(2 of 2)
At 20, Jenny Bunn cannot understand why every man who sees her behaves as if she were a hot cross. She is bright, friendly and no prude, although she is a virgin. But she is also stupefyingly sexy. Assaults of varying skill have been made upon her virtue almost daily since she turned 14, and unlike some girls whom men are always bothering, this bothers her, particularly after she leaves home to teach grammar school and falls in love with a Latin master named Patrick Standish. They meet, neck heavily, wrench apart, argue earnestly, and smoke more cigarettes than are good for them. This goes on for months, and toward the end of the novel the reader has begun to wish that Jenny and Patrick would either get on with it or take cold showers.
Now and then the book carries echoes of Lucky Jim's brattish humor, and Author Amis remains a shrewd, accurate observer of what sociologists call courtship patterns. He also has a message of sorts. After a particularly hectic session, Patrick tells Jenny bitterly that there are two kinds of men these days, the sort who despoil maidens as often as possible and the sort who have no desire to do so. The kind who wanted to but waited, he says, died out in 1914.
*So called because many of them—and most of their characters—went to "red brick" provincial universities. Amis himself went to Oxford, has taught at a red brick.