The Language of Kingsley Amis

Abstract

For a wide and loyal following, Kingsley Amis stands now as the most entertaining and readable of present-day novelists — so much so, indeed, that there is likely to be widespread agreement (even if some academic critics may carp) with the claim made by Alan Watkins, that Amis is ‘the outstanding English novelist of those who began their writing careers after 1945’.¹ Such a view is, among those of us who hold it, not only a firm but also a long-standing one, typically espoused from the moment of one’s very first delighted encounter with an Amis novel. My own case is exactly like that described by the American literary critic William H. Pritchard, who identifies himself, at the conclusion of an approving review of Amis’s Collected Poems 1944–1979, as ‘one for whom since the day I first read Lucky Jim back then, Amis has been the most entertaining, the most exhilarating of contemporary writers’.² Pritchard is reporting an experience probably familiar to many of Amis’s readers, just as his closing descriptions point to the fundamental reason for Amis’s continuing appeal — the fact that Amis’s novels are consistently exhilarating and amusing.