Take a Girl Like You by Kingsley Amis

"She's a decent wee girl, Standish, and that's her attraction for me.  She's the steady kind, not flighty or featherbrained like so many of them today."

It feels like it's been a while since I've issued one of these dispatches; besides additional remunerative work and family goings-on, my free time has been taken up by the ramifications of my purchase at an antique mall of a forty-dollar box of dusty old HO railroad models and rusty brass track, including the fact that, when my father learned that I was trying to get fifty-year old trains running, he sent me multiple boxes of his own model railroad equipment and supplies from the 1970s and I have been striving to get that stuff in working order.  But another reason I haven't blogged in a while is that the book I have been reading, Kinglsey Amis's 1960 novel Take a Girl Like You, a Signet paperback printing of which I picked up at Wonder Book last year, has taken me a bit of time to get through.  But I have finally finished what Saturday Review proclaimed to be Amis's "biggest, most ambitious (and best) novel," a work which the susceptible people at the London Observer found "awe-inspiring," and can write this blog post and move on with my fiction reading life.

Take a Girl Like You is a well-written realistic novel about real life, its theme being, as the excitable crew at the London Observer tells us in the back cover text, sex.  The characters in the book all have believable personalities and behave in easily understandable ways--all the actions and relationships ring true, and little if any suspension of disbelief is required of the reader.  Amis's novel is full of understated, even subtle, humor that is based on people's thoughts and feelings, not wacky coincidences or hyperbolic parody.  Amis explores what life is like for a beautiful naïve young woman from the "industrial north of England" who moves to the south, a manipulative and lecherous young man who pursues sex with gusto and has deflowered many a virgin, and his friend and roommate, an unattractive man whose pursuit of women has been a history of frustration and failure.  Amis compares old-fashioned mores, typified by the working class of the north, with the modern licentiousness practiced by the educated middle-class professionals and aristocracy in London and its environs, suggesting that the new sexual freedoms are bound to conquer traditional restraint, though without suggesting this will make people any happier.  And he provides amusing anecdotes about academic life, all three of the principal characters being educators--the young lady from the north a teacher of primary school age children, the young men "school masters" who apparently instruct the equivalent of American high school students (one of the cohorts in receipt of instruction is described as "the Junior Sixth.") 

The plot follows northerner Jennifer Bunn as she takes up a job at a school an hour or so from London and moves in to one of those private houses whose owners take in multiple boarders which old fiction is full of and meets a bunch of people from different parts of Britain and even a woman who claims to be from France but (as we learn at the very end of the novel) is an Englishwoman putting on an act because "Playing a part's the only thing left these days, it shows you won't deal with society in the way it wants you to."  Jenny is a dark exotic-looking beauty, often mistaken for a Frenchwoman, and every man she meets--plus the faux-Frenchwoman--endeavours to get into her knickers, but Jenny has old-fashioned values and wants to retain her virginity, and resists all their advances.  Chief among the men pursuing Jenny is Patrick Standish, a good-looking half-Irish teacher of Latin who embraces all things modern, music and culture and ways of thinking--"I haven't got my ideas from anyone else, I've thought them out for myself."  One of Patrick's ideas is that marriage is a lot of bunk, and his primary interest in life is having sex with lots of different women, a field in which he has achieved considerable success.  In contrast we have Patrick's virginal comrade, Scotsman Graham McClintoch, a fellow Labour Party activist and schoolmaster.  Graham is himself consumed with sexual desire, but has old-fashioned values and looks down on Patrick's seductions; perhaps this is one reason he has never had any success with the ladies.

Patrick is not only a charming, smart, handsome and outgoing man, but a selfish and callous deceiver and manipulator, and throughout the book's course he manages the other characters like some kind of puppet master.  One of the elements of the novel that makes it feel so much like real life is its pervasive moral ambiguity; I was not at all clear how much we were expected to admire Patrick for his successful pursuit of all those women and achievement of vengeance on minor characters or to share his contempt for traditional morals, how much we were supposed to sympathize with Jenny in her defense of her virginity and Graham in his apparently doomed efforts to divest himself of his own virginity, and to pity or commend both Jenny and Graham as they try to do the right thing, only to find their generosity and efforts to help people fall flat and go unrewarded.  

Anyway, Jenny is the most beautiful woman Patrick has ever seen and by the novel's halfway point he has gotten her to fall deeply in love with him.  The two seriously date for months; Jenny is deeply happy and Jenny's working class parents are charmed when they meet Patrick; Jenny's mother expects them to soon be married and Jenny hopes this will be the case.  However, Patrick is accustomed to regularly enjoying sexual intercourse, and finds Jenny's limiting him to "heavy necking" to be very frustrating, and in any case marriage does not interest him.  

In a long sequence, Patrick and one of the novel's many secondary characters go to London where, among other capers, Patrick is introduced to a beautiful, self-absorbed and air-headed young actress whom he seduces by telling her he is some kind of businessman.  Soon after bedding this woman, Patrick issues Jenny an ultimatum--she must have sex with him or they will be through.  Jenny initially agrees, but when the day upon which she is to surrender her virginity to Patrick comes, she stands him up.  By a coincidence, that very day the headmaster's 17-year-old daughter, who has been pursuing Patrick for ages, comes to his place, where he is alone awaiting Jenny (he has tricked Graham into being out all day) and throws herself at him.  After they have sex, the 17-year-old admits the real reason she has just given herself to Patrick--she is pregnant by some other guy and needs help getting an abortion, and of course womanizer Patrick can introduce her to a discrete and reliable abortionist.      

Amis does a good job in the last third or quarter or so of the novel keeping readers in suspense as to what is going to happen.  Many eventualities seem possible, and at various times I expected Patrick to dump Jenny and break her heart, Jenny to dump Patrick and thus force him to see the error of his ways, Patrick to reform and propose to Jenny, and/or for Jenny to suddenly realize she should build a relationship with good-guy loser Graham.  None of that stuff happens, at least not in a way that sticks.  

At a wild party at a Lord's house, Patrick tells Jenny they are through, Jenny gets drunk and Graham saves her from being raped by some minor character, and then Patrick takes Jenny's virginity while she is so inebriated that she can't even remember it happening.  Jenny tells Patrick they are through, but a few days later is back in his arms, and we are lead to believe they are going to spend the rest of their lives together, more on Patrick's terms than Jenny's.  The novel's ending leaves an impression that the world and life are chaos, with little justice and no peace of mind--cunning and amoral Patrick has triumphed over decent Jenny and Graham, practically coercing Jenny into becoming a person she didn't want to be, and at the same time a sort of shadow lies over Patrick, Amis suggesting in a number of ways that a number of ways Patrick has wasted his potential (to be some kind of literary scholar, it seems) and may even soon be coming to a bad end (indications of advancing age and intimations of an impending medical crisis.)  Wikipedia may describe this book as a "comic novel," but it is kind of a downer.

Take a Girl Like You is a book that is easy to admire, but it is not exactly thrilling.  Maybe I have grown too accustomed to reading short stories and short novels that speculate on the future or the supernatural and involve people fighting in wars or getting involved in horrible crimes; this 270-page book (the print of which is pretty small) about young smart people's love lives and teaching careers wasn't quite up to the task of drawing me away from the task of cleaning and lubricating my trains while I watched giallo movies on YouTube.  

Still, we'll probably be hearing from Kingsley Amis again; looking back on Take a Girl Like You, I like it more than I did when I was actually reading it, and of course I already own other books by Amis.  It even appears that there is a sequel to Take a Girl Like You that continues the story of Patrick and Jenny's relationship.  But expect to see some posts about horror fiction and 1950s SF here at MPorcius Fiction Log before we make our next foray into 20th-century British literary fiction.