Jake's Thing

First edition
Cover art by Quentin Blake

Jake's Thing is a satirical novel written by Kingsley Amis, first published in 1978 by Hutchinson.

Plot summary[]

The novel follows the life of Jacques 'Jake' Richardson, a 59-year-old Oxford don who struggles to overcome the loss of his libido.

Reception[]

In the magazine Prospect, critic Andrew Marr discussed his expectation that Amis' work would be retrospectively beyond the pale. "What slightly spoils this diatribe, however, is that to prepare for it I went back to Kingsley Amis’s novels and enjoyed myself more than was convenient for my purposes. Jake’s Thing, for instance, famously rancid with misogyny, turns out, on re-reading, to be surprisingly tender in parts, and intensely moving on the humiliations of impotence. The Old Devils will last as long as novels do; but it is not the only brilliant treatment of old age-Ending Up is one of the most delicately tragic funny books I have ever read. And so on."^[1]

Writing in The Millions, critic Catherine Baab-Muguira acknowledged the novel's "comic brio."^[2]

References[]

External links[]

• Kingsley Amis "The Art of Fiction," The Paris Review

Further reading[]

• Bradford, Richard. Lucky Him: The Life of Kingsley Amis. London: Peter Owens, 2001. ISBN 0-7206-1117-2.

This article about a 1970s novel is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by . See guidelines for writing about novels. Further suggestions might be found on the article's talk page.

• v
• t