From Publishers Weekly
Patrick Standish, "hardly going bald at all" at 37, reads girlie magazines and is having an affair with the woman next door. His over-accommodating wife Jenny, 28 and still childless seven years after her miscarriage, cozies up to gamy ex-Washington journalist Oswald Hart in an effort to bring her cad of a husband to his senses. The Standishes' sexual and emotional warfare forms the hub of Amis's wobbly satirical lunge through late 1960s London. Besides Patrick, other men having "difficulties with girls" include Timothy Valentine, who left his wife to try homosexuality; Simon Giles, pompous manager at the publishing firm where Patrick works; and Stevie and Eric, a gay couple prone to flamboyant arguments. With Swiftian glee, Amis deflates a menagerie of poets, publishers, academics and other snobs, phonies and egomaniacs. Yet on the whole, his satire is a flaccid, tedious affair that could have been set in the '80s as easily as in the '60s.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Everybody in Amis's new novel has difficulties with girls, even Jenny Standish, nee Bunn, whose husband Patrick can't leave them alone. Jenny and Patrick appeared in Amis's Take a Girl Like You ( LJ 1/1/61). Since then Patrick has moved on from teaching to editing, so Amis manages a number of running jokes about publishers. His main subject, however, remains the guerrilla war between the sexes. The year is 1967, a time ostensibly of liberation for heterosexuals and (especially in Britain) homosexuals alike--but only ostensibly. Amis is his country's funniest writer, yet some scenes here are so impenetrably British that only Anglophiles may get the joke. Buy accordingly.
- Grove Koger, Boise P.L., Id.Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.
