- Hardcover: 276 pages
- Publisher: Viking Pr; First Edition edition (May 1979)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0670404713
- ISBN-13: 978-0670404711
- Product Dimensions: 22.4 x 14.5 x 3 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 2,745,340 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Jake's Thing (Vintage Classics)
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Product Description
Sunday Telegraph
'In these explicit days, Mr Amis is the laureate of the unsayable, the literary it man'
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Book Description
Jake's Thing has been brought back into print for a new audience after being unavailable for some time
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Amis' later novels can be hit and miss, but 'Jake's Thing' is one of his best - a hilarious account of a man in late middle age struggling with impotence. All the sacred cows of the nineteen-seventies are mercilessly lampooned, in particular, women and psychoanalysis.
Jake's account of a TV producer commissioning a 'Tales of the Unexpected' style programme is probably one of the funniest things I've ever read. Like most Amis novels, the politically correct will find it repellent; those of us with a sardonic sense of humour will enjoy it.
Jake's account of a TV producer commissioning a 'Tales of the Unexpected' style programme is probably one of the funniest things I've ever read. Like most Amis novels, the politically correct will find it repellent; those of us with a sardonic sense of humour will enjoy it.
Format:Paperback
Very rarely do I give up on a novel - but in this case I had to make an exception. I found the prose style very stiff and at times hard to follow. The humour passed me by also. Overall I found the novel to be rather laborious and a tadge indulgent. Gave up about two-thirds of the way through.
4 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I must say I am mystified by the apparently general opinion that this novel is "hilarious" etc. My old Penguin is adorned by several review quotes to that effect, and the other reviewer here feels that way about it too. You are taken for a trip through a changing English society in the 70s by a consciousness (Jake's) that is itself subject to changing moods and/or judgements and certainly hampered by the rigidification (sometimes called "crustiness") of an aging English male who grew up between the 20s and the 30s. Hardly any of it makes me laugh, though certain shafts of witty observation make me smile, but the various semi-grotesque scenes which Amis makes his protagonist suffer through - very well integrated into a continually absorbing narrative about the world as experienced by Jake - suggest a bitterness and sadness about socially manipulated human frailty that is miles away from knockabout comedy/satire à la Tom Sharpe etc. The figures themselves are also subtly differentiated, being seen in the round with both good and bad elements - for example the "awful" American group "facilitator" is not simply awful, there are nuances involved in his portrayal. Nor is the portrayal of women simply misogynistic, as one might assume from a first acquaintance with Jake's attitudes and/or from what one knows of Amis Sr. One certainly ends up clarifying one's attitudes to certain phenomena, including group therapy, but I don't think the position one takes at the end is a foregone conclusion as it would be in some farcical satire; I find, for instance, the distorted (though not totally fantastic) presentation of women students reflects badly on Jake's (and possibly Amis's) humanity - it certainly does not reflect my own experience. I feel like a sadder and (I hope) a wiser man since re-reading this.
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