Jake is an Oxford don, approaching 60, which he finds almost impossible to believe and, equally incredibly, out of libido. His "thing" isn't up to it and his other "thing" is to be prepared to find out why. What he is left with is the thing itself which makes him live. The course of [Jake's Thing] follows Jake's quest….

Jake ends up with a view of women such as might have been held by Thor and might nowadays be most commonly expressed by a drunken Celtic supporter whose wife has left him because of his addiction to football. Jake's view of life—particularly of life in London today—is scarcely less despairing. His only real pleasure is in finding his expectations of dirt, decay, inefficiency, boringness and stupid behaviour by brain damaged citizens fulfilled. If this novel offers us a picture of our own times then what we see rising to the top of society is—according to the perception of Jake—scum.

Then there's the race issue which has to be faced up to in this novel. People are muttering about it and I'm sure that Amis intended that they should. Amis does not deny the feelings of prejudice which his protagonist might have. And he too as an author has his rights and can curse whomsoever he chooses to. Amis insists on variety, he insists on the differences in society. He also refuses to patronize or to deny what he observes are genuine feelings….

The very tight style of the book owes an enormous amount to the care and devotion with which Amis takes everyday sayings—cliches, turns of phrase, figures of speech—and presses them into the service of a resonant English prose…. He makes determined, even pedagogic efforts to distil and employ the language used in society today.

This is one of the things which gives the novel its excitement. Another is the general feeling … that somehow we have Lucky Jim one generation on. The book is indeed 25 years after Lucky Jim and in some ways Jake resembles him…. But Jake is a much less definite character than Jim. He will be much harder to make representative and that cannot displease Amis who has an acute sense of what a novel should be.

Amis has a talent for flicking minor characters into life with a couple of sentences. Here they are scattered generously through the book but I could have wished for even more and for more of those already invented. The strongest character—in her way stronger even than Jake although she has much less of the attention of the author—is Brenda, Jake's wife. We tend to believe in her more than we believe in Jake and that leads to an enriching of the novel in an area where you would have expected Amis to have been entirely unambiguous. For Jake—as you would expect—quite soon finds the whole sexual therapy business to be a total sham and says as much. Brenda, however, won't have this….

Jake's scorn is what one feels most after putting the book down. It is a cover for his despair. As he moves towards old age and death—and remember Amis's Anti-Death League—there is a reflective and impotent wondering at the existence he has. At the thing he has that makes him live.

This novel—widely and rightly given the highest acclaim—shows us that Mr Amis will not go gentle into that good night. For which, many thanks. (p. 564)