Book summary

This comic tale of modern psychiatry and modern discontents concerns Jake Richardson, an Oxford don who visits a London therapist in an attempt to cure his impotence and endures an increasingly degrading program of treatment that makes use of pornographic magazines, electrical devices, and groups sessions. Toward the end, Jake sees that he is not so much impotent as uninterested.

Media reviews

"[This] is a very funny book, less for its action or its talk than in its prose....[It] has its comic Oxford side, the panic-stricken dons conducting ingeniously dishonest arguments about letting women into Colleges. There is a thundering account of a lamentable hangover...The novel is really a comic diatribe and is less about sex than about paranoia. Even more, its subject is not people but the terrible language that coats their minds, some fungold infection caught from television, advertising, etc. People have become parodies of consumerism. And there are too many foreigners about. Everything rankles...There is a retired Colonel in all of us as we reach middle age; still Amis is our most adroit grumbling impersonator, a nonstop miniaturist, master of making faces at everthing, even at the unlucky Jake."