Amis, Kingsley (Vol. 129) - Philip Hensher (review date 16 October 1994)
Philip Hensher (review date 16 October 1994)
SOURCE: “Leader of the Hack Pack,” in Manchester Guardian Weekly, Vol. 151, No. 16, October 16, 1994, p. 28.
[In the following review of You Can't Do Both, Hensher, a novelist, criticizes Amis's writing, arguing that his novels are no longer funny and that this novel is badly written.]
If any one writer is to blame for the decline of the comic novel in England it is Kingsley Amis. Before the war, in the hands of writers like Gerhardie, Waugh and early Compton-Burnett, it was not inconceivable that the comic novel could be intellectually interesting, or be written with a bit of linguistic invention. What followed from Amis's novels were dismal comedies by Tom Sharpe or David Lodge about buying contraceptives.
Amis shut off large parts of his intelligence in favour of facetiousness, and the results have dated appallingly. Jake's Thing is a comedy about the folly of...
[The entire page is 958 words long]
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