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On the Horizon:
Middlebrow England: The Novels of Kingsley Amis
- Abstract
The English novelist Kingsley Amis is being both hailed and damned in England as the spokesman for the postwar generation, a position he seems to share with two other young novelists, John Wain and Iris Murdoch. He has published two lively comic novels, Lucky Jim and That Uncertain Feeling, the latter of which has recently been brought out in this country by Harcourt, Brace. His general subject is the insurgent lower middle class in the new conditions that have been made for it by England’s quasi-socialist “middle way.” So far, however, he sticks mostly to what he knows at first hand, and his two novels deal with the adventures of the sons and daughters of coal miners, union officials, small merchants, and government functionaries as they make their way into the intellectual life of England by taking jobs in the provinces as librarians, professors, or publicists. As may be imagined, Mr. Amis finds supporters among those who share his own uncertain status and enemies among members of the old settled middle class, such as Somerset Maugham, who has denounced Amis and his “school” as vulgar, referring to the characters of their novels as “scum.”
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