Take A Girl Like You

Some might question the four star rating, as opposed to a five star rating, and I would be remiss to say that it is only based on my impression that there seems to be an uneven quality in the tone of this book. Jenny seems in the final third of the book to be more worldly than we were led to believe and Patrick, well, he does not change although I think Amis had some thoughts of making him a shade more sympathetic tpwards the end. No doubt this is due to the break of several years in the writing of the novel. This story is basically a tale of the clash of sexual mores (pre and post WW 2) in England, the old male versus female outlooks on sex told with all the insight and biting observations, that Amis displayed in Lucky Jim, minus the faces. If you hated or were embarrassed by Doris Day-Rock Hudson movies, this is the perfect tonic.

Another compelling Amis novel. Tensions between very real and different characters move the story along. In typical Amis fashion, there are a lot of memorable scenes and satiric barbs. I'm not the kind of reader who needs to actually like characters - or root for them, or for one of them - in order to like a book. But if you are that kind of reader, you may have problems with this novel. Presumably, a reader is supposed to despise Patrick Standish, and be charmed (if not seduced) by the heroine, Jenny Bunn. While it's impossible not to sympathize with Jenny at the end, I found her priggishly annoying through most of the book. My response to Patrick was the opposite: yes, a heel through most of the book, but not really the depraved lout that I think he's supposed to be until the very end. Also, I felt uneasy with his half-Irish ancestry. I am not sure about this, but I wonder if it's a bit of an uncharacteristic cop-out on Amis's part - i.e., the depraved lout is one of them. I've encountered Irish louts, but there are plenty of English in the same category (just take a weekend ferry to Bruge). In any case, I make this point as an aside. Few writers can create characters as fully formed and complex as Amis's. This is a fine novel. I don't know where to rank it amongst his others, because too many are out of print and unavailable to read, but this one has a more pessimistic bite than the others I have read.

“Take a Girl Like You” was the fourth novel by Kingsley Amis after “Lucky Jim”, “That Uncertain Feeling” and “I Like It Here”. Unlike his three previous novels, this one has a female character at its centre. Jenny Bunn is a pretty twenty-year-old who, following an unhappy love affair, moves from her home town in the North of England to work as a primary school teacher in a Home Counties dormitory town near London in order. Most of the plot revolves around Jenny’s relationship with her boyfriend Patrick Standish, a 30-something master at a local public school, and around their contrasting moral values. Jenny holds firmly to the traditional view that a girl should remain a virgin until marriage. Patrick takes a much more permissive view of love and sex. The novel was published in 1960, a few years before it became fashionable to talk about the “permissive society”. Nevertheless, there was already a feeling in certain quarters that society ought to become a good deal more permissive, at least where sex was concerned, than it already was, and that values like Jenny’s were becoming increasingly old-fashioned and outdated. Patrick is the main representative of this viewpoint in the novel, but he is far from being the only one. Jenny’s good looks mean that she has to fend off attempted seductions not only from Patrick but also from her landlord Dick Thompson, from Patrick’s flatmate and teaching colleague Graham, and from another friend of Patrick, an older man named Julian Ormerod. She even receives advances from her own flatmate Anna Le Page, who claims to be bisexual. (To add to Jenny’s discomfort, Anna also turns out to be one of Patrick’s ex-girlfriends). This is not a novel with a great deal of plot, beyond the central issue, of whether Patrick will be able to get Jenny into bed with him, and whether he will be able to do so without having to marry her. (He has no interest in getting married, to Jenny or anyone else, but he is very interested in having sex with her). Amis was more concerned to draw a picture of a particular place at a particular time, a small town in the South of England on the eve of the sexual revolution. His style has been described as “Neo-realist”; like the realist novelists of the 19th century he is a careful observer of matters such as people’s appearance, they way they dress and the furnishings of the houses they live in. (For example, he is at pains to describe the various eccentric door-knockers in the Thompsons’ large, rambling Victorian house). Amis also draws some effective pen-portraits of his characters, such as the louche, sleazy middle-aged lecher Dick, or the tweedy, nerdish Graham, who is painfully aware of his own physical unattractiveness and of the disadvantage this puts him at when it comes to attracting girls. Julian is clearly wealthy, and tries to live the lifestyle of a country gentleman, but the source of his wealth remains a mystery, and there is a hint that it may not be entirely above board. Anna is one of those people who are quite happy to dispense with the truth if she feels that a lie will make her seem more interesting; she invents all sorts of bizarre stories about her love life and even lies about her nationality, claiming to be French when she isn’t. Patrick is an obvious cad, and his caddishness is obvious even to Jenny herself, especially when she catches him kissing another girl at one of Julian’s parties, but he is handsome, intelligent and charming enough to persuade her to forget it most of the time. “Take a Girl Like You” is certainly better than its immediate predecessor, “I Like It Here”, described by Amis himself as “by common consent my worst novel”; the characterisation, for example, is much better. It is often regarded as a comic novel, and it certainly has some very amusing passages, such as the description of the cricket match between the boys and the masters at Patrick’s school. To my mind, however, the relative lack of action means that the pace flags at times, and the novel lacks the sustained comic brilliance of “Lucky Jim”.

I read this book a long time ago when it was a contemporary classic of humour. I wonder how my concept of humour or our society's perception of humour has changed. The story of the book is a man's relentless pursuit of a young maiden. It concludes when he achieves his goal when the girl is dead-drunk. Funny?

Captures the feeling of the early 60s very well. I will read some of Kinglsley Amis' earlier and later books.

The author's writing may be terrific...(if you are British). I am not British and therefore had a struggle with much of the terminology. I had seen this story on television several years ago and looked forward to the book. But it wasn't entertaining after all.

Sans intérêt.Les personnages sont d'un autre siècle et le livre tombe des mains.D'ailleurs on abandonne en cours de route.A oublier

I was first drawn to reading this novel after seeing the film, which is a very good reproduction of the story (although in the novel Jenny Bunn has black hair and in the film she is a blond). Amis's novel reads well with his usual verve and he offers some penetrating insights into the mind of a young woman who has to decide who will be her partner and possibly eventual husband. I believe, from reading his biography, that Amis gleaned a lot of this information by conversations with his female friends, when he would ask them penetrating questions about what how a woman would feel and react in a given situation. The book also offers a good take on how moral attitudes were changing in Britain at the time, particularly amongst young women who no longer needed to remain 'virgins' given the increasingly widespread availability of sexual contraceptives. This is Jenny's dilemma as she moves down from a more conservative and old-fashioned north to the south of England. So, all-in-all a good read and one definitely worth recommending.

The publication date of 2013 on the Kindle page gives a very wrong impression of this book. It was actually first published in 1960, and gives a (now) sickening account of the behaviour of men at that time, and how it was accepted and not questioned. I can say this confidently because I read the book in the early 60s then again a few years ago, and I was shocked by how my own attitudes had changed. Read the passage in which Jenny dodges round the kitchen table to avoid the advances of her slimy landlord; Amis wrote this as comedy, and it is quite funny, but it absolutely exemplifies how at that time it would be unthinkable for a girl to assertively question or criticise that kind of behaviour in a man. It was, as in Jenny's case, up to her to evade unwanted attention without causing offence. Then when Patrick manages to have sex with Jenny because she is drunk at a party, the implication is that the drink simply loosened unnecessary restraint on her part, and she got what she had really wanted all along. The shock I had about my own attitude was because I realised that as a young woman myself at the time I actually held those views. So don't read this book thinking that Amis wrote it as a clever comment on sexual mores; he didn't, he was writing a straightforward story with the attitudes of a man of his generation. I have given it five stars because I did enjoy it a lot on first reading all those years ago, and because I now think it is a document to explain something of the behaviour of older men such as Donald Trump and Harvey Weinstein, who may be extreme examples, or more noticeable, but who are nevertheless products of a generation in which men, if they wished, were expected to have the upper hand.

I refuse to accept that this book “is a product/reflection of the time”. What happened to Jenny was wrong in 1960 just as it is wrong now. She is raped at the end of the novel by her boyfriend who gets into bed with her when she has passed out from drink. He then is rewarded with the prize of her virginity and the girl in his arms at the end. Would Kingsley Amis be happy if this happened to his daughter?

Having read Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis, I wanted to read another one of his books. This is written in the same style and I found it a good read.