Jim Fonseca's Reviews > Lucky Jim

[Revised 1/21/23]
This is a book packed with humor on every page. The blurbs tell us it is “Regarded by many as the finest, and funniest, comic novel of the twentieth century.” I’ll give examples but let me first tell you a bit about the story:

Jim Dixon is an adjunct faculty member at a British university. He’s under pressure to get something published and when he finds a title for his paper “It was a perfect title, in that it crystallized the article’s niggling mindlessness, its funereal parade of yawn-enforcing facts, the pseudo-light it threw upon non-problems.”



Jim isn’t a good-looking guy. He’s short and broad-shouldered and looks odd because he’s so skinny. His doddering supervising professor essentially has Alzheimer’s and all kinds of quirks. The professor has asked Dixon to take care of an unattractive female professor who lives in the professor’s house. That leads to a pseudo-romantic relationship and no end of problems and entanglements with the woman and his professor’s elderly wife. The professor’s son comes to visit for a time and Dixon makes the mistake of going after the son’s woman friend even though she’s out of his class.

The title of the book gives us the theme. Joseph Conrad wrote “It is the mark of an inexperienced man not to believe in luck.” Dixon, down on his luck, understands better than most that lucky people tend to attribute their success to hard work, their great abilities, and so on. Jim tells us more than once a simple truism that he has developed as a theory: “It was one more argument to support his theory that nice things are nicer than nasty ones.”

“All that could logically be said was that Christine was lucky to look so nice. It was luck you needed all along; with just a little more luck he’d had been able to switch his life on to a momentarily adjoining track, a track destined to swing aside at once away from his own.”

“To write things down as luck wasn’t the same as writing them off as nonexistent or in some way beneath consideration… there was no end to the way in which nice things are nicer than nasty ones. It had been luck too, that had freed him … And now he badly needed another dose of luck. If it came, he might yet prove to be of use to somebody.”

Dixon is bright enough to realize that he often brings on his own bad luck. Hius smoking in bed gives us a hilarious episode and his excessive drinking gives us several others.

Some examples of humor:

“Bertrand, Dixon had to admit, was quite presentable in evening clothes, and to say of him now that he looked like an artist of some sort would have been true without being too offensive.”

“There was a small golden emblem on his tie resembling some heraldic device or other, but proving on closer scrutiny to be congealed egg-yolk.”

“When she turned and faced him [to dance] at the edge of the floor, he found it hard to believe that she was really going to let him touch her, or that the men near them wouldn’t spontaneously intervene to prevent him.”

Of a couple dancing: “She permanently resembled a horse, he only when he laughed…]

“He reflected that the Arab proverb ‘take what you want and pay for it’ [Jim adds] ‘which is better than being forced to take what you don’t want and paying for that.’”

His landlady at the boarding house serves soggy cornflakes, pallid fried eggs, bright red bacon, explosive toast and diuretic coffee. Of one of the other boarders he tells us “As so often, especially in the mornings, his demeanor seemed to imply that he was unacquainted with the other two and had, at the moment, no intention of striking up any sort of relation with them.”

An academic novel that’s a hilarious read and a fun break from more serious stuff.



The author (1922-1995) Kingsley Amis was the father of the author Martin Amis. Kingsley wrote about 20 novels and Lucky Jim is by far his best-known work.

Photo of Oxford University from ox.ac.uk
The author from hyperallegic.com