Rating: 
Summary: A Belly Ache of A Book
Review: Before Dibert there was Jim Dixon. Whether you snicker, giggle or laugh through your nose, Amis' satiric romp through late 50's British academic life will leave you with a belly ache.
This book is as fresh and funny as the day it was written because we are all Jim at one time or another. Stuffed into a box that doesn't fit because we took the easy road and going along to get along until we can escape. He suffers the boss' kid, tedious work, pompous superiors and a flypaper relationship with a slightly crazed female collegue.
Sound familiar?
So will his small revenges and "lottery" like escape plan. Read it and live
Rating:
Summary: One of the funniest books ever written
Review: Was there ever a novelist as consistently funny as Kingsley Amis? And was there ever a novel as funny as Lucky Jim? Read this book and you'll know why critic William H. Pritchard named it one of the five funniest books written this century (along with Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall and Anthony Powell's From a View to a Death). No one was better than Amis at mercilessly skewering phonies and mocking the affected, and here his targets not only include academics and academic life, but the artistically pretentious, the enforced boredom of dinner parties, "Art with a capital 'A'," any male over the age of thirty with facial hair, the tendency of academic women to dress like peasants, "filthy Mozart," and--in case he missed anyone--Modernism in general. With targets like these, how could one not enjoy the book
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Summary: Lucky You....if you read this book
Review: "Lucky Jim" is Jim Dixon - who appears to be a most unlucky man. He recently landed a university teaching job, but he's miserable. Terrible at his job, Dixon is left wondering throughout the book whether his position will be continued. In addition to his job woes, he seems to have great contempt for most everyone around him, including his neurotic girlfriend, Margaret. Things worsen when he's invited for a weekend of music at a senior professor's home and he meets the professor's son - Bertrand. A buffoonish artist, Bertrand nevertheless has an alluring girlfriend, the lovely Christine. Dixon unsurprisingly is drawn to Christine, despite her stuffy manner and seeming arrogance. Embarrassing Bertrand and stealing away Christine become him main priority. In the meantime, he still needs to prepare a lecture on "Merrie England" that will be attended by his superiors and local town dignitaries. Will he survive?The novel is a model of dry British wit - at times laugh-out-loud hilarious. Dixon is a fantastic literary character - a cynic who personifies the scorn we all feel at times. As Amis writes about Dixon, "all his faces were designed to express rage or loathing." In addition to his cynicism, Dixon is incredibly irresponsible and engages in all sorts of mischievousness, resulting in hilarious predicaments. Nevertheless, you cannot help but root for him to succeed. The writing is spectacular - each scene bristles with detail and nuance. In particular, Amis beautifully portrays difficult interpersonal situations frankly and accurately, replete with requisite humor. Although the book drags at times, it's a first-rate read. Most highly recommended, particularly for readers who enjoy novels set in academia.
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Summary: Utterly Hilarious
Review: No wonder this book is deemed a "Classic." James Dixon is a 20th Century everyman. Poor beleaguered James Dixon. With his academic career hanging on a thread, not-so-lucky Jim has to kowtow to his witless superior and his witless superior's hugely annoying wife and equally obnoxious son during a weekend get together. From there, everything goes downhill fast for Dixon. But out of Dixon's dilemma comes wonderfully comic moments as he attempts to extracate himself from a bad situation. Amis creates wonderful, quirky but believeable central characters (and secondary) and Dixon's hilarious internal dialogue kept me laughing out loud -- I should think we can all relate to Dixon's thoughts (rude, catty, cynical, nasty, incisive, mocking, witty and insecure by turns) as we routinely censor what we will say aloud. There are so many terrific moments in this book that I immediately re-read it so as to savor them all over again.
Rating:
Summary: They don't write humor this solidly anymore...
Review: Goes straight for the jugular vein. Any graduate student attending a major university and wondering what's going to happen to him when he graduates should read this book. If you're not accustomed to proper English, it may be a bit of a struggle until you get the rhythm down, but the climax will bring tears into your eyes (and is bringing a smile to my face as I write this).
Rating: 
Summary: not especially funny
Review: A remarkably overrated book. The humor, such as it is, is dated, something that Trollope and Dickens, for ex, escape. Suggest you read David Lodge instead; he really is witty: Small World and Nice Work. Hynes A Lecturer's Tale is also brilliant.
Rating: 
Summary: A classic of English humour, now showing its age
Review: "Lucky Jim" was Kingsley Amis' first novel, effectively written in collaboration with his friend, the poet, Philip Larkin. The idea came during a visit to Larkin at Leicester University in 1948 - Amis sent drafts to Larkin, Larkin returned them, heavily edited.
First published in 1954, Amis introduces Jim Dixon, a junior lecturer at an English provincial university. Dixon is approaching the end of his first, probationary year and his senior, Professor Welch, is far from impressed. Jim stands little chance of being reappointed. He does his best to ingratiate himself with the professor, but he's socially inept, apparently accident prone, especially when indulging in his predilection for beer, lacks interest in his appointed subject - medieval history - and is consumed by sexual frustrations and fantasies.
Dixon comes from the north of England, from the lower middle classes, from a world which is alien to the Oxbridge elite who dominate academic life ... even in a provincial university. Amis constructs humorous situation after humorous situation. Dixon's ineptitude is excruciating. His luck is a major theme - he doesn't seem to have any. Meanwhile, all around him are those who have been lucky enough to be born into the upper classes and who are unselfconsciously reaping the benefits of it.
In its time, "Lucky Jim" broke new ground in satirising the academic world. The characters in the novel portray the pretensions, sterility, and advantages of the class system. Although greeted as a radical piece of writing and seen as transforming humour, even satire, "Lucky Jim" now appears dated. It has lost much of its edge and seems unrecognisable as a work which threatened the status quo.
Its humour can now appear slapstick and trivial, the stuff of poor sitcoms. The class and sexual mores are set in another world. The rationing and shortages are certainly from another era. And the writing style has also aged - it's a bit laboured in places, a bit coy in others.
Amis, himself, was born in South London into a lower middle class family. He attended public school, then Oxford University and was commissioned into the Royal Signals for wartime army service. He emerged to teach at Swansea University, then Cambridge. From the early 1960's he wrote full-time.
Throughout his life Amis enjoyed a reputation as an outspoken wit. "Lucky Jim" remains a seminal piece of writing, but many contemporary readers will find its themes and style dated, its humour rather gentle compared to contemporary savagery. It's a very gentlemanly, very innocent, very English, and very middle class novel, still with its comic moments, but no longer with the edge and bite which earned it ... and Amis ... a radical reputation.
Rating: 
Summary: Left me puzzled and unamused
Review: It is perplexing that so many reviewers laud this book for its hilarity, when the farce isn't outrageous and the sarcasm isn't sharp. The thrust of the book--character portraits that paint British instructors as befuddled and dysfunctional--is so dead-on as to be more reporterly and nostalgic than funny.
Essentially there are no more than four running gags: a character accidentally burns a hole in a rug, someone continuously avoids writng a lecture, and so on. If you can chew on those jokes for 60 pages each, then you can safely coast along to Lucky Jim's flat ending.
Some may argue historical context, but in fact classic humor dosen't devolve completely. For example, the situational humor of Robert Benchley and S.J. Perleman is a little dated, but still worth chuckles. And others have created more successful characters--Amis' predecessors Thurber and E.B.White are two writers who demonstrated through absurd dialog and great plots that an everyman character could make you laugh out loud then and now.
I can only speculate that reviewers have extended credit for other much-loved Amis novels while reading and reviewing this one. Taken on its own, there is not much to recommend Lucky Jim.
For funnier academic sendups, I like Straight Man by Richard Russo, Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon and Small World by David Lodge.
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Summary: Relief for Academics
Review: I read this book roughly three times a year-- whenever the world of academia becomes intolerable. I know the plot and several pages by heart, but it never gets old.
At first glance, it seems like an indiscriminate stab at any intellectual who, a la Welch, is wildly passionate about his or her subject-- Amis pissed off a lot of people that way. My father, a professor, refused to read "Lucky Jim" because he remembered all of the intolerable anti-intellectuals who hauled the book around in their back pockets when it was published in the fifties, and it's hard to blame him-- but ultimately, I think the joke is on the anti-intellectuals. Amis is an academic man himself. Once you drop below the surface of it, he isn't jabbing at intellectuals at all-- after all, Jim admits that history, "well taught," is a necessary discipline; it's just that he's not the one to teach it. Michie, for my money the one true intellect in the entire book, is only bad in that he makes Jim feel inadequate; he's revealed at the end to be a perfectly decent person. And the fact that Jim leaves academia in the end for a spot as a personal secretary doesn't necessarily reflect badly on academia; after all, he's simply going to be paid for doing what he already did for free at the college-- he's moving on to a new career as a "boredom detector."
You could be upset with this book if you respect learning-- but I wouldn't bother. I am hyper-sensitive to that kind of thing myself, and I think that finally this comes down on the side of REAL intelligence, whether you find it in a college or in the private sector.
Also, for those who think that Welch is an overdrawn caricature, I can report that I had a class from a man just like him. I used to sing the "Welch tune" in lecture, just to get through the day.
Rating:
Summary: Very well written, but...
Review: Jim is lucky, primarily because everything comes together so well for him by the end of the book. And that's part of the problem with this classic. There's an unnecessarily implausible happy ending that didn't need to occur. Jim Dixon is the quintessential anti-hero. Gliding through life at the campus, trying to succeed by not truly trying. Skating through life; chasing the beautiful woman, Christine, partially due to the fact that it will annoy Christine's boyfriend, Bertrand; drinking too much at inappropriate occasions; being disrespectful to the department head, Mr. Welch, for no apparent reason other than he is Dixon's superior. All of these ingredients make for a very funny book, but do not reasonably add up to the book's conclusion, which in my mind was the book's only flaw. Amis's writing is terrific, however, allowing the reader to get deeper into the mind of Dixon than most other books' primary characters.
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