Girl, 20 (New York Review Books Classics) Paperback – September 17, 2013

I enjoyed this a great deal.Probably not on par with Lucky Jim, but it's been so long since I read that book. that I can't say as I'm sure.Ending is poignant and sad, lending the book a more serious note than one might have expected

Kingsley Amis, famous old alcoholic, womanizing fascist curmudgeon, and anti-Semite (you name it), has a very human and often unnoticed side that is shown to great effect in this excellent novel. The narrator, the music critic Douglas Yarnell, is asked by all his friends to help sort out their messes, and so he tries, but never with the slightest success. All the people he touches, or attempts to reason with, acknowledge his intelligence, the correctness of his argument, but decide to go their own way for reasons of the heart or lust or just because they have no choice. This is the world as Amis sees it, as it is, now, not as one would wish it be. Truth ring out. Amis's great talent, one very much in the manner of the great French realists, is his ability to depict the world with a cold and accurate eye. He sees all and misses nothing. But all of his characters are fully drawn, particularly the women. It is unusual for a man, and a heterosexual man at that, to understand the psychology of women as perceptively and wisely as he does. In this comic novel, no one is satirized or caricatured, easy as that might be, as they all behave ridiculously at some point or other. There is an enormous degree of compassion under the crust, a sort of unstated sadness. We are all what we are. We have been given a life to live, and it is our inalienable right to live it nobly or foolishly or to destroy it. Not a very uplifting message, I'll agree, but an unabashedly honest one, spoken in a voice that is uniquely his. First rate writing and highly recommended.

Girl, 20 is my 5th book by Kingsley Amis, but two of these are tied to James Bond and perhaps do not count. I get that he can write entire paragraphs worth reading. What I do not get is his reputation as a funny man. The common thread in the 3 of his ’real’ novels that I have read is the problem of a central character who is repellant and how to keep the reader interested.In this outing we have 54 year old Sir Roy Vandervane. A very successful orchestra conductor also vain, spoiled, self-centered; reckless with friends, family and pretty much everything. His Girl, 20 is almost 18 and he is indifferent towards the possibility that this relationship teeters on criminal. His 2nd marriage, and his household is a mess from his drama queen wife, to his over fed dog. Together his nearest and dearest hardly combine to much except a collective bunch of enablers serving his whims, moods and politics while carping about and doing nothing about his whims, moods and womanizing.Among his rationales for being always on the prowl for new and younger mistresses is a need for new inspiration. In this he may be right. Amis gives us enough for an interesting discussion of how much we should tolerate in bad behavior if the bad person happens to be an artist. Otherwise we have another Amis novel asking us to decide how much we want to know about someone we cannot legitimately like.The narrator is a long time friend, 20 years Roy’s Junior. Douglas Yandell, by name is another musician and music critic. He is not bad to the degree that his friend, and drinking buddy Sir Roy is, but this character is too bland and ultimately weak to have control of his own life never mind the constant calls on him to act as a friend.Along the way we have some amusing shots at the swinging 1960s, liberal politics and hard rock music.I keep thinking I have not yet read the ‘right’ Kingsley Amis novel. But I also think there are many other writers I like and even more I have not yet read.

Like many of Kingsley Amis's novels, "Girl, 20" is a work of political and social satire. At its centre is Sir Roy Vandervane, a distinguished Classical musician and conductor, a man who combines self-proclaimed "progressive" left-wing views with an unquenchable appetite for seducing women. The precise significance of the title "Girl, 20" is too complex to set out here, although in general terms it relates to Roy's preference for woman much younger than himself; his current mistress, Sylvia Meers, is not even 20, but only 17, less than a third of his age.Although Sir Roy is the novel's main character, however, he is not its narrator; the story is told, in the first person, from the viewpoint of his friend, the journalist and music critic Douglas Yandell. Most of the story is taken up with Douglas's attempts to perform various "favours" for members of the Vandervane family, including Sir Roy, his long-suffering wife Kitty, and Penny, Roy's daughter by an earlier marriage. These "favours" are all connected to Roy's complicated love-life, although Douglas's own love-life is not exactly simple; he is currently sharing his girlfriend, Vivienne, with another man, who never appears in the story.Douglas is considerably younger than Roy (33 as opposed to 54), but is much more conservative in his political, social and cultural opinions. To some extent, at least, Amis seems to be using him to reflect his own views; he shares his creator's distaste for modernist atonal music, for pop music and for seventies youth culture in general. Some of those views might seem odd from a twenty-first century viewpoint, such as Douglas's dismissal of Haydn's music as "perfunctory periwiggery" and of Mahler as "enormously talentless", but such opinions, especially as regards Mahler, were probably more widely held in the seventies than today. (It is interesting to speculate which composers, scorned or neglected today, will be regarded as cultural giants by the year 2050). In other respects, however, Douglas's prejudices reflect our own much more exactly, especially as regards the tastelessness of fashion during the "decade that taste forgot". (Amis had a keen eye for the shapeless clothes and ludicrous colour combinations which prevailed at the time).According to one reviewer, Christopher Hitchens felt that this book inflicted a satirical wound on the intellectual left. I am not sure that I would agree with Hitchens on that, if only because both left-wingers and right-wingers tend to be so entrenched in their views that they are unlikely to find their opinions shaken, or to feel that their credibility has been damaged, by a single work of fiction. In any case, although by 1971 Amis had moved a long way from the left-wing position of early novels like "Lucky Jim", in "Girl, 20" also satirises the right, represented by Harold Meers, Sylvia's father and Douglas's editor, who cannot bear any Communist countries even to be mentioned in his newspaper, and by Vivienne's comically reactionary old father. Amis reminds us that in the seventies the right could be just as unpleasant as the left; for every leftist proclaiming Brezhnev's Russia or Mao's China as a workers' paradise there was a rightist ready to defend Franco, apartheid or the Greek military junta.Amis's satire in "Girl, 20" seems to me to be directed less against socialism per se, or for that matter against conservatism per se, than against two tendencies, both personified by Vandervane, which he saw as prevalent intellectual currents during the late sixties and early seventies. He criticises Vandervane not so much because he is a socialist but because he is a pseud and hypocrite, the sort of wealthy champagne socialist who employs servants and who lives in a big country house in Hertfordshire, but who, if a genuinely socialist revolution were to break out, would doubtless flee the country in terror, and who salves his social conscience by making futile political gestures like refusing to perform Berlioz's "Harold in Italy". (His convoluted logic is that Berlioz was inspired by a poem by Byron, who is a national hero in Greece, which in the early seventies was a right-wing dictatorship).Amis's other criticism of Vandervane is that he is a man who, to adapt Chesterton's words, has "stretched the folly of his youth to be the shame of age". He represents every would-be trendy middle-aged man who still thinks that he is a teenager, who idolises the young and who embraces the shallowest aspects of youth culture with a quite embarrassing enthusiasm. His penchant for girls young enough to be his granddaughter is due as much to his membership of this Cult of Youth as it is to simple lust. Sylvia- physically unattractive, foul-mouthed, bad-tempered and incapable of coherent thought- is a singularly unappealing young woman, but Sir Roy desires her less for what she is in herself than for what she represents, Youth with a capital "Y". Even his political positions are dictated as much by the desire to be fashionable and trendy as by the desire to be morally right.I have admired Amis's writings ever since coming across "Lucky Jim" many years ago, but had not read "Girl, 20" until recently. More than four decades have passed since it was written, the Girl, 20 of 1971 is now Girl, 61, and it is doubtless true that satire, when directed against the transient fashions and trends of a particular era, loses some of its bite with the passage of time. I would not rate this book quite as highly as "Lucky Jim", largely because it contains no character like Jim Dixon himself who is both a figure of his own time and a timeless Everyman. Nevertheless, there is much in this novel which is worth reading. Amis at his best had an acid wit, and some of the set pieces are brilliantly funny, such as the accounts of the rock concert and of the performance of Sir Roy's latest composition, "Elevations 9", a chamber concerto for violin, sitar, bass guitar and bongos. (That particular line-up says a lot in itself about the state of culture in the seventies). The book certainly reminded me of why, during my own teenage years in the late seventies, I and a group of like-minded school-friends consciously embraced the values of Classical music and "high culture" in general, partly motivated by a protest against what we saw as the inanity and shallowness of contemporary Youth Culture.

The people in this reminded me of some of the people with whom I rubbed shoulders at Uni in the 1970s. Anything goes and so on. Amusing at times. Ultimately pretty pointless.

Far from Amis at his best imho. Supposed to be a satire but main character ridiculously stuffy and rather annoying. Unsatisfying and not anywhere ear as funny as his best. Silly ending too. Not really a classic imho, but still fairly enjoyable.

A real throw back to a sadly bygone age. Yes we did used to behave in a wacky way which would be frowned on today. One for sociologists to reflect on.

I believe that the best novels are often the one's not easily sorted into a specific genre. Yet Amis clearly was at a loss of what his tale is actually about.Amis clearly intended this to be some sort of satire, and perhaps it's merely because this novel is far to dated to appreciate it's brutal mocking of its characters, because I can't remember a single memory of really noticing any humour in it.At times, it tries to be provocative. There are scenes where Amis clearly feels like he's opening the door to a bleaker, dirtier side of relationships and sex. I'm not entirely sure why though, because the cover of the Penguin Edition itself is far more provocative than anything behind it.So then where are we suppose to draw pleasure from the tale? Its characters? There's not a single character who will stay in your mind after you've closed the book, I'm afraid? His self-indulgent lecturing on the world of classical music Amis clearly felt himself apart of? It's as engrossing as it sounds.Not to say that Amis is an untalented writer. Having only read his "Girl, 20" (and despite my bleak opinion of it), I suspect strongly that is not the case. But "Girl, 20" is such a incoherent mess that I find it hard to believe many people will take pleasure in devoting themselves to reading it.

As a send up of the permissive 1970s, this parody is the best. Witty, laconic, eloquent character assassinations, this is my favourite Kingsley Amis book after Lucky Jim. Devoured it in a couple of sittings and then read it again because it is that good. Highly recommended.