Jake's Thing

by Kingsley Amis

Jake Richardson, an Oxford don nearing sixty with a lifetime's lechery behind him, is in pursuit of his lost libido and heads off to the consulting room of a miniature sex therapist. Not one to disobey a doctor's orders, he runs the full humiliating gamut of sex labs and trendy 'workshops', where more than souls are bared. He decks himself with cunning gadgetry, dreams up a weekly fantasy, pets diligently with his overweight wife and browses listlessly through porn magazines behind locked doors. Is sex really worth it? As liberationists abuse him, a campus hostess bores him into bed - and even his own wife starts acting oddly - Jake seriously begins to wonder.

Genres: Fiction, Humor, Literary Fiction, Comedy, British Literature, Novels, Literature

274 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1978

About the author

Best known novels of British writer Sir Kingsley William Amis include Lucky Jim (1954) and The Old Devils (1986).

This English poet, critic, and teacher composed more than twenty-three collections, short stories, radio and television scripts, and books of social and literary criticism. He fathered Martin Amis.

William Robert Amis, a clerk of a mustard manufacturer, fathered him. He began his education at the city of London school, and went up to college of Saint John, Oxford, in April 1941 to read English; he met Philip Larkin and formed the most important friendship of his life. After only a year, the Army called him for service in July 1942. After serving as a lieutenant in the royal corps of signals in the Second World War, Amis returned to Oxford in October 1945 to complete his degree. He worked hard and got a first in English in 1947, and then decided to devote much of his time.

Pen names: [authorRobert Markham|553548] and William Bill Tanner

Reviews

[Warwick · Rating 1 out of 5]

One reads Jake's Thing now in a mood of embarrassed depression: embarrassed by the details we're given of a failing middle-aged libido and the efforts undergone to fix it, and depressed by the general context of 1970s suburban England, which here seems desperately poky and insular – a succession of small houses inhabited by small minds.

This was nominated for the Booker Prize in 1978, and like that year's eventual winner (Iris Murdoch's The Sea, The Sea), it takes the misogyny of its central character as a guiding concern. Even from Iris Murdoch I found it wearying – here, where it's played for comic effect, it's twice as exhausting and ten times as objectionable.

The tone is set early, when Oxford don Jake Richardson goes reluctantly to a therapist to deal with his lack of sexual desire, which, we already sense, is linked to a vague distaste for women and their bodies in general. Sent off to examine a sheaf of porn mags, Jake stares gloomily at the focal point of the centrefolds – an organ which, he decides, looks

like the inside of a giraffe's ear or a tropical fruit not much prized even by the locals.

OK, this is at least funnyish out of context – but it gets harder to laugh the more Amis indulges his protagonist in the long misogynistic speeches which begin to predominate in the later parts of the novel. During a university debate about the possibility of admitting female students, Jake is allowed to rant:

‘All this will go and there will be women everywhere, chattering, gossiping, telling you what they did today and what their daughter did yesterday and what their friend did last week and what somebody they heard about did last month and horrified if a chap brings up a topic or an argument. They don't mean what they say, they don't use language for discourse but for extending their personality, they take all disagreement as opposition, yes they do, even the brightest of them, and that's the end of the search for truth which is what the whole thing's supposed to be about.’

The question is, are we supposed to be laughing at Jake's obliviousness, or nodding in agreement? Amis clearly knows that many readers will object to Jake, but I felt a creeping suspicion that his opinions were being shown to us in a sort of nudge-nudge, ‘this is what we're all thinking’ way. The expected reaction to the passage above is, I think, not ‘Oh my god his opinions are garbage’, but instead a thrilled ‘Oh my god someone said it out loud!’ And even if not, who gives a shit what people like that think? Who wants to spend 200 pages in their head? Although Jake is basically a harmless old duffer, the violence implicit in his attitudes is there, at least conceptually:

‘Once I even played with the fantasy that the point of women being in season all the time with only brief interruptions, and even those aren't treated as interruptions among primitive peoples I read somewhere, anyway if they were like dogs or rather bitches with intervals of several months during which they aroused no sexual feelings at all then most of 'em wouldn't make it, they'd get their bloody head kicked off before they could come on heat.’

Comedy sits uneasily with passages like that. Oh, did I give the impression that I'd finished? Nah, there's also plenty of space to rail against women's

concern with the surface of things, with objects and appearances, with their surroundings and how they looked and sounded in them, with seeming to be better and to be right while getting everything wrong, their automatic assumption of the role of the injured party in any clash of wills, their certainty that a view is the more credible and useful for the fact that they hold it, their use of misunderstanding and misrepresentation as weapons of debate, their selective sensitivity to tones of voice, their unawareness of the difference in themselves between sincerity and insincerity, their interest in importance (together with noticeable inability to discriminate in that sphere), their fondness for general conversation and directionless discussion, their pre-emption of the major share of feeling, their exaggerated estimate of their own plausibility, their never listening and lots of other things like that, all according to him.

The least that can be said of this is that it's tiring. And it's hard to escape the conclusion that Amis is using this character to tell us what he thinks, to say the things he wishes he could say ‘openly’.

I was about to write that the book has not aged well, but I suppose I have to reconsider that. Maybe if I'd read this any other week I would have had more of a sense of humour about it. Despite Jake's shortcomings, even as a fictional chauvinist he is far too polite ever to say that he just grabbed women he liked by the pussy, whereas someone who said exactly that can in 2016 be elected President of the United States – so perhaps in the nightmarish Black Mirror clusterfuck world that we are now living in, this tiresome throwback will find an appreciative audience after all.

[Nicole · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reading reviews of this book, one could be forgiven for thinking that its target was women, womankind, and all feminism. It's not. His primary target is his shrinks, and his secondary target appears to be Jake himself. I don't think it's fair to pretend that this book -- whatever incidental backwards bullshit it may also contain -- is somehow a diatribe against progress and women's rights. It's meant to be a satire on middle age and therapy and not adjusting to the changing times.

And some of that is even sort of successful. Early on, I was struck by a profound sense of a lack of privacy in Jake. In this way the libido thing is almost a kind of red herring: he just wants to be left alone to drink he wine he bought for a treat, to eat his trout, to watch James Bond, to look at porn, and no one will ever grant him that privacy. This is coupled to a deep sense of public embarrassment, a sort of constant low level shame, about things made public or seen by others that he wants kept secret, kept to himself -- even his doctors make him feel this way, and so much more so his wife's friends or the cleaning lady, who make him feel unable to retreat even inside his own home.

It may be that Jake was also not really fit to be married, and that many marriages were like this for the people involved in the era. We are used, I think, to feeling the various ways in which women suffered from their inability to remain single under tremendous social pressure, but it seems true to the point of obviousness that there must also have been men who felt terrible in the married state and who would have been better off single.

For about the first 100 pages I actually sort of felt for Jake. Imagine a shrink who, upon hearing that he preferred to stay home and eat trout and watch tv to having meaningless sex with a woman not his wife, said, well Jake, I think the only thing in your story that seems off is that you didn't just tell her you were busy and do what you had wanted to do all along. Or who said, a low libido doesn't necessarily mean anything is wrong with you, nor does it mean that you don't love your partner. Or who said, actually, sir, it's probably more important NOT to have extra-marital affairs than it is to have them to prove some sort of backwards sexual fitness. I wouldn't worry about it if I were you.

Needless to say, no such shrink is to be found in these pages.

The problem is that this book goes on too long, its ambition and scope are too small, and the end result is something just a tiny bit pathetic: the eventual self-awareness that comes to Jake that he's a womanizer because he doesn't really like women, and that being a womanizer allows him to go not liking them, it's fine, but it's not enough of a payoff for the pages that went before. The first of these three problems is definitely related to the third: going on too long makes the smallness of the book's ambition apparent, and there came a point at which I stopped feeling sorry for Jake, and started also feeling sorry for Amis. That's also when the experience of reading it started to get somewhat boring. I really do not understand how this book could possibly have made the booker shortlist, even taking into account the fact that satire often does not age well. (I feel similarly about David Lodge books -- surely they are not written at a scale that merits being on a shortlist of the year's best books, however entertaining they may be?)

So despite a somewhat promising, or at least interesting, start, in the end I'm not giving it a very high rating, or a very low rating, but rather a thoroughly mediocre rating, but I want to be absolutely clear that this is because it is a thoroughly mediocre book, and not because I am offended or outraged or somehow damaged by the contents of its pages. (As it happens, I think there is quite a bit of distance between Jake and Amis -- notably in the speeches of the women around him, who understand a lot better what is going on than either Jake or any of the mental health professionals he is meant to be getting help from. Even Jake himself has a couple moments of self-awareness, when talking to what appears to be a gay friend about whether or not women are likeable or not, though these moments do not last long, and effect no sort of major change. Still, his lack of progress is not the same as the book's railing against same.)

Whether or not the book is actually misogynist, as opposed to its main character, I would add that in general, I do not see the point of outrage and hurt as a response to books like this one. It is some ways so genuinely pathetic, this book, in its choice of problem and subject, its main character so genuinely lost and baffled and sad, that to take it seriously enough to even be outraged is to confer upon it much more status than it merits. Don't get me wrong, I believe that there exist readers so fragile that they genuinely do feel subjectively harmed by the experience of reading a book like this one (though I also think there are self-serving puritanical assholes who like to think that they are virtuous because of what they condemn, as if fully evidenced by the obsession with condemning books you see everywhere on this site whenever something was published before 1963). But I think we should all start admitting that this is a problem that those readers have, and not a problem that society has, or a problem that the book has, and which has been inflicted upon the readers in question. Such fragility is sad, a kind of tragedy really, but I don't think we should help it along by pretending that it's reasonable to be afraid of a damn book.

[Stela · Rating 3 out of 5]

During the twenty-minute waiting between the two buses I have to take to go to work every day I – read of course, what else? Usually slim books that don’t weigh a lot in my purse, like Kingsley Amis’s Jake’s Thing, which I borrowed from a friend of mine who bought it in a second-hand bookstore without looking inside, as I realized when I grabbed it one morning and opened it happily and impatiently (for Lucky Jim is one of my favourites and I was looking forward to something in the same tonality) in the bus station to suddenly realize that the first chapter was missing. Since the second one began at page 5, I decided that whatever events were presented in the first three (coz I excluded the title page, of course) could be read afterwards and thus, following a Cortazar recipe, I read the novel as it was and went in search of the first chapter afterwards. Lucky me, I found it on Amazon, which was offering it as a sample of its kindle edition.

I don’t want to suggest, with this long introduction, that the story of the reading was more interesting than the story itself; it was just that it made me able to recapture a long-lost memory from my childhood holidays at my grandparents’ house in a mesmerizing countryside (though, alas, not in Combray!), with long sunny days during which I used to climb dusty attics looking for old, dilapidated books I devoured despite missing covers or pages or both. I did not care much then about the indestructibility of the text, nor did I bother with the idea that even a single missing word can leave a gaping hole in a narrative. On the contrary, I loved to fill in the blanks with my own words, to guess and even re-write the missing parts.

Only this time I didn’t. Try to guess, I mean. I read the book without wondering about the first chapter only to realise after reading it that it held no surprise for me – somehow I knew it would reveal how come Jake arrived at Rosenberg’s door (this is what a lifetime of reading does to you, it teaches you at least to put in order the narrative sequences ☺), and the amusing parts (like the one in which Jake waves at a familiar face he thinks it’s an old friend only to realize it was in fact an actor who played in a popular series) have never a fixed place in the tale. I concluded that the postmodernist approach works nicely for the angry young men generation as well, or at least for this witty novella.

It is said (see inter alia the article of Zachary Leader The Menage à Trois that saved Kingsley Amis from Despair ) that Kingsley Amis (who was suffering from the same problem as his character at the time he was writing the book), immediately after his novel was published, used to appear in public with his wife in order to prevent any autobiographical reading, although many of the beliefs and experiences of his (anti)hero were his beliefs and experiences:

“Like Jake, Amis had laboratory tests in which he was given 'pictorial pornographic materials' for stimulation (in the novel these provoke Jake's comparison of female genitalia to 'the inside of a giraffe's ear, or a tropical fruit not much prized by the natives') and had his erections measured by a machine called a plethysmograph.
At night he put on a 'nocturnal mensurator', a device for measuring 'penile tumescence'.”

All these experiences, seriously taken by Amis in real life (where he tried hard to save his marriage), would find their funny way towards his novel, becoming scenes of a burlesque comedy in which Jake is forced to attach strange machines to his “thing”, to expose it as a part of a scientific experiment in front of medical students, or as a part of a curative process in front of his fellow sufferers in a workshop, to protect it against aggressive females convinced they detain the secret for his recovery, and so on. All this combined with almost daily assaults with feminist ideas from his students, his colleagues, his former mistresses and even his wife that it is no wonder his misogyny grows and grows until in the end shamelessly takes over.

However, I think the theme of this funny novel is not misogyny, though Jake is a misogynist all right, nor is the andropause discreetly suggested by the title. Or not only. The theme could also be the danger of losing the manhood under the pressure of the modern society, the de-masculinization of the male forced to abandon by turn the territories he was the master of for a long time, the intimacy of his thoughts and the singularity of his attributes, whilst forced to acknowledge en tout temps this strange and incomprehensible creature which is the woman. Moreover, womankind is nothing but a black widow waiting to devour the poor male whose only role has become only to assure the survival of the species. Their invasion of the mankind’s sacred pace, suggests Jake in his discourse at the College meeting (where, by the way, he was supposed to support women’s integration in their institution), is imminent and with horrible consequences:

'…it’s the men who are going to be the losers – oh, it’ll, it’ll happen all right, no holding it up now. When the first glow has faded and it’s quite normal to have girls in the same building, and on the same staircase and across the landing, they’ll start realizing that that’s exactly what they’ve got, girls everywhere and not a commonroom, not a club, not a pub where they can get away from them. (…) They don’t mean what they say, they don’t use language for discourse but for extending their personality, they take all disagreements as opposition, yes they do, even the brightest of them, and that’s the end of the search for truth which is the whole thing’s supposed to be about.’

The book is full of such sarcastic reasoning that transform our hero in a mighty defender of the survival of his “race”, forever fighting against that hostile female society that assaults him with their bodies when he finds himself in the middle of a feminist demonstration, that sends him penises which he is forced to hide in his office at university or that blackmails him with suicide attempts when he refuses to deliver. His last act of bravery, described in one of the most brilliantly ironic pages of the novel that ends the story in a major (although not, and this is part of its brilliancy, solemn) key, is his refusal, after learning from his physician that his condition doesn’t have a psychological but a physical explanation (a lack of hormones or something like that), to be cured, for it would mean re-enter the enemy territory he finally was able to escape from:

Jake did a quick run-through of women in his mind, not of the ones he had known or dealt with in the past few months or years so much as all of them: their concern with the surface of things, with objects and appearances, with their surroundings and how they looked and sounded in them, with seeming to be better and to be right while getting everything wrong, their automatic assumption of the role of injured party in any clash of wills, their certainty that a view is the more credible and useful for the fact that they hold it, their use of misunderstanding and misrepresentation as weapons of debate, their selective sensitivity to tones of voice, their unawareness of the difference in themselves between sincerity and insincerity, their interest in importance (together with noticeable inability to discriminate in that sphere), their fondness for general conversation and directionless discussion, their pre-emption of the major share of feeling, their exaggerated estimate of their own plausibility, their never listening and lots of other things like that, all according to him.
So it was quite easy. 'No thanks,' he said.

Although not in the same league with Lucky Jim, whose sparkle is quite inimitable, Jake’s Thing is altogether worth reading (in any chapter order you may prefer ☺), be it only for the funnily desperate way in which it desecrates the androgyne myth.

[Realini Ionescu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jake’s Thing by Kingsley Amis
10 out of 10


Considering this is the sixth masterpiece read by the undersigned by the phenomenal Kingsley Amis, after the glorious Lucky Jim, Ending Up, Girl, 20, The Old Devils, That Uncertain Feeling, all reviewed on this blog http://realini.blogspot.com/2018/05/l..., it could be expected that this reader is enthused by this marvelous writer, considered to be the best in the comedy department, at least in the second part of the last century.

The hero of this magnum opus has some features and moments when he becomes an antihero, such as when he engages in a tirade, at Oxford, where he is a don, aged 59, teaching Ancient Mediterranean History, on how detrimental the acceptance of women would be, in a speech that is not just sexist, arrogant and abusive, but it may be affected by the state he is in, a massive Hangover, after a night during which he had cheated on his wife, in a rather remarkable fashion, considering that the title of the book refers to the main issue in it, the Thing is the penis and the main character has an impotency problem, complex as it is, for he seems to perform when the occasion arises and he is ‘free’ of constrictions, but he does not want ‘it’ anymore, in correlation perhaps with the said antagonism he feels towards women.
Jake Richardson is married with Brenda, who is about twelve years younger, but has gained a lot of weight in the last years – statics we learn from Dr. Rosenberg, the psychotherapist who would try to solve the sexual problem of the protagonist indicate that being overweight is frequently the reason for the issue – who has a friend that the hero does not like, indeed, in one of the first scenes, he arrives at home with a more expensive bottle of wine than the Tunisian, table variety and when he sees that he has to offer some to the guest, he tries to switch bottles, only to be impeded by the arrival of the two women in the kitchen – the master work has many hilarious scenes, as fans of the author would know, albeit the tone if most often serious.

Jake is given some ‘homework’, which includes consulting pornographic materials, having ‘non genital sensate sessions’ with his wife, attending some consultation in a specialized section of a clinic and eventually, joining a workshop where other people with various challenges, including Geoffrey, the peculiar husband of Brenda’s friend, a man who appears to have trouble understanding almost anything – the hero thinks this man is unable to follow the arrow sign to the men’s room and he would have found a business card a tough nut to crack, which is more than interesting and ironic considering later developments .

Winnie is an attractive young woman, actually the only one, included in the workshop, who is ‘unable to control her life’, in the words of the ‘facilitator of the seminar, Ed, but when she follows and tracks Brenda and her husband home, she first claims that she is in fact acting a part and is there only to expose the setup as a fraud, albeit the older woman spots her real interest in her spouse, who would indeed receive a visit from the girl, when he is in Oxford, where she tries to have sex with him, only to be rejected and then engage in a mouthful of vicious insults and imprecations…
The hero has another clash with women, who are picketing Oxford, in protest against the sexist attitude of that and other institutions, who were not allowing women to join at the time – 1970s – partly with the pretext that those places of higher education destined for women only would suffer if others would relax their entrance policies and thus would result in fewer candidates for the specialized ones, but that was just a bogus reason and Jake Richardson is asked by the dean to present the argument in favor of admitting women, while a colleague would present the opposite view…at the meeting, after stating that this inevitable and woman have to be admitted, sooner, rather than later, the hangover man descends into a sexist attack on women, indiscriminate and pathetic.

Granted, he had been earlier in a position where he talked about illiterate students, one young woman came to speak about her paper and seemed to be rather disinterested, some of those in the picket line rubbed themselves against the teacher and called him a ‘wanker’, a term he would have to investigate about and ask a fellow, homosexual teacher, but this is no reason to be so absurd and outrageous, in fact it does more to explain maybe the deeper causes of the impotency, a serious inadequacy, stated at one point when the antihero – as he is at stages – declares that he does not feel the ‘shame and guilt’ attributed ad nauseam by Rosenberg, for those feelings would have been more reasonable in the past, not in this present where ‘permissiveness’ is the word.
Actually, Jake is sure that the age when everyone knows everything about what is expected during, before and after coitus will have dramatic consequences – not for Rosenberg and his guild, that would get so much more business – because at the time when the hero was young and so active – he had a reputation as a womanizer and that past is the reason why he still does some dangerous things, such as when Winnie comes again to get close to him, he accepts returning to the seminar and join the group at what turns to be a nearly tragic outing – men and women had no idea what to expect from sex and thus it was less calamitous when things would not work for the best, whereas in the present, there is an overwhelming burden of expectations…

Just like the previous five books that this reader has had the immense pleasure to read before, this magnum opus by the fantastic Kinsley Amis is spectacular and a joy to engage with.

[Jacob · Rating 1 out of 5]

I had read Amis novels before (Lucky Jim & The Green Man) and found Lucky Jim in particular to be funny as it is a satire of academic culture. Following my reading of Lucky Jim, I had picked up a handful of Amis novels in a used book store to explore his writing some more, which is how I ended up with Jake's Thing.

Although I have rated this book, I decided not to waste my time finishing it. There are plenty enough misogynistic things in the news to infuriate me daily without reading this.

I think Warwick's review sums it up well (and points out actual incitement to violence against women in a later part of the book I did not read)
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Amis, from my previous reading of his books, seems to be fond of objectifying women and portraying them as shallow flibbertigibbets. So when Jake initially attributes his lack of libido in part to his wife getting fat, or pokes fun at her and her friend Alcestis and their inane-to-him hobbies, I wasn't exactly surprised, and was willing to overlook and persist. But then I got about half way through to Chapter 11 which is entirely devoted to Jake both sexualizing and lambasting a female student while giving her feedback on her paper. He refers to her as (among other things) an "idle bitch." Lovely.

In the following chapter, Jake must relieve his frustration at having to deal with bitches in all their idleness and stupidity by hanging out with some other male academics to complain about the expansion of the English literary cannon to include women authors, and about how women think they can write and be academics, but actually, on the whole, they are not smart/talented enough.

At this point, I was becoming increasingly sure Amis wasn't writing to satirize sexism but that he was actually making a joke out of degrading women. In debating whether to give up on the book, I flipped through the remainder of the book reading bits here and there, and landing on the last page where Jake rants internally about all the reasons women aren't even worth having desire for. Ha! It's funny - libido problem solved! You don't need a libido when women are so deplorable. Yes, so funny.

In case you missed it, if I could use one word to describe this book, it would be misogynistic. But I guess I am just one of those "women's libbers" who doesn't have anything valid to say about literature anyway. My PhD in English was clearly given in error.

[F.R. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Yes, the pun in the title is intended.

Jake Richardson is an Oxford don, approaching his sixties, who suffers a failing libido. Therapy leads to group therapy and in-between there is drunken fumbling and college mayhem, as he tries to reclaim his lost virility. But is it that he simply can’t help sex, or that he doesn’t like women anymore?

Reading this in 2010 it’s striking how much of its time this book is. This is the 1970s of polyester suits, sardine sandwiches and French wine still being a noteworthy treat. If a television drama had been made on publication then Leonard Rossiter would inevitably have played the lead. Obviously the central issue is a problem men can still suffer today, but the cures have probably changed. Do people still have experimental group therapy sessions in suburban front rooms, for example? This is an England of gentleman’s clubs and old school ties, and although attacking modish trends may allow you some good jokes, when those trends vanish so does some of the relevance of your novel.

Although undoubtedly very witty, the main problem with ‘Jake’s Thing’ however is how reactionary the tone is. Amis – once labelled an angry young man – famously turned dramatically from the left to the very right. This book finds him incredibly angry, but in the way of an old drunk in the corner of a bar railing at the inanities of the modern world. Things ain’t what they used to be after all.

The edition I read is not the edition pictured. There’s apparently an old saying about books and covers, but mine has the kind of comic, sexual, fumbling image that wouldn’t have been out of place on the cover of a contemporary Tom Sharpe (an author never nominated for a Booker). Except, despite containing some risqué and ribald stuff the novel isn’t really like that at all. Indeed there is a great sadness at the centre of it, which stops it from ever veering near your standard sex farce. As I say, if a television drama had been made it would have starred Leonard Rossiter and not Robin Asquith.

[Todd · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kingsley Amis was one of the most fearless, honest, and, of course, hilarious of writers. "Jake's Thing" is superb. "Lucky Jim" is one of the great books of all time, maybe one of my 2 or 3 favorites of any books, but, personally, I think Amis got even better with time. If you want to read a true masterpiece read "The Old Devils."

[Lucia · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best descriptions of K. Amis’s writing style I’ve heard to date was “eloquently misanthropic”, which is exactly what it is. Jake’s Thing is cruelly funny. It’s not a book to be taken too literally and seriously. It’s satiric to the core. Jake is a pathetic figure, but somehow generating readers’ sympathy. All his misogynistic statements aim to entertain and underline his own misery. In fact, reading through other reviews, I think it’s really interesting how K. Amis works with readers’ sympathies.

[Jonathan Pool · Rating 3 out of 5]

Jake's Thing is a book ostensibly about sexual inadequacy. It is a book that offers Kingsley Amis another opportunity to lay down his version of Men are from Mars and Women from Venus. Jake's Thing is not unreasonably summarised by most reviewers as a straight misogynistic polemic (one of many from Amis senior).
I would have thought that in 1978 it was a bit soon to hang another book around the male sex drive, less than ten years after Philip Roth's 1969 (stronger) version in Portnoy's Complaint.
Jake's Thing does, at least give some space to a thoughtfully expressed retort from a woman's perspective. It also has some cleverly written, ironic, very amusing observations- when not focused on sex or women;
e.g. referring to dining out: "The food wasn't much good and they were rather nasty to you, but then it cost quite a lot" p91

Strip out the infantile sex set pieces and the battle of the sexes narrative isn't quite as dated as it first appears. The book's analysis of a certain type of 1978 male psyche and of role of women in a man's world, certainly reflects accurately a strand of opinion both then and now. Some bastions of male separateness have always, and continue to be, populated by Jakes. Amis himself lived a life not far removed from the Gentlemens clubs and colleges of 18th century Britain.

A Google search in 2016 for "Gentlemens Clubs" reveals their continued existence in London in some numbers (Brooks, Boodles, Carlton, Garrick, among others). Jake is also present throughout the British Isles in the male only bars and memberships of a significant number of golf Clubs. (Take a recent bow Troon and Muirfield). In America a "Gentleman's Club" search lists predominantly strip clubs, so I imagine that to American readers the picture portrayed by Kingsley Amis, of quintessentially British chauvinism, mostly comes across as a laughable fantasy; a farce, a spoof. (Augusta National patrons excepted).

Jake's musings on females throughout Jake's Thing (good examples pages 213 and 269 (last page)), do seem dated and anachronistic in the Britain of 2016, but pockets of this 1970's train of thought do continue to exist.
My three stars reflects my view that it's not a novel to stir strong emotions. I am surprised that Amis subsequently won the Booker prize, and that he is highly rated in the pantheon of British writers since 1945.

[Michelle Luksh · Rating 2 out of 5]

I purchased this little number in Cambodia after just destroying a very very 'happy' pizza. I was stoned and lured in by the sexual sounding synopsis on the back cover and basically wanted to find out if Jake was able to finally get it up. Plus, my once great interest in becoming a licensed sex therapist made me think it was best to explore the secret life of sex in a new form.

This book, however strange and casually diplomatic when wanting to be, is sort of funny to read because it felt like I was going through the mind of my ex and how his future self will most likely end up - like Jake. Not that Jake is a bad guy, but you come to find that his OCD-ish ways with directions and pragmatic senses regarding travel and location make him seem more quirky and kind of sad rather than the guy we come to find out is a chauvinistic pig who cares very little about anything that wastes his precious time. He doesn't want small talk or real affection anymore, but just wants to be with the only company he likes; that of himself.

I didn't hate Jake as much as a I probably should've have. I liked his commitment to his therapy and routine and found him in ways funny but in more ways pathetic (although intelligent which always makes a difference).

The writing was classic English style and was a quick read. I slept in certain chapters but then raced through other ones. Towards the end, poignancy and my commitment to learning Jake's final resolution regarding his impotence made me finish it quickly. The author has a dependable writing style and a rigid commitment to unnecessary details, but it proves all the more reasons his main star, Jake, also had irritating and unforgiving personality malfunctions. Seeing the effects of old age and soddened marriage kept me weary of acting too quickly and counting my blessings regarding these remarkable days spent traveling mainly in the company of my own.

Thanks Jake. And Jeff, considering I thought of you in your early-onset old age during the weightiest chunks of this book.

[Bryan Murphy · Rating 4 out of 5]

At a certain point in life, you begin to realise that curmudgeons have a point, and you can relax and begin to laugh with rather than at this Curmudgeon's Charter penned with the vitriolic wit of Kingsley Amis. It's interesting to note how attitudes towards differences between the sexes have changed since this book came out. Amis makes the case for men being clearer thinkers and therefore better company; my own slightly younger generation abhorred the idea of innate psychological differences based on sex; now they are back in fashion, with sex shoehorned into a grammatical category and supposedly feminine plural traits deemed superior (and that's just by the men). Fortunately for readers, Amis is far too subtle for cheap stereotypes: he is clearly ambivalent about his Curmudgeon-in-Chief, and the character who comes off best in the story is his long-suffering but last-laughing wife. Even Amis's hatchet job on psycho-babbling quacks is tempered by an acknowledgement that some people may sometimes derive some benefit from their techniques. He would turn in his grave if he could see what people put up with these days at the hands of New Age quacks - turn and have a belly laugh, no doubt.

[Mauro · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book that grows on you as you read it. Funnily misogynist certainly on purpose (probably inspired in Amis's own personal misgivings with the fragile sex).

Up to the middle I was thinking of the old anecdote attributed to Bernard Shaw (or Anatole France) and Isadora Duncan - she said: wouldn't it be wonderful if we could have a child who had your brains and my beauty?" His (Shaw's or Anatole's) reply was: "yes, but supposing it had my beauty and your brains...".

I was going to say that 'Jake's Thing' is a son of Wodehouse and Greene - sometimes it has the light spirit of the first and the deep reflections of the second; but sometimes it goes the other way around.

It wouldn't be fair to say that, though. The book has some really great bittersweet moments (up to the last paragraph); it bashes group therapy (and shrinks as well) when they were just flourishing and shows first-hand the crude damages os the sexual revolution.

A very gook book. Specially if you are male.

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nothing can compare to Lucky Jim, my all time favourite book, however this had some good laugh out loud moments. The passage describing the hangover is the most accurate and descriptive I have ever read.
Yes, Jake is an absolutely awful misogynist - that's at the root of his problem and that's explicitly stated - but I don't think that means the author is. Although maybe he was and this was his way of exploring it. In any case, the misogyny is not presented as anything "good" - if anything it's linked to a dreadful emptiness and sadness in the protagonist's life.

[Mike Harper · Rating 4 out of 5]

Call me out of date, but I think this book is funny despite the protagonist's dislike of women. Or maybe because of it. Read it for the tirades, don't feel guilty for enjoying yourself, and this holds up well into the 21st century.

[Bob · Rating 1 out of 5]

A painful mess.

[Lucas · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Jake's Thing" is a sardonic, deeply humorous exploration of middle-aged masculinity and modern mores, written with the acuity and wit that Amis is renowned for. Receiving a full five-star rating from me, it is a scathing social commentary with a charmingly imperfect protagonist at its heart.

The eponymous "Jake" is a retired Oxford don named Jake Richardson, who finds himself at odds with a world that no longer makes sense to him. The "thing" refers both to Jake's diminishing libido and the mess of societal change he's trying to navigate. Amis deftly utilizes Jake's struggles to satirize everything from psychoanalysis to feminism, offering a critique of 1970s societal shifts from the perspective of a decidedly old-school protagonist.

Amis’s sharp, incisive humor is on full display in this novel. He manages to tackle issues of aging, masculinity, and sexual mores with a comedic flair that's consistently entertaining. While some of Jake's perspectives might seem out of touch by contemporary standards, Amis uses this as an opportunity to highlight the comedic tension between older and newer societal norms.

Jake Richardson is an engaging character, not despite his flaws, but because of them. He’s curmudgeonly, bewildered by the modern world, and yet there's an honesty about him that makes him compelling. His dialogue and internal reflections are pure Amis—witty, biting, and filled with observational humor.

One of the novel's great strengths is its dialogue, which is snappy, clever, and full of wit. The interactions between characters are filled with subtle comedy, expertly revealing the absurdities of everyday conversation. The narrative is fast-paced and the prose crisp, keeping the reader entertained and engaged from start to finish.

Despite the comedic undertones, "Jake’s Thing" is not devoid of more profound, introspective moments. Through Jake, Amis provides an exploration of aging and the fear of obsolescence – themes that offer a somber counterpoint to the novel's overall humor.

In awarding "Jake's Thing" five stars, I applaud not just the quality of Amis’s writing, but also his ability to tackle serious topics with humor, subtlety, and irreverence. This book is not just a satirical romp but also a thoughtful reflection on society and the trials of aging. It’s a testament to Kingsley Amis's extraordinary talent as a writer and his unique ability to mix humor with poignancy.

[lärm · Rating 5 out of 5]

Downright hilarious book on a misogynist with erectile problems.

I can imagine that a lot of people take offense of what Jake thinks and / or says out loud, especially nowadays, with different views on women, their rights and sexuality. But for the easily offended or professional complainers it should be pointed out that this is a novel and what the protagonist thinks isn't necessary the writer's opinion, and even if it is so, don't mix politics or feelings with reviewing a novel.

Truth is, I enjoy these 'old' books a lot more than that crap that is fully compliant with the woke doctrines. A bit of political incorrectness doesn't harm.

Anyway, no matter how misogynist Jake is, the most captivating part of the book is when Brenda explains why she wants to leave him. It's impossible not to sympathize with her and letting a caring woman like that go is his loss. The fact that he doesn't care changes little to this fact. Amis didn't ridicule her when it comes to this divorce and neither does the protagonist. So it's not all bad.

I think it's a great book.

[GD · Rating 5 out of 5]

One disadvantage of reading paper books over ebooks is that you can't highlight as easily, and holy shit did this book have some zingers. I've loved every Kingsley Amis book I've ever read, and this one was maybe the funniest. It was 95 percent pure high octane verbiage and dark hilarity, then at the end threw on the breaks for a couple of chapters and became touching and almost serious, and very sad. Then the very last page turns all the lights back out and another round of satanic cackling comes forth from the dark.

Nearly had me falling out of my chair with laughter at times, once it got going I could hardly put it down.

[Rob Tapper · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hilarious, best light entertainment for a long time. Insightful, too. Seems the author really wanted to believe what he had discovered; as close to fact as man could get in trying to fathom "woman". Not a book for women's women then or now. In fact there's nothing about children or family in it; just a good old one on one relationship finally running out of juice (metaphorically speaking on both counts.)

[Katie · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was a huge disappointment after Lucky Jim. Definitely dated, and maybe I'm not at the right point in my life to appreciate a novel about an aging Oxford professor coming to terms with loss of his libido. Either way, if you're going to read a Kingsley Amis book, hands down I would go with Lucky Jim.

[Michael David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Yes, this novel contains a bit of misogyny. It is, after all, a veiled autobiography of Kingsley Amis, who was a serial philanderer. I've been told by others that I have to let go of a bit of my self-control. Surely, that makes this novel horrible?

It doesn't.

Let's not mistake the forest for the trees. In fact, to me, it's not even solely a raillery against feminism: it's actually more a critique of psychology's hypocrisy, and a reflection on aging. Do I think this novel is outdated? Partly, especially because I believe in the intelligence of women and respect their capability. I also believe that they're not inferior creatures: I actually prefer talking with women because nowadays, they make more sense than most men. If I read a good book, or watched a good film, it would often be a lady I'd talk to, not a man.

See, Jake is the norm nowadays. Men have always been sexual beings, and I am no exception, but the self-control of many men nowadays compared to Jake's is like comparing a satyr to a godly priest. A lot of men nowadays don't even possess insight as to what they've done. Is Jake an asshole? Oh, he is one, most definitely. In spite of his mistakes, however, he tries. I'm not even saying that's enough, but it's more than a lot of men do nowadays. Yes, I'm cynical, but this is a cynicism based on fact: I belong to a country who ranks No. 1 in rising AIDS cases in the entire Asia-Pacific.

I'm not exonerating Jake. What he did to Eve was improper, and offensive: 'A nice man would have tried to make a girl feel it had been worth while, however, tired and pissed he was. No, that's not fair, a man who sees more in women than creatures to go to bed with, a man who doesn't only want one thing.' (p. 199)

Jake is, undeniably, an asshole. He is a bit of a misogynist, too. That's true. But he tries to change, and successfully reins in his libido when it came to Kelly (in spite of the fact that she was busty, attractive, and young). He also came clean to Brenda, his wife. When Kelly attempts to kill herself because he did not come to her room, I admired his expose on the hypocrisy of certain psychologists who play on the sexual inadequacies of their patients (and covered the suicide attempt as an allergy):

'In the old days a lot of people, men as well as women, didn't know quite what to expect of sex so they didn't worry when it didn't work too well. Now everybody knows exactly what's required of them and exactly how much they've fallen short down to the last millimetre and second and drop, which is frightfully relaxing for them. No wonder you boys have got enough trade. Hence guilt and shame at inadequacy - all quite superficial according to you.' (p. 265)

By the end of the novel, his past catches up to him, and Brenda leaves him for a more caring person. He's still not a good person by a long shot, but he tried to change for the better.

He never touched Kelly - and that's a start.

[Stephen · Rating 2 out of 5]

SUMMARY - Limp.

2.5. Has anyone written a comparative study of Kingsley Amis and the Carry On films? Amis's first breakthrough smash (Lucky Jim: 1954) closely prefigures Carry On Sergeant (1958) Nurse and Teacher (both 1959).The stuffy old guard (battalion leaders, matrons, and academics) in both get ribbed in a warmly mocking inrushing countercultural tide. Fun for all the family. Fast-forward 20 years, and Carry On Emmannuelle (1978) and Jake's Thing (1978) try to scrape laughs out of a well-used spitoon lined with a soaked topless red-top model torn from the Daily Star.

The last page of Jake's Thing is baldly chauvinistic, and a surrender after what feels like Amis trying to sublimate his womanising dark side to something more balanced. Brenda (Hattie Jacques) is the overweight dieter with a will of her own, but seemingly still little more than a will to collect trinkets, make steak and kidney pie, and await weekly sex. Meanwhile Amis dismissively grunts at the army neanderthals, but imperceptibly inches away a half inch further to the left with an Oxford don whose lowered sexual drive is little more than a pretext for end of the pier knob jokes, albeit in Amis's fluent and admittedly occasionally effective patter.

Top marks to whoever designed the cover of the Vintage edition.That cover is a thing of interpretive beauty that the pages between couldn't hope to match.

The Times voted Amis the 9th best British novelist of the late 20thC. Sadly the committees behind the major awards of the 1950s-1980s tended to agree, which is why I have now endured four of Amis's middling to middenly novels. However, I am a believer that we need bad culture to more fully appreciate the good. Like winter before spring, so I hope Amis will purge the bile for sweeter tastes to come.

[Rascal · Rating 2 out of 5]

- TBH this is hardly the type of novel I am interested in reading these days. Why did I bother? I must have purchased a copy as a teenager, over 10 years ago at the age of 15 or 16. It has been sitting around ever since and I have set some rules about reading so-many books that I have in the collection before purchasing new ones to somehow get on top of it all.

- This is an interesting novel to grapple with if you are at all interested in the question of whether abhorrent views can be represented without it being the view of the author. In this case I think we can all accept that Amis (the individual) held views which make it very easy for those inclined to 'cancel' his fairly uninteresting body of work. That said, I did think the novel quite interestingly managed to depict Jake as a casualty of his own views, and though it did at the end test my sympathies with a few vividly misogynistic monologues, it also gave the most reasonable and considerate vantage to his wife Brenda.

- My main concern with the novel actually doesn't have anything to do with its politics. I find the book incredibly boring (and I don't believe in boring art). I don't think it's a comedy, because it is so invested with the wellbeing and science of its conceit. Especially today, the workshops don't seem so ridiculous as to suggest the novel is satirising them. Ultimately what we're left with is one individual who withdraws himself from society because he can no longer face the times in which he lives. I might be giving Amis too much credit to suggest he also sees something rather pathetic about the whole thing.

[Rick Patterson · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's hard not to consider Amis an academic novelist, one who takes a lot of pleasure in scuppering the halls of higher learning, if only because he knows their foibles so well. In that regard, he reminds me a little of David Lodge--or perhaps Lodge should remind me of Amis, given who's the older statesman--but with a little more starch in his humor. However, this one is quite a bit darker than I was ready for, a cranky novel that does of course have its uproarious moments--particularly at the expense of university students and faculty--but returns again and again--and finally--to what could justifiably be regarded as sardonic misogyny. Jaques Richardson, the title character, is not a nasty man, and he certainly engages us completely from the start; however, his problem--an abrupt lack of sexual interest in his wife, Brenda--generalizes itself into a rather wholesale distaste with most of the rest of his associates, male and female, all of which makes for an antipathetic protagonist, one would suppose. Not so. Jake is a engaging man who settles on disengagement, an academic whose interest in his own problems remains academic, a razor-sharp observer who simply gets tired of observation. Jake's resolution is less broadly misanthropic than Hamlet's dismissive "Man delights not me. No, nor woman neither," but it seems somehow more disturbing. This one will sit in my head a lot longer than Lucky Jim did, and it is a much better achievement than Amis' novel that actually won the Booker.

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think that only an unregenerate type like Kingsley Amis could have written a novel like Jake's Thing. Most male writers writing about sex in modern life would be oh so politically correct. Amis makes the right moves to assure us that he is not a troglodyte, but then manages to leave us with the impression that the sexes don't get along all that well: Going in for sex therapy at the age of sixty, Oxford don Jake Richardson finds that there is no improvement to speak of, but things seem to be getting worse.

They get markedly worse when a twenty-year-old named Kelly makes an attempt to add him to her collection, which leads to a rift between him and his wife Brenda (who is portrayed very sympathetically, I find).

In the end, women are not encouraged by the lackadaisical way their men interact with them, and men are not encouraged by the way that women endlessly find fault with them. There is a lot of painful honesty here, and Amis, being Amis, can be hilarious and savage by turns. Worth reading.

[Bob · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of my reading strategies is to complete lists - mechanical perhaps, but it introduces me to things I might never know about otherwise. Anthony Burgess's "Ninety-nine Novels" is a useful list but I got so bogged down with Gore Vidal's "Creation" (to be reviewed in due time), that I set it aside for a couple of weeks, determined to read a few books that I could burn through in a day or two.

Fortunately Kingsley Amis writes just that sort of book. "Jake's Thing" is from 1978, and the premise, a 59-year-old Oxford don who has lost his sex drive, gives Amis a jumping off point for satirizing 1970s sex-therapy, encounter group type of pop psychology from every angle.

Jake has been a relentless womanizer and one is never sure quite how autobiographical Amis is being; the denouement, in which his doctor revises the diagnosis that his condition is psychological and says there is a new pill he can take to solve his problem provokes a two-page misogynist internal monologue and about how Jake basically can't stand women, after which he gleefully declines the recommendation.

[Poornima Vijayan · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5. I really liked the book. But it was a difficult read. Amis' writing is sure and strong. His descriptions, near perfect. I loved the unapologetic tone of the character (I'm sick and tired of political correctness and wanna be movements)

Jake's thing is not working the way Jake thinks it should. That's the basic premise of the book. Jake, who follows doctors orders punctiliously, does whatever is asked of him. So does his wife Brenda. 'Does he have qualms showing his genitals in public' is a much repeated question and action that is required to him, throughout the book. As the book progresses, we discover (and so does Jake) that his thing can work. But he's just not very interested in it all.

I cannot believe the book is a Booker nominated one. Really. All Booker books I've read have been about personal trauma and anguish. This is ridiculously funny!

[Lon Eriksson · Rating 4 out of 5]

The topics in the book are risqué, but it provides a lens into the life of a childless, sterile marriage in 1970s Britain's academic class. Amis's (well deserved) suspicion of psychotherapy is apparent throughout, and some of the farcical descriptions drew chuckles and even laughs. More soberly, the description of an aging man, bereft of real purpose and interests, caused some introspection. The phrase "shell of his former self" is overused, but this shell-man is essentially what this book seeks to investigate. Is there something underneath? A spark or a purpose? Jake's final contemplation in the closing paragraphs, after his wife has left him and he has weakly protested, shows that despite the longing for this former self - a man in his 20s and passionate - he can't be bothered to bring that man back.

[Yani · Rating 2 out of 5]

Parts of this are quite good... other parts are deeply misogynistic, casually racist, occasionally homophobic and very confusing.

I don't really know what to say about this. The lead character is a mostly self involved intellectual snob, and all the characters are seen through the lens of his viewpoint, so they don't really have many redeeming features. And there are whole sections of this that just confused the hell out of me, either because I had no idea how they were supposed to fit into the story or just rambled on for too long.

And either Amis was an incredibly gifted writer to could completely encapsulate the mindset of his lead character and let nothing of himself show through, or Amis deeply hated women. Hopefully it's the former.

[Jonathan Natusch · Rating 2 out of 5]

What a strange book. I bought it, thinking, from the blurb, that it would be a bit of a fruity sex-comedy, a la Richard Gordon's 'Doctor in the Nude' or suchlike. It wasn't. Nor was it even particularly funny, though there were the occasional moments of hilarity.
Instead, I waded through numerous interminable rants about the female of the species, long-winded set-pieces of medical and psychiatric "treatment", and the general feeling that 1970s Britain was a terrible, grim place indeed.
I'd enjoyed 'Lucky Jim', the only other Kingsley Amis novel I've read, but I don't think I'll delve any further into his back catalogue...