Word: englishman
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...ENGLISHMAN by Kingsley Amis. 192 pages. Harcourf, Brace & World...
...better at being beastly to the British than the British. In One Fat Englishman, Kingsley Amis has raised this particular form of beastliness to the level of high comic...
Roger Micheldene is a plump package of just about everything Americans find detestable in a U-type Englishman. He is expensively accented (Oxford), twice married, with a modest homosexual past, a nonchurchgoing Roman Catholic, but a devout snob and a glutton, a sexman and a Potterish ployman of epic pretensions. His exploits in one-upmanship take the form of a baroque conversational style, impeccable scholarship in cigars, and a collection of snuffboxes with appropriate snuff (antelope horn for the Otterburn mix). He hates progress, Protestants, Negroes, Jews, Americans, today and tomorrow. Such a man, Amis implies, has done very nicely...
...Englishman is very funny. But by the time Amis lets his ployman homeward plod his weary way, the reader finds his heart wrung with pity. In a puzzling way, the appalling Roger has endeared himself. It is not just that Roger himself in odd moments has recognized that he is a pretty dreadful character. "Very angst-producing, being a snob," he confesses to his mistress. Something deeper is involved. The secret may be that the totally selfish man is pathetic as well as detestable; Roger has some of the heartbreaking quality present in the rapt self-absorption of a child...
...Today. Trying to be urbane about his (and England's) present predicament, the poor man says: "You have no idea how pleasant it is not to have any future. It's like having a totally efficient contraceptive." "Or like being impotent," says one Russian interrogator drily. The Englishman has the grace to blush...