Jake's Thing by Kingsley Amis

"A nice man would have tried to make a girl feel it had been worth while, however tired and pissed he was.  No that's not fair, a man who sees more in women than creatures to go to bed with, a man who doesn't only want one thing.  So you see I've rather come around to Brenda's way of thinking."   

This week I tackled another Kinglsey Amis novel, 1978's Jake's Thing.  Living in the suburbs and lacking access to a university, there was no hope of finding in any library within easy reach any books by Kinglsey Amis beyond Lucky Jim, so I read the scan of a Penguin paperback edition of Jake's Thing available at the internet archive.

Jaques Cecil Richardson is a fifty-nine-year-old college professor--an Oxford don, no less--living in London with his third wife, the quite fat Brenda.  When he was younger, Jake (as everybody calls him) was very sexually active--he claims to have "been in bed with well over one hundred women" and has cheated on Brenda quite often.  But the last year or so he has suffered what the doctors categorize as a decline in libido.  "I don't fancy anyone, not even girls I can see are very attractive," Jake explains to the shrink his GP sends him to.

Jake's Thing is in part about how the passage of time wreaks changes, changes which may well not be welcome.  Starting with the very first chapter there are many scenes of the Jake walking and riding around London and Oxford, and Amis presents all manner of details pointing out how England has changed, and continues to change, and how Jake resents and to some extent has resisted such changes.  Jake's house is an early example.  It is one of a long row of brick homes put up a century ago which are now in demand and more expensive than Jake could afford to pay today.  All of the houses on the street have had their front gardens or facades altered for cosmetic or practical reasons, but Jake has refused to change a thing about the front of his own domicile.

Much of the novel is taken up with the odd methods of diagnosis and treatment prescribed by Jake's shrink.  Our hero is to "study" pornographic magazines, to write his own pornography (like so many college professors, Jake turns out to be an atrocious, or maybe just extremely lazy, writer), to attach a device to his penis that measures his nocturnal erections, among other things.  There are group therapy sessions; the patients in attendance have all manner of psychological problems--one man is a kleptomaniac, one woman suffers crippling shyness, etc.

In one scene that I suspect was deliberately constructed to remind readers of Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange, Jake sits in an operating theatre with a machine connected to his member and is shown different images of women; over a dozen people, doctors and medical students, watch the experiment, the object of which is to determine Jake's sexual tastes.  Between pictures, to make sure Jake has returned to a state of zero arousal, Jake is instructed to read aloud long paragraphs from John Stuart Mill's On Liberty; Amis reproduces these paragraphs, which cover such topics as the value of free speech and individual autonomy, and the dangers of increased government power.  Presumably this is a hint that scientists and medical people in 1970s Britain think that the freedom of the individual is hogwash or that the very idea is alien to them.  In conversation Jake finds his shrink to be woefully ignorant of history and culture--to these men of science the things held dear by Jake, a specialist on classical Mediterranean civilization who translates Martial for fun, are beneath notice.

Jake spends about 10% of the year (he calculates) living up at Oxford, and we see him at his college, Comyns.  Comyns is one of the few colleges at Oxford that does not yet admit women students, and Jake is physically harassed by feminist protesters on his way to his office; when he opens his mail he finds what you might call anti-male hate mail.  In the next few scenes after the mail opening scene Jake has a conference with a lazy and incompetent female student and then hangs around with other Oxford profs--they decry the ignorance of their women students and all the zany feminist ideas they profess.

About halfway through the novel Brenda starts attending some of Jake's meetings with his psychologist, and Jake is shaken when she says that "she had had no pleasure or other benefit out of her marriage for a not very small number of years and only acquiesced in its continuance out of habit, laziness and dislike of upsets, and, in particular, that she considered her husband to be at best indifferent to all women except as sexual pabulum."  Then the head of Comyns College, who is planning on having a sort of hearing on whether Comyns should start admitting women, asks Jake to assemble and present at the hearing the case for admitting women.

Winston Smith at the end of 1984 and Alex at the end of A Clockwork Orange have changes of heart, and there is a scene in Lolita in which Humbert Humbert admits he stole Lo's childhood.  I began to wonder if Jake, prodded by his long-suffering wife and his task of examining the benefits of admitting women to the college, would in similar wise become a more affectionate husband and begin to see women as more than sex objects.

As the final third of the novel of 277 pages begins, it is the day of the hearing and Jake wakes up with a terrible hangover in the bed of a member of the university administrative staff, having gotten drunk and cheated on Brenda again.   His bedmate of the night before tells him that he wasn't at all sweet or considerate after their lovemaking--he really does treat women as mere sex objects!  Jake hurries off to his office to prepare his presentation of the case for admitting women to Comyns, which of course he has not even started work on.  The case he presents is simply that admission of women will soon be inevitable and there is no point in resisting, and when directly asked if he thinks women are equal to men, Jake unleashes an impassioned description of how women will ruin the college:

"...there will be women everywhere, chattering, gossiping, telling you what they did today and what their daughter did yesterday and what their friend did last week and what somebody they heard about did last month and horrified if a chap brings up a topic or an argument.  They don't mean what they say, they don't use language for discourse but for extending their personality, they take all disagreement as opposition, yes they do, even the brightest of them, and that's the end for the search for truth, which is what the whole thing's supposed to be about."     

Jake does not reform!  At least, he does not develop a greater appreciation for or sensitivity towards women.  He does change his attitude about psychology, going from deep skepticism accompanied  by a willingness to give it a shot at the start of the book to abject hostility and refusal to even consider it by the end--after one of the patients who regularly attends the group therapy sessions tries to commit suicide Jake gives the medical professionals a tongue lashing, telling them their methods not only fail to resolve people's problems but make them worse and that their whole industry is a scam.  Brenda, who has been taking the therapy seriously and who, in an effort to become more attractive to Jake, "had lost something like two and a half stone and could no longer be called fat" leaves Jake for one of the many minor characters who fill the novel and about whom I will not be talking.  (I looked it up and can report that 2.5 stone is 35 pounds.)

On the last page of Jake's Thing, months after abandoning psychotherapy and being abandoned by his no-longer-fat third wife, the protagonist's GP tells Jake that it is likely his lowered libido is not psychological at all, but the result of a hormonal imbalance that can be treated with drugs.  Would Jake like to try this simple remedy?  Jake considers how much trouble women are and says "No thanks."

Many of the compliments and criticisms I had for Lucky Jim, Amis's 1954 novel which I read just recently, are equally applicable to this 1978 novel.  Jake's Thing is good, but it is just an ordinary novel, unless you think the constant unsexy talk of sex or the rank hostility to psychotherapy and women is extraordinary, and perhaps it would be for some people, especially in 1978, before Dr. Ruth and Howard Stern and Dr. Drew hot the airwaves.  The jokes are not bad, but they are not uproariously funny, either.  The novel feels a little slow, and the group therapy session, which takes up two chapters, really drags.  The whole thing is understated and lacks excitement and passion--the best part of the novel is Jake's harangue, quoted from above, about how women can't discuss abstract intellectual ideas and take personally any disagreement and so fill up time by telling pointless quotidian stories; this speech gets a rise out of the reader by making a controversial case with some spirit.  The exciting parts of Jake's Thing, like the ferocious attacks on women and on psychotherapy, are like islands in the novel's broad sea of interesting but bland text.

Like Jim, Jake is selfish and not terribly sympathetic.  (The most sympathetic character in Jake's Thing is Brenda, who really tries to make her marriage work but whom Jake is not willing to meet halfway.)  Where Jake's Thing is superior to Lucky Jim is in how Amis doesn't try to pawn off on us an inexplicable and bogus happy ending--Jake and Brenda act in a way that makes sense and they get their just deserts.   

Also on the good side, I enjoyed the various references, some learned, like talk of T. S. Eliot and the Greek Anthology (I love my Penguin edition of selections from the Greek Anthology edited by Peter Jay) and Thunderball, the 1965 James Bond movie that features a surfeit of underwater action.

Another noteworthy facet of the novel is Amis's depiction of London as a multicultural, international city.  As the most prominent members of Monty Python and The Smiths have been eager to tell us, there are very few English people left in London, and Amis as far back as the Seventies stresses how London is full of foreigners, with "Americans, Germans, Spaniards," and "black, brown or yellow" people taking up all the taxis, a Muslim in traditional Middle Eastern attire in the doctor's office, a "witch doctor" on the street.  Jake's shrink is an Irishman, and, as his first own name suggests, Jake himself is descended from a Frenchman who came to England in 1848, the year of revolutions.  ("Jakes" of course, is also slang for lavatory, and we all know what the shortened form of Richardson must be.)

Like Lucky Jim, I can give this one a moderate recommendation.

In our next episode we'll check in with one of our favorites here at MPorcius Fiction Log, space opera pioneer, Weird Tales scribe, and husband of Leigh Brackett, Edmond Hamilton.