Cover art by Quentin Blake
Jake's Thing is a satirical novel written by Kingsley Amis, first published in 1978 by Hutchinson. According to Craig Raine, it is a fictionalised account of Amis’s affair with the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard.[1]
Plot summary
[edit]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
[edit]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."[2]
Writing in The Millions, critic Catherine Baab-Muguira acknowledged the novel's "comic brio."[3]
References
[edit]- ^ Raine, Craig (1 May 2025). "Kingsley goes to the toilet". The Spectator.
- ^ Andrew Marr (20 July 2000). "Worst of England". Prospect. Retrieved 31 January 2021.
- ^ Catherine Baab-Muguira (24 August 2018). "Take A writer Like Him: My Complicated Love Affair With Kingsley Amis". The Millions. Retrieved 31 January 2021.
External links
[edit]Further reading
[edit]- Bradford, Richard. Lucky Him: The Life of Kingsley Amis. London: Peter Owens, 2001. ISBN 0-7206-1117-2.
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