Jake's Thing

by Kingsley Amis

ISBN: 0670404713
ISBN-13: 9780670404711
Format: Hardcover

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.

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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."    -- V. S. Pritchett

   -- New York Review of Books

"By far the most impressive Amis novel since 'Lucky Jim'."    -- William Trevor

"First-rate Amis, enormously funny and sobering (maybe even depressing) as well."

   -- Library Journal

Bibliographic Details

Publisher: Penguin Group USA
Published date: 1979
Pages: 276

Publisher's Notes

A lecherous Oxford don, rapidly approaching sixty and horrified at the dwindling resources of his normally hyperactive libido, seeks professional advice and tours the modern Inferno of self-awareness and sexuality.

Other Editions

Hardcover - Penguin USA (1979) - from $1.00
Paperback - Penguin USA (1980) - from $1.00

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