Kingsley Amis. Difficulties with Girls (1988)

     Kingsley Amis. Difficulties with Girls (1988) UP sent me this for Christmas in 1989, and I didn’t read it then. I tried to read it recently, and found I couldn’t be bothered. Amis is one of those writers whose works reflect a few apparently essential features of life as it is lived when the book was wrote, and so gains a reputation as an insightful critic of the soap opera we call society. But a few years later, these works become almost unreadable. They refer to and take seriously transient attitudes and values, the kind that engage the editorialists and pontificators for a season, and seem quaint almost as soon as they are dissected and discussed. So I didn’t finish this book. I suppose in a decade or so some hapless graduate student will read all of Amis’s works and come to the unwarranted conclusion that he affords more than a superficial impression of English life in the second half of the 20th century. (2005)