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

  1. ^ Andrew Marr (20 July 2000). "Worst of England". Prospect. Retrieved 31 January 2021.
  2. ^ 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

  • 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.
  • v
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Kingsley Amis
Novels
  • Lucky Jim (1954)
  • That Uncertain Feeling (1955)
  • I Like It Here (1958)
  • Take a Girl Like You (1960)
  • The Anti-Death League (1966)
  • Colonel Sun (1968)
  • The Green Man (1969)
  • Girl, 20 (1971)
  • The Alteration (1976)
  • Jake's Thing (1978)
  • Stanley and the Women (1984)
  • The Old Devils (1986)
  • The Folks That Live on the Hill (1990)
  • The Russian Girl (1992)
Non-fictionFilm and
television adaptations
Related
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  • t
  • e
Novels
  • The Rachel Papers (1973)
  • Dead Babies (1975)
  • Success (1978)
  • Other People: A Mystery Story (1981)
  • Money: A Suicide Note (1984)
  • London Fields (1989)
  • Time's Arrow: or The Nature of the Offence (1991)
  • The Information (1995)
  • Night Train (1997)
  • Yellow Dog (2003)
  • House of Meetings (2006)
  • The Pregnant Widow (2010)
  • Lionel Asbo: State of England (2012)
  • The Zone of Interest (2014)
  • Inside Story (2020)
Short story collections
Screenplays
Non-fiction
Screen adaptations
  • The Rachel Papers (1989)
  • Dead Babies (2000)
  • Money (2010)
  • London Fields (2018)
  • The Zone of Interest (2023)
Miscellaneous


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