Word: fats
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...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...
Pursuit of Angst. What happens is a howling shame. Roger is defeated in conversation by an undergraduate "Jewish jackanapes" who enrages him by professing identical opinions. He tests his conviction that "these Yank college girls were at it all the time," and is bitten severely in his fat neck. He bloats with rage after a faculty party when he guessed the word was "effeminately" in a game of charades; the word was "Britishly." He is finally seduced by an ill-complected nymphomaniac and is comic in love as he conjugates Latin to prolong his pleasure. He is outdrunk, outmaneuvered, outraged...
...Fat 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...
True as Tape. In the ten years since Lucky Jim appeared, that frenetic farce of provincial English academic life has become a minor classic. In One Fat Englishman, Amis has faced and triumphantly cleared the hazards of translation. Most English novelists cannot manage a single sentence in demotic U.S. speech without setting on edge the big white American teeth. But Amis' mimic's ear is true as tape...
...member of the group who witnessed dollar worship at the New York Stock Exchange reports: "For me, a man from another world, it was funny to observe hundreds of people, fat and thin, short and tall, but completely alike because of some kind of avid possessiveness, running about the whole room... crying out magic numbers and sounding like adding machines...