Rating: 
Summary: Relief for Academics
Review: I read this book roughly three times a year-- whenever the world of academia becomes intolerable. I know the plot and several pages by heart, but it never gets old.
At first glance, it seems like an indiscriminate stab at any intellectual who, a la Welch, is wildly passionate about his or her subject-- Amis pissed off a lot of people that way. My father, a professor, refused to read "Lucky Jim" because he remembered all of the intolerable anti-intellectuals who hauled the book around in their back pockets when it was published in the fifties, and it's hard to blame him-- but ultimately, I think the joke is on the anti-intellectuals. Amis is an academic man himself. Once you drop below the surface of it, he isn't jabbing at intellectuals at all-- after all, Jim admits that history, "well taught," is a necessary discipline; it's just that he's not the one to teach it. Michie, for my money the one true intellect in the entire book, is only bad in that he makes Jim feel inadequate; he's revealed at the end to be a perfectly decent person. And the fact that Jim leaves academia in the end for a spot as a personal secretary doesn't necessarily reflect badly on academia; after all, he's simply going to be paid for doing what he already did for free at the college-- he's moving on to a new career as a "boredom detector."
You could be upset with this book if you respect learning-- but I wouldn't bother. I am hyper-sensitive to that kind of thing myself, and I think that finally this comes down on the side of REAL intelligence, whether you find it in a college or in the private sector.
Also, for those who think that Welch is an overdrawn caricature, I can report that I had a class from a man just like him. I used to sing the "Welch tune" in lecture, just to get through the day.
Rating:
Summary: Lucky You....if you read this book
Review: "Lucky Jim" is Jim Dixon - who appears to be a most unlucky man. He recently landed a university teaching job, but he's miserable. Terrible at his job, Dixon is left wondering throughout the book whether his position will be continued. In addition to his job woes, he seems to have great contempt for most everyone around him, including his neurotic girlfriend, Margaret. Things worsen when he's invited for a weekend of music at a senior professor's home and he meets the professor's son - Bertrand. A buffoonish artist, Bertrand nevertheless has an alluring girlfriend, the lovely Christine. Dixon unsurprisingly is drawn to Christine, despite her stuffy manner and seeming arrogance. Embarrassing Bertrand and stealing away Christine become him main priority. In the meantime, he still needs to prepare a lecture on "Merrie England" that will be attended by his superiors and local town dignitaries. Will he survive?The novel is a model of dry British wit - at times laugh-out-loud hilarious. Dixon is a fantastic literary character - a cynic who personifies the scorn we all feel at times. As Amis writes about Dixon, "all his faces were designed to express rage or loathing." In addition to his cynicism, Dixon is incredibly irresponsible and engages in all sorts of mischievousness, resulting in hilarious predicaments. Nevertheless, you cannot help but root for him to succeed. The writing is spectacular - each scene bristles with detail and nuance. In particular, Amis beautifully portrays difficult interpersonal situations frankly and accurately, replete with requisite humor. Although the book drags at times, it's a first-rate read. Most highly recommended, particularly for readers who enjoy novels set in academia.
Rating: 
Summary: A classic of English humour, now showing its age
Review: "Lucky Jim" was Kingsley Amis' first novel, effectively written in collaboration with his friend, the poet, Philip Larkin. The idea came during a visit to Larkin at Leicester University in 1948 - Amis sent drafts to Larkin, Larkin returned them, heavily edited.
First published in 1954, Amis introduces Jim Dixon, a junior lecturer at an English provincial university. Dixon is approaching the end of his first, probationary year and his senior, Professor Welch, is far from impressed. Jim stands little chance of being reappointed. He does his best to ingratiate himself with the professor, but he's socially inept, apparently accident prone, especially when indulging in his predilection for beer, lacks interest in his appointed subject - medieval history - and is consumed by sexual frustrations and fantasies.
Dixon comes from the north of England, from the lower middle classes, from a world which is alien to the Oxbridge elite who dominate academic life ... even in a provincial university. Amis constructs humorous situation after humorous situation. Dixon's ineptitude is excruciating. His luck is a major theme - he doesn't seem to have any. Meanwhile, all around him are those who have been lucky enough to be born into the upper classes and who are unselfconsciously reaping the benefits of it.
In its time, "Lucky Jim" broke new ground in satirising the academic world. The characters in the novel portray the pretensions, sterility, and advantages of the class system. Although greeted as a radical piece of writing and seen as transforming humour, even satire, "Lucky Jim" now appears dated. It has lost much of its edge and seems unrecognisable as a work which threatened the status quo.
Its humour can now appear slapstick and trivial, the stuff of poor sitcoms. The class and sexual mores are set in another world. The rationing and shortages are certainly from another era. And the writing style has also aged - it's a bit laboured in places, a bit coy in others.
Amis, himself, was born in South London into a lower middle class family. He attended public school, then Oxford University and was commissioned into the Royal Signals for wartime army service. He emerged to teach at Swansea University, then Cambridge. From the early 1960's he wrote full-time.
Throughout his life Amis enjoyed a reputation as an outspoken wit. "Lucky Jim" remains a seminal piece of writing, but many contemporary readers will find its themes and style dated, its humour rather gentle compared to contemporary savagery. It's a very gentlemanly, very innocent, very English, and very middle class novel, still with its comic moments, but no longer with the edge and bite which earned it ... and Amis ... a radical reputation.
Rating:
Summary: Lucky You....if you read this book
Review: "Lucky Jim" is Jim Dixon - who appears to be a most unlucky man. He recently landed a university teaching job, but he's miserable. Terrible at his job, Dixon is left wondering throughout the book whether his position will be continued. In addition to his job woes, he seems to have great contempt for most everyone around him, including his neurotic girlfriend, Margaret. Things worsen when he's invited for a weekend of music at a senior professor's home and he meets the professor's son - Bertrand. A buffoonish artist, Bertrand nevertheless has an alluring girlfriend, the lovely Christine. Dixon unsurprisingly is drawn to Christine, despite her stuffy manner and seeming arrogance. Embarrassing Bertrand and stealing away Christine become him main priority. In the meantime, he still needs to prepare a lecture on "Merrie England" that will be attended by his superiors and local town dignitaries. Will he survive? The novel is a model of dry British wit - at times laugh-out-loud hilarious. Dixon is a fantastic literary character - a cynic who personifies the scorn we all feel at times. As Amis writes about Dixon, "all his faces were designed to express rage or loathing." In addition to his cynicism, Dixon is incredibly irresponsible and engages in all sorts of mischievousness, resulting in hilarious predicaments. Nevertheless, you cannot help but root for him to succeed. The writing is spectacular - each scene bristles with detail and nuance. In particular, Amis beautifully portrays difficult interpersonal situations frankly and accurately, replete with requisite humor. Although the book drags at times, it's a first-rate read. Most highly recommended, particularly for readers who enjoy novels set in academia.
Rating: 
Summary: not especially funny
Review: A remarkably overrated book. The humor, such as it is, is dated, something that Trollope and Dickens, for ex, escape. Suggest you read David Lodge instead; he really is witty: Small World and Nice Work. Hynes A Lecturer's Tale is also brilliant.
Rating:
Summary: Lucky me!
Review: I'm so glad I picked this book up. It is delightfully funny in a rather understated way. The characters become real enough to care about during the course of the story. The more improbable the situations, the more believable they are. This is a book you'll want to read again!
Rating: 
Summary: Left me puzzled and unamused
Review: It is perplexing that so many reviewers laud this book for its hilarity, when the farce isn't outrageous and the sarcasm isn't sharp. The thrust of the book--character portraits that paint British instructors as befuddled and dysfunctional--is so dead-on as to be more reporterly and nostalgic than funny.
Essentially there are no more than four running gags: a character accidentally burns a hole in a rug, someone continuously avoids writng a lecture, and so on. If you can chew on those jokes for 60 pages each, then you can safely coast along to Lucky Jim's flat ending.
Some may argue historical context, but in fact classic humor dosen't devolve completely. For example, the situational humor of Robert Benchley and S.J. Perleman is a little dated, but still worth chuckles. And others have created more successful characters--Amis' predecessors Thurber and E.B.White are two writers who demonstrated through absurd dialog and great plots that an everyman character could make you laugh out loud then and now.
I can only speculate that reviewers have extended credit for other much-loved Amis novels while reading and reviewing this one. Taken on its own, there is not much to recommend Lucky Jim.
For funnier academic sendups, I like Straight Man by Richard Russo, Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon and Small World by David Lodge.
Rating:
Summary: Being out of control
Review: Jim Dixon is a man painfully aware of his loathesome existence which he in turn sparks up with booze and constant inappropriate wisecracks. He is best when he gives way to his impulses- saying aloud the insults that his innermind is shouting to another, drinking far too much before giving a speech in front of a jam-packed lecture hall where his job rests on the outcome, and being unable to stop making phoney phonecalls to his boss' wife and 'braying' artist son. He finishes writing his speech and then hops around like an ape only to be observed on the bed by his enemy. He is constantly at war with one of his housemates and plays childish pranks to get his goat. Though the setting is post-WWII British University, the character has much in common with Larry David in Curb Your Enthusiasm. He's the part of us that never stops being a class clown. He is a 'bore monitor' like a canary in a cage who suggests he be hired to go in and assess the bore level of every party or gathering. He is constantly falsifying his abilities and interests and inevitably getting called to task in humiliating but hilarious scenes. While it takes a chapter or so to get into, the book quickly becomes contemporary- he takes rolling of the eyes to a new level. I loved it.
Rating:
Summary: Very well written, but...
Review: Jim is lucky, primarily because everything comes together so well for him by the end of the book. And that's part of the problem with this classic. There's an unnecessarily implausible happy ending that didn't need to occur. Jim Dixon is the quintessential anti-hero. Gliding through life at the campus, trying to succeed by not truly trying. Skating through life; chasing the beautiful woman, Christine, partially due to the fact that it will annoy Christine's boyfriend, Bertrand; drinking too much at inappropriate occasions; being disrespectful to the department head, Mr. Welch, for no apparent reason other than he is Dixon's superior. All of these ingredients make for a very funny book, but do not reasonably add up to the book's conclusion, which in my mind was the book's only flaw. Amis's writing is terrific, however, allowing the reader to get deeper into the mind of Dixon than most other books' primary characters.
Rating:
Summary: Perhaps the classic 20th Century British comic novel
Review: Kingsley Amis is one of my favorite writers, and Lucky Jim (1954) of course is probably his most famous novel. It's also his first novel, which makes him one of those writers who spent their entire career trying to live up to early success. Despite Lucky Jim's preeminent reputation, several later novels are at least as good: I'd mention as my personal favorites The Anti-Death League, The Green Man, Ending Up, The Alteration, and The Old Devils. I think this is my third reading of Lucky Jim. It remains a very enjoyable book. It's the story of Jim Dixon, a history lecturer at a provincial English university shortly after the second world war. Jim is involved in an unsatisfactory relationship with a drippy fellow lecturer called Margaret Peel, who uses emotional blackmail such as implicit suicide attempts (she took sleeping pills after breaking with her previous boyfriend) to keep him on the string. He hates his job, and he hates his boss (Professor Welch) if anything even more, while worrying that he won't be retained for the next school year. He hates phoniness in general, particularly that represented by Professor Welch, who is into recreations of old English music (recorders and all). The plot revolves mainly around Dixon's growing attraction to Christine Callaghan, a beautiful girl who is nominally Professor Welch's son Bertrand's girlfriend -- but Bertrand is also fooling around with a married woman, and he's a crummy artist to boot. Also, Dixon is working on a lecture about Merrie Olde Englande, which he hopes will impress Professor Welch enough that he can keep his job, but every sentence of which he hates. The resolution is predictable, if rather convenient for Dixon (involving a rich uncle of Christine's), but it satisfies. The book itself is really very funny: such set-pieces as Dixon's hangover-ridden lecture, and his disastrous drunken night at the Welch's, remain screams after multiple rereadings. I should say that some things bother me a bit. Some of Dixon's stunts (such as stealing a colleague's insurance policies and burning them) seem, well, felonious. And of course Margaret Peel really is someone he's better off breaking up with, but the way Christine is presented as naturally good because she is beautiful does seem rather sexist. Still, all this can be laid to accurate description of a certain character -- and if we root for Jim (as we more or less naturally do), it should be with some uneasiness. All this said, Lucky Jim is deservedly a classic of 20th Century fiction, and an enormously entertaining book.
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