Lucky Jim - Hardcover

From the front flap of this 256-page book: "Jim Dixon is one of those hapless individuals who bumble through life tripping over their own good intentions. As he caromed from fiasco to triumph to cataclysm, he was sustained only by his rare talent for creating a Face to suit every occasion.....grimaces like his Mad-Peasant face or the Shot-in-the-Back face, smirks like the Evelyn Waugh or Sex-Life-in-Ancient-Rome. Jim held tenuously to a probationary instructorship at a small English university and his hopes for reappointment lay solely in his ability to butter up Prefessor Welch, the odious and vapid head of his department. Lurking like a neurotic thundercloud on Jim's already hazy horizon was Margaret Peel, a young woman of scant charm and suicidal tendencies, who was being harbored at the home of Professor Welch while convalescing from a surfeit of sleeping tablets taken in pique. As part of his hysterical campaign of apple polishing Jim accepted an invitation to one of Professor Welch's artistic weekends, After a French-play-reading, record playing, madrigal-singing evening with a group of local intellectuals that included the professor's painter son, Bertrand, poor Jim sought sanctuary at a nearby pub. Closing time found him launched on a monumental binge, the results of which were an inconclusive but spirited attack on Margaret's virtue, an incendiary episode with his bedclothes, and the formation of a new alliance with Christine Cunningham, Bertrand's current inamorata. From this point on the plot begins to congeal, with Jim caught like a shrimp in the aspic. Kingsley Amis, who wrote 'Lucky Jim', has a rare wit that teeters between the hilariously nonsensical and the deeply serious. This delightful - if often quite mad - novel is his first."