The world of academia can be quite tiresome, and nobody knows this better than Jim Dixon.
For this week’s column, I sat down with English Literature Professor Robert May to discuss English 20th-century writer Kingsley Amis’ debut novel, Lucky Jim (1954). The story centers around a young medieval history lecturer, Jim Dixon, as he navigates his mundane life at a small red brick university.
He gets increasingly irritated with Margaret, his coworker with whom he’s landed in a complex relationship with, and his stuffy, pompous boss, Professor Welch, the head of the history department. He yearns passively for Christine, a girl he finds much dreamier than Margaret, and dreams of one day giving everyone who annoys him a piece of his mind. The novel is a biting satire of academic life that comically attacks the pretension, boredom, and stuffiness that often seem to come with the territory.
Lucky Jim was inspired by Amis’ friendship with English poet Philip Larkin, a librarian at a provincial university like the one Jim works at in the story. Amis and Larkin swapped letters back and forth following WWII, each complaining about everything—from their relations with women to their careers to J.R.R Tolkien’s teaching style. The novel is a portrait of the mid-20th-century, straight from the generation that lived through Hitlerism and WWII, only to have to return to “normal life” that had become suffocating and meaningless.
Yet though Jim (and Amis and Larkin) seems quite miserable, there’s something almost profound within their misery and bitterness.
“We live today in an age of pervasive niceness. Everyone seems to compete with each other, bending over backwards to be as nice and accommodating as possible. There’s nothing more annoying than that and there’s nothing more artificial than that. Jim is not afraid to be nasty,” Professor May said in an interview with The Journal.
“One of Jim’s most entertaining characteristics is just how hilariously nasty he is, and it’s almost refreshing, because finally, here is someone who is speaking like it is,” he said.
There’s something appealing about the disdain Jim openly has for his snobby coworkers, his pretentious overachieving students, and generally most other things. As a student creeping towards the end of my undergraduate career, Jim’s irritation resonates with me in some ways. We all have a little bit of Jim within us, especially in our moments of disillusioned youthfulness.
We’ve all drunk too much and embarrassed ourselves, felt frustrated and outshone by peers, and experienced awkward romantic miscommunications. There’s a paragraph in this novel that describes Jim’s hangover in such ridiculous and absurd similes that it’s hard not to laugh and sympathize with those dreadful mornings.
Even though Jim is kind of—actually, scratch that—totally a jerk, you can’t help but root for him as a reader.
In the introduction by Keith Gessen, he suggests that this regard is because hatred and irritability can be a source of humour and liveliness— “If you hated intensely enough, deliberately enough, with enough determination and discrimination, you might just end up with something new, unexpected, true to life.”
Amis seems to suggest there’s something about hating with intention that can actually make you more insightful and funnier, even if it’s uncomfortable to admit.
As someone who deeply admires the world of academia, Lucky Jim was a cynically funny mockery of a novel that poked fun in all of the right places, save Jim’s disdain for Margaret, whom I surprisingly grew a fondness for.
Professor May earns an A in my books because Lucky Jim led me with the perfect ratio of moments to chuckle at, scenes to mull over, and characters to empathize with.
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book, Book review, Column, Kingsley Amis, Literature, Lucky Jim, novel, professor
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