The Life of Kingsley Amis

by Zachary Leader

Book Overview

Kingsley Amis was not only the finest comic novelist of his generation, but also a dominant figure in post-World War II British writing as a novelist, poet, critic, and polemicist. Zachary Leader's definitive, authorized biography conjures in vivid detail the life of one of the most controversial figures of twentieth-century literature, renowned for his blistering intelligence, savage wit, and belligerent fierceness of opinion.

In The Life...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0810127598
• ISBN13: 9780810127593
• Release Date: May 2011
• Publisher: Northwestern University Press
• Length: 1012 Pages
• Weight: 3.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 2.1" x 6.2" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Seven Pounds

Zachary Leader's book intrigued me even though I'm not much of a fan of the novelist Kingsley Amis, but I had followed something of the fallout that attended the previous biographer Eric Jacobs when he got "fired" by the Amis family and given the sack and prevented pretty much from editing Amis' letters (often quite witty) and writing this biography. I would think it would take a certain kind of person to step in on top of such a disaster and actually take the reins and do the book. What I didn't expect is that it would be so thorough. That's putting it charitably, the book is far too long. Then again if one was really convinced that Amis was a great writer and that the second half of the 20th century should have been named the "Amis Era," then you too would probably right something as long as this. The "Amis Era" formulation is not Leader's own, by the way, but a funeral notice he quotes with approval. Anyhow it's all individual taste isn't it. In my eyes, each chapter just proved beyond a reasonable doubt that Amis and Larkin might have been the two biggest pigs ever to pick up a pen. But Leader, while admitting some of their faults, just thinks they're the cat's meow because, I suppose, for him they were England's leading novelist and poet respectively. I don't think so, and he was never able to persuade me otherwise. The detailed notes of the plots of each of Amis' three dozen novels were an embarrassment in fact... Maybe there weren't three dozen, it just felt that way. His womanizing and drinking are amusing, it's his bigotry and contempt for the world that nauseates. AND the over-ratedness. How did he get so lucky? Leader makes a case that Amis appeared at the right time, and just in the right manner; the social and political conditions were crying out for a man with all of Amis' qualifications, and something about the very slightness of LUCKY JIM appealed to a taste grown tired of modernism, tired of asking questions, to a generation that wanted to have a laugh and to feel that they were cool doing so. I've been reading the book for well over a year, as some men read Proust I read Zachary Leader's life of Amis and now, as I come to leaf through the book again trying to sum up my general impressions, I find that my memory must be fuzzy. There are whole chapters with mysterious titles that yield nothing back to me, even though I spent a month reading each. What was (chapter 9) "Swansea"? Leader's predilection for dating everything according to what mansion Kingsley and Hilly (or then Kingsley and Jane) were living in at the time never clicked for me Chapter 17: "Patrick and Dai." Refresh my memory, Zachary Leader! Were they, perhaps, Amis' dogs? Make them wag their tails, make them bark at me! Don't leave me like this.... I can date my entrance into this book (I had the ARC), it was February 2007. That means... click click click... it's been more than a year, more like a year and a half. I could have walked to S

Big But Good

This a hefty read -- there are relatively few biographies of literary figures that are as long. But, the length is worth it. Leader writes gracefully and interestingly about a man who often is hard to like but difficult not to admire. Most of us know Amis either as the author of "Lucky Jim" (book and movie) or as the father of the Booker Prize winner Martin Amis. Kingsley's career, however, is more important than those two claims to fame. He was one of the initiators of the Angry Young Men who had a major impact on English writing from the 1950s on. And, he brought back to English, and American poetry, an emphasis on accessibility to the average reader, although his effort is not always visible today. Further, he was the model of the hard-drinking, womanizing author that populates so much of popular fiction and film. In that story, we find a lot of what makes his life so sad as well as so interesting. And, this is an interesting book that takes you inside the creative process of writing and the destructive process of hard living.

Exhaustive/exhausting biography of a great writer

I love Amis' work and expect that he'll be read as long as literature has legs, but this bio requires a lot of stamina. It's all there: drinking, carousing, family life, contrarian politics, the wicked sense of humor. Leader did an enormous amount of research and doesn't pull punches about some serious character flaws. One thing that bugged me throughout was the implicit assumption that the books and poetry were autobiographical - besides being factually wrong, this drags things out unnecessarily. If I was going to pick out a novel of Amis for the uninitiated, I'd have to make it 3 of them to show his versatility: "Lucky Jim", "The Alteration", and "Ending Up". But you wouldn't go wrong with "Take A Girl Like You", "Girl, 20", "The Anti-Death League", his collected short stories or any of his criticism.