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One Fat Englishman
Roger Micheldene, an English publisher, is on the loose in the U.S. He spends an October week shuttling between New York and Budweiser College in Pennsylvania. This exercises all his British appetites...snobbery, gluttony, anger, sloth and lust.
But Amis roasts Americans as well and serves us familiar dishes, though in a piquant sauce: the precocious undergraduate author of a far-out novel, an earnest young priest, and an alcoholic literary agents nymphomaniacal wife.
"They are all presented with glee and gusto and the keenest wit, but it is Roger Micheldene--at once a prototype of the insufferable Englishman and an individual with sufficient humor to win our sneaking sympathy--who dominates a supremely entertaining comedy of bad manners." (Publisher's Source)
176 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1963
43 people are currently reading
728 people want to read
About the author
Kingsley Amis
212 books552 followersBest 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
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
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 96 reviews
May 15, 2023
Many are the artist's rendering of Roger Micheldene, one of the most despicable characters in all of literature. By my eye, the above illustration captures the odious, lecherous louse in all his inglorious glory. Dastardly, dreadful, disgraceful - upon reading Kingsley Amis's novel, you will surely grow to love hating this bulbous Brit in his role as publisher on a business trip to America, visiting a land and people he simply can’t stomach.
To highlight just how despicable, we are given glimpses of Roger’s bigotry and racism: he views a young Jewish novelist as a Yid scribbler with lobeless ears flapping, a young Asian lady as attractive if she only had eye-sockets as well as eyes, a Black woman having skin as jet-black as it can get. And when it comes to Americans, Roger is at his scathing snobbish best. On his car ride through suburbia he observes: "The distance of the houses from one another, their wooden construction, the absence of horticulture and fences or walls, the woodland setting, all combined to give the area the look of a semi-temporary encampment for a battalion of parvenus."
And here’s Roger’s reflection on first meeting a fellow publisher, an American, by the name of Joe: “Of the seven deadly sins, Roger considered himself qualified in gluttony, sloth and lust but distinguished himself in anger. The first time the two men met, an incident with a brief-case lock had suggested to him that here was a formidable rival in the last-named field.”
Kingsley Amis doesn't hold back in Roger’s critical self-assessment but also provides vintage British understatement about Joe the American being a hothead capable of exploding at the slightest provocation. This one sentence provides a quick preview of the range of humor to follow, from broad slap and tickle slapstick to, again, understatement and irony.
Roger’s responsibilities for a publishing house bring him into contact with men he abhors, but in addition to his desire to eat, drink and screw everything in sight, the core of the story is Roger’s infatuation and lust for Helene, beautiful blonde wife of Danish philologist Ernst Bang who is on a teaching fellowship at Budweiser College in Pennsylvania and, yes, that’s Budweiser as in the beer where Budweiser’s big football rival is Rheingold (Kingsley obviously couldn’t resist the temptation of naming American colleges after beer companies).
This is a short novel where the men and women and Helene’s six-year-old boy are little more than character sketches but such rough outlines are pitch-perfect since in Roger’s worldview people barely exist; rather, each one is a mere butt and foil for his sneers and jibes, his calculation and manipulation. The literary aesthetic is cartoonish in that if the novel were ever turned into a movie, animated cartoon would work best.
The pace is brisk, capturing different episodes in Roger’s American adventures, such as Roger having mechanical Clockwork Orange-style sex out in nature with a woman who uses men the same way Roger uses most women – as mere sex objects. Actually, this scene is so revealing: without affection and intimacy, the old in-and-out is empty and unfulfilling, thus both Roger and his partner resort to their time-tested remedy, liquor, to fill the void. On some level Roger realizes all this but his monumental ego prevents him from really doing anything about it.
In another scene Roger refuses to deliver a much attended evening lecture on publishing at the college when he discovers someone has stolen his prepared outline. An event organizer pleads with Roger to speak informally on a topic he knows inside out and not disappoint the nearly one hundred and fifty people waiting patiently in the auditorium. Roger tells him flatly even if there were one hundred and fifty thousand people, he still would refuse. Again most revealing: all of Roger’s fancy British upper class education counts for nothing; such insolence and inflexibility is the behavior of a spoiled child.
At one point, after dropping Roger back at the house where he is staying, the driver rolls down the window and says: “Your basic objection to Jack Kennedy appears to be that he’s an American. Don’t think I don’t sympathize, but unfortunately we have this law here that says the President of the United States has to be a citizen of the Republic. Unreasonable, I grant you, but there it is. Dura lex sed lex, old man, which is Iroquois for Why don’t you go back to your island and stay there. Good night.” Thanks, Kingsley! Such a fabulous way to bare Roger’s uppity soul to a reader.
Following a fling in the sack, Roger tells Helene he loves her. But how deep is his love, really? Considering how Roger’s life is a constant lusting and indulging his appetites to reinforce his own physical identity, one wonders. Added to the equation is the fact Roger is married to his second wife. If this isn’t enough, Roger reflects on how he only hit women in the past when he was either very angry or very drunk.
Ah! As if those are legitimate excuses, you loathsome fat pig! Actually, Helene is given a real taste of Roger’s feelings – he could spend more time with her but bounds out of bed to field what he considers an urgent phone call, urgent, that is, since it pertains to the young man, that damn Yid scribbler, who made off with his lecture outline.
Roger muses, “Outside every fat man there was an even fatter man trying to close in.” No doubt. After reading this novel we might admit: Inside every reasonable man there is Roger Micheldene trying to get out. Sure, Roger is a culturally condescending racist and bigot but how free are we from our inner Roger? Do we find racism and bigotry acceptable in any form? Are we in our own way culturally condescending or racist or bigoted, even in our private thoughts? Such are the larger philosophic questions raised by this fine Kingsley Amis novel.
April 2, 2015
Kingsley Amis is the kind of writer who can give misogyny a bad name.
Roger Micheldene, the One Fat Englishman of the title, is gluttonous, alcoholic and adulterous, but mostly just hateful and insufferably British. I winced a lot.
What I did like though was how One Fat Englishman got its title.
See, when he wrote this, Kingsley Amis was, or would become, all those things that Roger Micheldene was: gluttonous, alcoholic, adulterous, hateful and insufferably British. He famously cheated on his first wife, Hilary Anne Bardwell (Martin's Mum). Hilary, or Hilly, as she was known, found out about the affair shortly before a vacation with Kingsley to Italy and Yugoslavia, where Kingsley passed out drunk on a beach. Hilly took the opportunity to make an editorial comment, in lipstick, on Kingsley's back:
At least Kingsley Amis could laugh at himself, in the way that self-loathers usually do.
Roger Micheldene, the One Fat Englishman of the title, is gluttonous, alcoholic and adulterous, but mostly just hateful and insufferably British. I winced a lot.
What I did like though was how One Fat Englishman got its title.
See, when he wrote this, Kingsley Amis was, or would become, all those things that Roger Micheldene was: gluttonous, alcoholic, adulterous, hateful and insufferably British. He famously cheated on his first wife, Hilary Anne Bardwell (Martin's Mum). Hilary, or Hilly, as she was known, found out about the affair shortly before a vacation with Kingsley to Italy and Yugoslavia, where Kingsley passed out drunk on a beach. Hilly took the opportunity to make an editorial comment, in lipstick, on Kingsley's back:
At least Kingsley Amis could laugh at himself, in the way that self-loathers usually do.
May 31, 2009
This book offers a quite remarkably negative self-portrait. The most obvious explanation is that Amis was disgusted with himself for leaving his first wife in such a callous manner, but few people would have gone this far.
There's an interesting question of chronology here, which I remember discussing with Jordan and Beth Ann. Maybe someone who knows more about Amis can tell us in precisely which order the following events happened?
- Amis starts writing this novel.
- Amis decides on the title One Fat Englishman.
- Amis gets involved with the woman who later becomes his second wife.
- While Amis is asleep on the beach, his first wife scrawls 1 FAT ENGLISHMAN I FUCK ANYTHING on his back in lipstick, and takes a photograph which is later widely circulated.
- Amis leaves his first wife.
There's an interesting question of chronology here, which I remember discussing with Jordan and Beth Ann. Maybe someone who knows more about Amis can tell us in precisely which order the following events happened?
- Amis starts writing this novel.
- Amis decides on the title One Fat Englishman.
- Amis gets involved with the woman who later becomes his second wife.
- While Amis is asleep on the beach, his first wife scrawls 1 FAT ENGLISHMAN I FUCK ANYTHING on his back in lipstick, and takes a photograph which is later widely circulated.
- Amis leaves his first wife.
July 5, 2010
I'm so glad people aren't writing books like this today. (They aren't, are they?) This is a truly unpleasant satire, hip-deep in unfunny snark. Roger Micheldene is a fat, lecherous, child-hating, asshole Brit, a publisher on sojourn in the U.S. Despite his fat lecherous assholery, women seem to be perfectly willing to sleep with him (mysteriously, even attractive, happily married women), although no one really likes him, partly because he's British, partly because he's an asshole. (No one in this book is likeable, it must be said.) Here he is entering a shop, with whose proprietress he plans to share some afternoon delight:
And here he is at a jazz club, searching for his mistress. A lanky Negro at the bar addresses him:
"Man, ya beez lan wah yam reez a heez woo nap lah cam a nam."
"I beg your pardon?"
Another Negro adds:
"Wa hang heez a beez mah gat sam reez a ran moo pah yah dan, man."
"I fear I fail to understand you."
If that even has a point, I don't know what it is.
It's been a very long time since I read Lucky Jim, which I certainly don't remember being this awful. Even this book has occasional, rare passages that are well written and pleasing -
It would be nice if the whole novel were written this way.
A girl of Oriental appearance, who would have been quite acceptable if she had had eye-sockets as well as eyes, came forward and said: "Good afternoon, sir, and what can I show you this afternoon?"
Although relieved at not having to start on the wantee-speakee-missee drill he had been contemplating, Roger would have preferred something less impeccably American.
And here he is at a jazz club, searching for his mistress. A lanky Negro at the bar addresses him:
"Man, ya beez lan wah yam reez a heez woo nap lah cam a nam."
"I beg your pardon?"
Another Negro adds:
"Wa hang heez a beez mah gat sam reez a ran moo pah yah dan, man."
"I fear I fail to understand you."
If that even has a point, I don't know what it is.
It's been a very long time since I read Lucky Jim, which I certainly don't remember being this awful. Even this book has occasional, rare passages that are well written and pleasing -
What he could see through the window without raising his head told him nothing. The wire mesh of the screen gave the view a mealy, pointilliste quality, like a representation of what a dog sees. ....
He got out of bed and padded to the window. Viewed from here the scene looked different. It reflected a fair amount of sunlight but in a dull, uniform way, as if everything - neighbours' houses, lawns scattered with fallen leaves, gravel roadway, thin evergreen copse - had been sprayed with a thin film of gelatin. There was nobody about.
It would be nice if the whole novel were written this way.
Read
February 18, 2018Read this so long ago I remember nothing. Hence no rating. Actually it's even possible I never read it, but just carried it around for a few decades; who knows? I'm discarding it. It's rating here on GR doesn't make it very appealing.
Neither does the cover art.
Neither does the cover art.
January 7, 2020
Strung with the same gauge strings as Catcher in the Rye but played by a ham-fisted drunk there's no reason anyone should like this but I'm fairly confident almost everybody with an ear for humor will take delight. Now and again I read something so visceral that I'm ashamed to be holding a book instead of a bloody rag, drink or bundle of clothing. Where Lucky Jim felt a bit constrained at times this work is an unrestrained whiskey-soaked rager in comparison. Amis writes well and he wastes nobody's time - good for the bookish as well as the boozy. If you enjoyed Monty Python's American Conversation Restaurant sketch - you'll find yourself on familiar footing here. Rarely a book so boozy is this smart and even more rarely will you find yourself remotely engaged by such a venomous slob as Micheldene. Why do I want to spend a night drinking with these horrible pricks? There's powerful insight here among the ashes and empty bottles . Great stuff.
April 8, 2024
Roger Micheldene is a fat, slothful and lusty Englishman visiting America and some friends. He is having an affair with Helene the wife of Ernst his friend.Roger seduces women with words and has no morality except to enjoy himself and hates all things American. He is a snob with a great opinion of himself.
The story is amusing and satirical with the reader left bemused in why women would find someone so repulsive attractive. They all drink copious quantities of booze which may in some way explain their poor decisions.
America sounds a fun place in 1963 with jazz, cocktail parties and high jinks.
The story is amusing and satirical with the reader left bemused in why women would find someone so repulsive attractive. They all drink copious quantities of booze which may in some way explain their poor decisions.
America sounds a fun place in 1963 with jazz, cocktail parties and high jinks.
July 29, 2007
Hilarious and fascinating: a youngish, and still-reputedly-socialist Kingsley Amis predicts his future as an obese bigoted alcoholic womanizer with astonishing accuracy. Kingsley rarely wastes his words, and his ability to put across comic situations is peerless (well, except for his son Martin). Here we get a darker, nastier version of his usual sexual shenanigans, with some attempted mockery of America thrown in for good measure (the novel is set in a fictional southern college called... Budweiser University). These rubber arrows almost never hit their mark, but when you enter into the booze-soaked priapic maze of the title character's brain, you will not stop laughing.
June 3, 2017
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell,
The reason why, I cannot tell;
But this I know, and know full well,
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell.
--Thomas Brown
There is a long tradition in many cultures of the lovable rogue the charming con man and his female counterpart the hooker with a heart of gold. Enter Roger Micheldene. Even his name is somewhat aggravating and in fact it's longer and more complicated than this but we only have to deal with that one obscure paragraph deep in the book. Roger is a man of some standing with his publishing firm but outside of whatever hold he has on an evidently comfortable job there is nothing likable about Roger. He is fat and irascible; given to adultery with as many women as have managed to hold his otherwise short attention span. He eats too much drinks incredible amounts, storms and threatens impotent violence over things that couldn't possibly be proper provocation and in fact the large mystery and perhaps the source of the satire is that people either befriend him or pretend to befriend him.
To be sure author Kingsley Amis intended One Fact English Man to be darkest humor and sharpest satire. In this short novella, 162 pages in this edition, we follow him as he moves about Budweiser College where for some strange reason he has visiting professor status. (One of the jokes of this short book is to see how many names of American beers you can identify.) Not only lionized in the college set but frequently serviced by various women even as he pursues the married Helene and ponders his second failing marriage back in England.
My suspicion is that the real satire here is not Roger but the various pretenses and shows of deference being staged partially for his entertainment by a presumably clever and sophisticated college set with whom he is mingling.
In one short phrase I do not remember laughing once at any point during this book. I rather doubt I ever smiled or otherwise quite got the humor. Part of the reason for my response to this book is one of the worst introductions I have ever read. David Lodge the author of this brief intro is normally one of my favorite writers and can usually be counted upon to say something humorous. Instead in about five pages Lodge focuses entirely on the possible link between the Roger of this book and Kingsley's own pending self-destructive habits.
There are autobiographical elements to this book based on the fact that both the author and Roger had visiting professor status in American colleges. There is more than some evidence that Kingsley Amis lived in a very dissipated life among his American counterparts. It is something of a legend that upon reading the script to this book Kinsley's first wife proceeded to divorce him.
There are swipes at all manner of pretensions whether academic,literary, gastronomic or for that matter cigars but the humor is so bleached bone dry that that it is difficult for a lover of dry humor to catch much of it.
Two things redeem One Fat Englishmen: it is very short and Kingsley Amis is a very adept wordsmith. I can recommend this book as an opportunity to enjoy the use of English. Indeed there are a few mostly unnecessary segues into minor differences between the English language as spoken in America and as spoken in England. The fixation on some of these very minor constructs may have been funny in the very early 60s.
The reason why, I cannot tell;
But this I know, and know full well,
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell.
--Thomas Brown
There is a long tradition in many cultures of the lovable rogue the charming con man and his female counterpart the hooker with a heart of gold. Enter Roger Micheldene. Even his name is somewhat aggravating and in fact it's longer and more complicated than this but we only have to deal with that one obscure paragraph deep in the book. Roger is a man of some standing with his publishing firm but outside of whatever hold he has on an evidently comfortable job there is nothing likable about Roger. He is fat and irascible; given to adultery with as many women as have managed to hold his otherwise short attention span. He eats too much drinks incredible amounts, storms and threatens impotent violence over things that couldn't possibly be proper provocation and in fact the large mystery and perhaps the source of the satire is that people either befriend him or pretend to befriend him.
To be sure author Kingsley Amis intended One Fact English Man to be darkest humor and sharpest satire. In this short novella, 162 pages in this edition, we follow him as he moves about Budweiser College where for some strange reason he has visiting professor status. (One of the jokes of this short book is to see how many names of American beers you can identify.) Not only lionized in the college set but frequently serviced by various women even as he pursues the married Helene and ponders his second failing marriage back in England.
My suspicion is that the real satire here is not Roger but the various pretenses and shows of deference being staged partially for his entertainment by a presumably clever and sophisticated college set with whom he is mingling.
In one short phrase I do not remember laughing once at any point during this book. I rather doubt I ever smiled or otherwise quite got the humor. Part of the reason for my response to this book is one of the worst introductions I have ever read. David Lodge the author of this brief intro is normally one of my favorite writers and can usually be counted upon to say something humorous. Instead in about five pages Lodge focuses entirely on the possible link between the Roger of this book and Kingsley's own pending self-destructive habits.
There are autobiographical elements to this book based on the fact that both the author and Roger had visiting professor status in American colleges. There is more than some evidence that Kingsley Amis lived in a very dissipated life among his American counterparts. It is something of a legend that upon reading the script to this book Kinsley's first wife proceeded to divorce him.
There are swipes at all manner of pretensions whether academic,literary, gastronomic or for that matter cigars but the humor is so bleached bone dry that that it is difficult for a lover of dry humor to catch much of it.
Two things redeem One Fat Englishmen: it is very short and Kingsley Amis is a very adept wordsmith. I can recommend this book as an opportunity to enjoy the use of English. Indeed there are a few mostly unnecessary segues into minor differences between the English language as spoken in America and as spoken in England. The fixation on some of these very minor constructs may have been funny in the very early 60s.
July 20, 2014
This is the first and so far only book by Kingsley Amis I have read, and judging by some of its other reviews, it isn't his best-loved work. I enjoyed it though, and so this encourages me to read other books by him. I did not find it laugh-out-loud funny as some reviewers have, but it definitely had me smiling, sometimes broadly, on more than one occasion. As a satire of contemporary-to-publication British and American culture in the sauced up, swinging former half of the 1960's, however, I did feel like I was missing some of the subtlety of the social commentary simply because it's now so removed in time.
This book is a character sketch and psychological portrait as much as it is a satire, though, and I found it a compassionate, if unshrinking one. But then I'm probably also the president and sole member of the Real Life Women Who Like Roger Micheldene Fan Club. You can read other reviews as to why he's a completely unredeemed and insufferable character (they are lies.) Roger is an anti-hero - fat, bigoted, womanizing, prone to violent impulses; repulsive by design to be sure - but a comprehensible and sympathetic one, if you can allow yourself into his frustrated and dissipated British Imperial Old Guard worldview.
Indifferently married to another woman, the corpulent, middle-aged Englishman Roger has come to America on professional pretexts to pursue the endgame with his sporadic, transnational mistress Helene; either to persuade her to leave her own handsome-but-pin-headed Danish academic husband and marry him, or to conceded the race once and for all. I don't tend to stick with books the premise of which I find hard to believe, and at the outset it is a little difficult to understand why the very beautiful, satisfactorily married and significantly younger Helene ever bestowed her favors on the physically and morally distasteful Roger in the first place, or continued to hold out their promise across a variety of land masses and the course of five years.
However, in this case I didn't find it SO improbable that I rejected the story outright. Because the narrative is unshakably rooted in Roger's point of view, we encounter Helene as he does; as an entrancing female enigma, whose whims are capricious and whose motives and next move are uncertain. It provided a successful hook and mystery to keep me reading at a fast clip. Why should Roger think he even has a chance with Helene? DOES he? Might she leave her husband for him? If so, what will become of her irritatingly precocious young son, whom Roger detests? These questions and more made the book solidly engaging at the plot level, as well as its satire and humor. The pacing of each chapter propelled me effectively into the next.
The book is not long (only 162 pages in my edition), and its small cast of characters are tightly integrated, each one plays a necessary role in the ultimate payoff. The majority of them seem two-dimensional at first, because that is how they seem to Roger, all lampooning some different aspect of boozy, wife-swapping professional and academic early 1960's America, but on closer inspection, each one possess some subtle, individuating characteristic. By the end we, along with Roger, gain a glimmer of insight into even Helene's character and motivation as well. Most of the time though, it seems like Roger is the only real, thinking, feeling human being on the continent. This isn't a flaw in the writing, this is also how Roger feels most of the time, and goes a long way towards explaining much of his behavior. He's very careful to almost never show it, of course (he is English), but the inside of his head is a swirl of turbulent emotions, and we are, for all intents and purposes, inside his head.
I also found the picture Amis paints of how such a disgusting man could still manage to attract women surprisingly convincing. Roger's whole outward persona is a calculated mask (until he occasionally slugs someone), and he is very well practiced at turning on a particular kind of refined, Oxford-educated charm when he wants to. Amis portrayed it in such a way I could actually believe it was sometimes effective. We see proof within the book that, no matter what Roger would like to think, it isn't 100% effective with all women, but Amis convinced me by the deftness of his writing that it could be effective enough, enough of the time. This especially impressed me, given that he also goes out of his way to show just what a stupendous glutton and boor Roger can be, and often the two things happened within pages of each other. The little cracks of vulnerability that sometimes show, especially when dealing with the almost perpetual disappointment that is Helene, whom he seems to really love, touchingly round off the grating edges of a realistic and complex character.
All in all One Fat Englishman is probably most worth your time if you are making a serious study of satire, or have a particular interest in the time period it's set in. At such a short length, however, it's worth taking the time to make up your own mind about this fat Englishman, one way or another.
This book is a character sketch and psychological portrait as much as it is a satire, though, and I found it a compassionate, if unshrinking one. But then I'm probably also the president and sole member of the Real Life Women Who Like Roger Micheldene Fan Club. You can read other reviews as to why he's a completely unredeemed and insufferable character (they are lies.) Roger is an anti-hero - fat, bigoted, womanizing, prone to violent impulses; repulsive by design to be sure - but a comprehensible and sympathetic one, if you can allow yourself into his frustrated and dissipated British Imperial Old Guard worldview.
Indifferently married to another woman, the corpulent, middle-aged Englishman Roger has come to America on professional pretexts to pursue the endgame with his sporadic, transnational mistress Helene; either to persuade her to leave her own handsome-but-pin-headed Danish academic husband and marry him, or to conceded the race once and for all. I don't tend to stick with books the premise of which I find hard to believe, and at the outset it is a little difficult to understand why the very beautiful, satisfactorily married and significantly younger Helene ever bestowed her favors on the physically and morally distasteful Roger in the first place, or continued to hold out their promise across a variety of land masses and the course of five years.
However, in this case I didn't find it SO improbable that I rejected the story outright. Because the narrative is unshakably rooted in Roger's point of view, we encounter Helene as he does; as an entrancing female enigma, whose whims are capricious and whose motives and next move are uncertain. It provided a successful hook and mystery to keep me reading at a fast clip. Why should Roger think he even has a chance with Helene? DOES he? Might she leave her husband for him? If so, what will become of her irritatingly precocious young son, whom Roger detests? These questions and more made the book solidly engaging at the plot level, as well as its satire and humor. The pacing of each chapter propelled me effectively into the next.
The book is not long (only 162 pages in my edition), and its small cast of characters are tightly integrated, each one plays a necessary role in the ultimate payoff. The majority of them seem two-dimensional at first, because that is how they seem to Roger, all lampooning some different aspect of boozy, wife-swapping professional and academic early 1960's America, but on closer inspection, each one possess some subtle, individuating characteristic. By the end we, along with Roger, gain a glimmer of insight into even Helene's character and motivation as well. Most of the time though, it seems like Roger is the only real, thinking, feeling human being on the continent. This isn't a flaw in the writing, this is also how Roger feels most of the time, and goes a long way towards explaining much of his behavior. He's very careful to almost never show it, of course (he is English), but the inside of his head is a swirl of turbulent emotions, and we are, for all intents and purposes, inside his head.
I also found the picture Amis paints of how such a disgusting man could still manage to attract women surprisingly convincing. Roger's whole outward persona is a calculated mask (until he occasionally slugs someone), and he is very well practiced at turning on a particular kind of refined, Oxford-educated charm when he wants to. Amis portrayed it in such a way I could actually believe it was sometimes effective. We see proof within the book that, no matter what Roger would like to think, it isn't 100% effective with all women, but Amis convinced me by the deftness of his writing that it could be effective enough, enough of the time. This especially impressed me, given that he also goes out of his way to show just what a stupendous glutton and boor Roger can be, and often the two things happened within pages of each other. The little cracks of vulnerability that sometimes show, especially when dealing with the almost perpetual disappointment that is Helene, whom he seems to really love, touchingly round off the grating edges of a realistic and complex character.
All in all One Fat Englishman is probably most worth your time if you are making a serious study of satire, or have a particular interest in the time period it's set in. At such a short length, however, it's worth taking the time to make up your own mind about this fat Englishman, one way or another.
Read
July 8, 2025Rather crass, but terribly funny. There is an amusing encounter between the fat, pessimistic Englishman, and a breezy, optimistic American priest.
May 22, 2017
Roger Micheldene is, not to mince words, a truly horrible old man. And not only a world-class lecher, but also fat and morally ungainly. One even begins to suspect that the author of One Fat Englishman, Sir Kingsley Amis, is somewhat like this himself. Last month, I read his Girl, 20, which was also a revelation to me of hidden nastiness.
During his writing career, Amis metamorphosed from a liberal to a conservative to a hidebound Tory; and it is this latter which we see in his later novels. No matter, his character Micheldene compensates by being funny as well as occasionally racist and otherwise biased. At one point, he describes "a girl of Oriental appearance, who would have been quite acceptable if she had had eye-sockets as well as eyes."
One of the main plot points is our hero's distaste for the young Jewish-American novelist Irving Macher, who steals Roger's notes for a college lecture, and later steals his girlfriend.
The action of the novel takes place in a college-town America where all the colleges are named after breweries,such as Budweiser, Ballantine, Rheingold, and Pilsener. Everyone seems to spend an inordinate amount of time at parties that would be excruciatingly boring if they did not also exhibit the potential female provender.
Although he is a frightful curmudgeon, Micheldene is a hilarious observer; and his comments, however not-nice at times, are hilarious.
During his writing career, Amis metamorphosed from a liberal to a conservative to a hidebound Tory; and it is this latter which we see in his later novels. No matter, his character Micheldene compensates by being funny as well as occasionally racist and otherwise biased. At one point, he describes "a girl of Oriental appearance, who would have been quite acceptable if she had had eye-sockets as well as eyes."
One of the main plot points is our hero's distaste for the young Jewish-American novelist Irving Macher, who steals Roger's notes for a college lecture, and later steals his girlfriend.
The action of the novel takes place in a college-town America where all the colleges are named after breweries,such as Budweiser, Ballantine, Rheingold, and Pilsener. Everyone seems to spend an inordinate amount of time at parties that would be excruciatingly boring if they did not also exhibit the potential female provender.
Although he is a frightful curmudgeon, Micheldene is a hilarious observer; and his comments, however not-nice at times, are hilarious.
September 6, 2025
Quite funny at times
April 5, 2025
As well as being splutteringly, coffee-spittingly funny, Kingsley Amis is always uncomfortable to read. I used to think that this was because of the decidedly politically-incorrect, right-wing, Anglocentric and (alas) frequently racist attitudes which we know from history and biography he lent directly from his own to many of his fictional characters, grotesque as he may have made them. As I've come, however, with advancing age and disillusionment, to sympathise with many of his conservative positions (though not the racism and misogyny), I still find him vaguely disconcerting, and I've realised, at my first-ever encounter with this comparatively early novel, that it has nothing to do with politics or social attitudes per se, but rather with the people who hold both them and the attitudes to which Amis opposes those of his protagonists and surrogates.
In short, apparently mature, intellectual, responsible adults.
Here, for example, the fat - and drunken, and lecherous, and monstrously opinionated - Englishman of the title, one Roger Micheldene, opposes his evident intelligence and force of character against what he perceives as the superficiality, mediocrity and general inferiority of a clutch of American academics, and sets his sights on having apparently random, promiscuous sex with as many of their wives as possible, more as a means of expressing his contempt for them and their milieu than anything - other than to bolster his own fragile, voluminous ego. No-one behaves well. The women play along tiredly. The men conspire against, outwit, and humiliate Micheldene. Everyone conducts himself thoroughly badly. These are professional, respectable middle-class academic individuals - and they act like vicious children. And that's what's so perpetually disturbing about Amis - his laying bare of the infantile, at best adolescent, motivations of supposedly grown-up people, something he can only have arrived at by an unflinching, but nevertheless profoundly uncomfortable, reckoning with himself.
This book is "Lord of the Flies" cast as a campus novel. It's both as comic and as terrifying as that sounds.
In short, apparently mature, intellectual, responsible adults.
Here, for example, the fat - and drunken, and lecherous, and monstrously opinionated - Englishman of the title, one Roger Micheldene, opposes his evident intelligence and force of character against what he perceives as the superficiality, mediocrity and general inferiority of a clutch of American academics, and sets his sights on having apparently random, promiscuous sex with as many of their wives as possible, more as a means of expressing his contempt for them and their milieu than anything - other than to bolster his own fragile, voluminous ego. No-one behaves well. The women play along tiredly. The men conspire against, outwit, and humiliate Micheldene. Everyone conducts himself thoroughly badly. These are professional, respectable middle-class academic individuals - and they act like vicious children. And that's what's so perpetually disturbing about Amis - his laying bare of the infantile, at best adolescent, motivations of supposedly grown-up people, something he can only have arrived at by an unflinching, but nevertheless profoundly uncomfortable, reckoning with himself.
This book is "Lord of the Flies" cast as a campus novel. It's both as comic and as terrifying as that sounds.
June 5, 2014
I love Kingsley Amis’s work; Lucky Jim is one of my favorite comic novels (not that I’m alone in that). And at times One Fat Englishman reads like a sequel to that earlier novel…one in which Lucky Jim has grown up gross and embittered and roiling with hate. So ultimately it’s a bit of a downer; the scabrous way Roger Micheldene talks about everyone he encounters would be very funny in smaller doses, but here it’s virtually unrelieved.
Roger is a literary publisher visiting an American university, and is in hot pursuit of a colleague’s wife—but not exclusively so; he manages to score with a few other women along the way, none of whom he seems to feel anything for but disdain (at best) or contempt (at worst). In addition to women, he also excoriates children, teenagers, gays, and pretty much every ethnicity you can name off the top of your head. America itself appalls him; and yet he’s no happier to come across any of his own countrymen. Basically he’s a drunk and a braggart and a brute and a prick.
However, if you’re going to have a hero as objectionable as this one, you might as well go all in, and portray him with as much comic brio as possible, and Amis had that in spades. Roger’s groping and lurching across the span of pages make for compelling reading. And given that he doesn’t quite escape America unpunished (the last page will have you howling), I can, in the final analysis, recommend the book—but only for readers whose skins are a tad thicker than the norm.
Roger is a literary publisher visiting an American university, and is in hot pursuit of a colleague’s wife—but not exclusively so; he manages to score with a few other women along the way, none of whom he seems to feel anything for but disdain (at best) or contempt (at worst). In addition to women, he also excoriates children, teenagers, gays, and pretty much every ethnicity you can name off the top of your head. America itself appalls him; and yet he’s no happier to come across any of his own countrymen. Basically he’s a drunk and a braggart and a brute and a prick.
However, if you’re going to have a hero as objectionable as this one, you might as well go all in, and portray him with as much comic brio as possible, and Amis had that in spades. Roger’s groping and lurching across the span of pages make for compelling reading. And given that he doesn’t quite escape America unpunished (the last page will have you howling), I can, in the final analysis, recommend the book—but only for readers whose skins are a tad thicker than the norm.
February 17, 2016
I am really growing to love Kingsley Amis’s stuff and this is an amusing Amis romp centred on one of literature’s most unpleasant protagonists. As we are meant to laugh both at and with the antics of Roger Micheldene, and also to generally disdain him, we can then wince at his anti-Semitism, and his propensity to want to slap women, but still simply see those traits as just two further reasons to despise the character.
But then some angst creeps in because as the character is clearly meant to be at least partly autobiographical of Amis himself this makes those two character properties a little more worrying.
It is hard not to think of the “One Fat Englishman” of the book blurring into the famous picture of the author himself (in the year before the book was published) with the very same three words (along with three further words…) scrawled onto his sleeping back by his then wife.
However I think I am reasonably convinced by Amis biographer Zachary Leader that we still should not see Micheldene as a carbon copy of Amis. Leader points out that the character’s loathing of American people and culture was very clearly not a view shared by Amis in reality, so we should tread carefully before assigning every other aspect of the character’s failings to the author. So the philandering unfaithfulness yes a shared trait, but the willingness to strike women thankfully not so, and hopefully the other unpleasant trait is also not exactly what it first seems.
But then some angst creeps in because as the character is clearly meant to be at least partly autobiographical of Amis himself this makes those two character properties a little more worrying.
It is hard not to think of the “One Fat Englishman” of the book blurring into the famous picture of the author himself (in the year before the book was published) with the very same three words (along with three further words…) scrawled onto his sleeping back by his then wife.
However I think I am reasonably convinced by Amis biographer Zachary Leader that we still should not see Micheldene as a carbon copy of Amis. Leader points out that the character’s loathing of American people and culture was very clearly not a view shared by Amis in reality, so we should tread carefully before assigning every other aspect of the character’s failings to the author. So the philandering unfaithfulness yes a shared trait, but the willingness to strike women thankfully not so, and hopefully the other unpleasant trait is also not exactly what it first seems.
September 19, 2017
Kingsley Amis never disappoints - an amusing and not overly complex plot serves as a vehicle for his sociological observations. In this case, Roger Micheldene, an English academic in America in the early 1960s finds plenty to comment on. His self-loathing may only be exceeded by his loathing for everyone else.
While the ability of not-conventionally attractive men to have their share of conquests among conventionally beautiful women is hardly newsworthy, Micheldene's portrayal of the relative merits of himself and the married woman he is pursuing strains credulity a bit.
Among Roger's observations, the one on American men's summer attire is more true than ever: "If being cool meant dressing like a child there was a clear case for staying hot."
While the ability of not-conventionally attractive men to have their share of conquests among conventionally beautiful women is hardly newsworthy, Micheldene's portrayal of the relative merits of himself and the married woman he is pursuing strains credulity a bit.
Among Roger's observations, the one on American men's summer attire is more true than ever: "If being cool meant dressing like a child there was a clear case for staying hot."
September 22, 2012
I found this guilt-inducingly funny. A predictive self-portrait of the public persona of the later Kingsley Amis - fat, drunk, misogynist, selfish, greedy and wonderfully "child-unfriendly" published in 1961, when Amis was in his thirties. Roger, the central character is an English man of letters pursuing wine, women and food, in reverse order, in American academe. Amis is generous in showing Roger as a tethered bear, goaded and teased by the younger Americans he so despises. The scene in which he's beaten at Scrabble by the 7-year old son of one of his fleeting conquests, and his hilariously childish revenge will stay with me for a long time.
June 5, 2014
I do like reading Kingsley Amis but I don't think this story is particularly wonderful, except for the main character Roger. Amis is so eloquent as Roger that I have to admire this perspective on things. His sole objective as Roger is to get his way, get the best of all the other men and generally behave like a selfish snobbish twat. Fantastic. He roams around drinking and taking his snuff conversing with all the ladies who find him intriguing because he is so different to the American man. His obnoxious behaviour is refreshing and I love how he loathes children and secretly wants to smack imbeciles around him on the head. Brilliant, but not as good as Lucky Jim.
December 1, 2011
You have to be slighlty twisted with a dry sense of humor (or something) to appreciate this kind of writing and you also have to understand that the main character is, like the title says, one fat Englishman. And he's a jerk. But that's the point. so if you accept that, then you can enjoy the book, the writing, and have a laugh...
"Then he went down the slope to join her. He slid about a bit in doing so, either because of the gin or because he was holding his stomach in so tightly that his legs worked like stilts or because the grass was slippery."
"Then he went down the slope to join her. He slid about a bit in doing so, either because of the gin or because he was holding his stomach in so tightly that his legs worked like stilts or because the grass was slippery."
June 9, 2014
It's like an ungrateful payback to Henry James' Portrait of a Lady - a fat sloppy and snobbish Englishman goes to the US, gets tangled with an americanized ice queen and gets his heart broken.
More about the form than the contents: you can see Martin's genes in full action here.
And it is kind of autobiographical, as it started from this picture, taken by Kingley's wife, after she herself branded her not-yet-so-fat hubby:
http://media.tumblr.com/2057036b675d2...
More about the form than the contents: you can see Martin's genes in full action here.
And it is kind of autobiographical, as it started from this picture, taken by Kingley's wife, after she herself branded her not-yet-so-fat hubby:
http://media.tumblr.com/2057036b675d2...
June 17, 2017
I've never read a Kingsley Amis before and I have to say that I won't be reading any more. I forced myself to get to the end but it didn't improve. I couldn't see any humour in the book and wouldn't have known it was meant to be funny if I hadn't read that it was. Hugely annoying and unbelievable main character and lots of other annoying characters. I realise that Roger Micheldene is meant to be awful, but I didn't even find his awfulness amusing. Very disappointed.
November 8, 2012
Англичанин во "враждебной" Америке. Он много ест и пьет, реагирует на всех женщин, очень хочет произвести впечатление. В то же время он не глуп и забавен. Повествование сначала показалось скучным, но отложить книгу не смогла.
September 17, 2015
My first Kingsley Amis and I loved it. The irreverence and caustic tone was refreshing. Although the protagonist is really an awful man you can help but be delighted with the things he says and does. A privilege to read such great writing
June 20, 2016
The titular character, Roger Micheldene, is a misogynist and racist slob. I don't mind despicable characters when they show some hint of redeeming value ...charm?...good intent?... development? There's none here. He's just unpleasant and the book feels mean.
September 13, 2013
A contemporary and even more mordant view from the same era as Mad Men. Amis was pretty ruthless.
January 20, 2015
Truly obnoxious.
July 13, 2022
A hilarious story about a despicable character. I had to keep highlighting passages of fantastic writing.
January 27, 2016
Savage, cynical and very funny - like downing a belter of a horse's neck in one
July 16, 2020
A more appropriate title might have been ONE FAT ENGLISHMAN IN AMERICA, as the novel alternates, not too successfully, I thought, between satirizing academia in America and depicting the qualities of a pretty unlikable Englishman.
The satire is scattered, beginning with calling American universities by beer names, such as Budweiser, Rheingold, and Ballantine. Budweiser is the school where Roger Micheldene, the Englishman is a visiting publisher. He has to tolerate Americans who try to impress him with their knowledge of British accents and expressions, and aside from that are unable to talk about anything meaningful except sports and what college they went to. He resents what turns into his nemesis, a smart American Jewish writer who is coming out with a good novel. something Roger hates to admit.
He encounters a precocious and presumably typical 8 year old who beats him at scrabble and prompts dark thoughts about spoiled American children. He has to smoke inferior American cigars, put up with silly Halloween customs, the list goes on. In what I thought was a oddly extraneous encounter, Fr. Colgate, a priest, tries to amend some of Roger’s faults as a semi-lapsed Catholic and gets only verbal abuse for his efforts. Is Amis satirizing religion, reminding the reader that Roger once had a good side, or making fun of earnest American types.? It wasn’t clear to me.
Roger, however, as I said, is a generally despicable person. He makes offensive remarks about Jews, Negroes, women, homosexuals, and Americans in general. He eats and drinks far too much, and while he’s attempting to revive an affair he once had with Helene, the wife of a Danish philologist, he also tries to bed every half-way attractive woman that he sees. His has zero respect for women, sees them only as sexual objects. He has erratic success, given his limited appeal, and hits a low point when one of his attempted conquests leads him on and then delights in frustrating him.
In the end, he steals a valuable 19th century poet’s notebook he has coveted and heads back to England to his two former wives. He has not succeeded with Helene and his brief trip to America resulted mostly in drunken experiences that didn’t turn out well. A hazy observed America by a lazy Englishman, but it could be what Amis was suggesting – a depiction of the present (l960’s) dreary state of an aspect of Anglo-American academic culture.
The satire is scattered, beginning with calling American universities by beer names, such as Budweiser, Rheingold, and Ballantine. Budweiser is the school where Roger Micheldene, the Englishman is a visiting publisher. He has to tolerate Americans who try to impress him with their knowledge of British accents and expressions, and aside from that are unable to talk about anything meaningful except sports and what college they went to. He resents what turns into his nemesis, a smart American Jewish writer who is coming out with a good novel. something Roger hates to admit.
He encounters a precocious and presumably typical 8 year old who beats him at scrabble and prompts dark thoughts about spoiled American children. He has to smoke inferior American cigars, put up with silly Halloween customs, the list goes on. In what I thought was a oddly extraneous encounter, Fr. Colgate, a priest, tries to amend some of Roger’s faults as a semi-lapsed Catholic and gets only verbal abuse for his efforts. Is Amis satirizing religion, reminding the reader that Roger once had a good side, or making fun of earnest American types.? It wasn’t clear to me.
Roger, however, as I said, is a generally despicable person. He makes offensive remarks about Jews, Negroes, women, homosexuals, and Americans in general. He eats and drinks far too much, and while he’s attempting to revive an affair he once had with Helene, the wife of a Danish philologist, he also tries to bed every half-way attractive woman that he sees. His has zero respect for women, sees them only as sexual objects. He has erratic success, given his limited appeal, and hits a low point when one of his attempted conquests leads him on and then delights in frustrating him.
In the end, he steals a valuable 19th century poet’s notebook he has coveted and heads back to England to his two former wives. He has not succeeded with Helene and his brief trip to America resulted mostly in drunken experiences that didn’t turn out well. A hazy observed America by a lazy Englishman, but it could be what Amis was suggesting – a depiction of the present (l960’s) dreary state of an aspect of Anglo-American academic culture.
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