Word: man
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...WEEKS before Christmas, a middle-aged man woke up in a bathtub when his heart shivered. The water had gone ice on him; the last cigarette in the house from before his arm went limp was floating around on top, shedding little brown slivers of tobacco that slid down their individual chutes to the porcelain tub bottom...
...hero of Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis' first novel, was an exasperated rather than an angry young man. While characters out of John Osborne, Alan Sillitoe and others raged against the ossifying and stultifying British class system, Amis' feckless young professor did his best to fit in. Unfortunately, or fortunately, Jim's private loathing for the nest of ninnies that ruled his academic career kept coming to the fore. It was one thing to make secret faces when other backs were turned or to plan baroque revenges against his superiors, but quite another to wind up drunk...
...that was 25 years ago. The inspired comedy of Lucky Jim has worn well, and so has Amis the man of letters. His characters, though, as Jake's Thing demonstrates, have grown pinched and crabby with age. Jake Richardson, 59, and his overweight wife Brenda have a problem. "I realized," Jake explains to his doctor, "something that used to be a big part of my life wasn't there any more." That thing is sex. A brash American who leads an encounter group grudgingly attended by Jake puts the matter succinctly: "What's with Jake is that...
...Burnham, a political scientist at M.I.T.: "Most of us pretty much take life as it is given to us by others. For example, destroy local mass transit systems, promote suburban sprawl ... permit central cities to deteriorate into jungles and stimulate the automotive industry by every advertising trick known to man, and what do you get? A spread-out network of settlement, work, distribution and consumption which has become absolutely dependent on the automobile for its existence." Burnham will have none of the "pundits who blame the American people for doing what their leaders and their corporate giants had told them...
...problem is that too many Americans are accustomed to acting only in emergencies, and too few of them are persuaded that they actually face one at the moment. Presumably they will wake up to the certain knowledge of it before too long. As Samuel Johnson said: "When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully...