*Take a Girl Like You*, by Kingsley Amis

This excellent and neglected novel deserves a new look in our time.  As Christian Lorentzen points out in his useful introduction, if you are interested in (non-Submission) Houellebecq, this is the next place to go.  How exactly did we get on the Houellebecq sexual emptiness path to begin with?  This novel was published in 1960, and it shows the first steps toward the sexual revolution and the rise of more open sexual competition, with a nod in the direction of what the final results are going to be.

In the novel the old sexual world is still there, and largely in control.  There is a distinction between “good girls” and “bad girls,” for instance, or if you are traveling with an opposite sex companion there needs to be talk of “separate bedrooms.”  But the characters discuss birth control, and one asks the other why don’t they just…do it?  The novel shows how the older world started to break down and morph into what was to come later.

I will not spoil the ending for you.

Interesting and insigthful passages abound.  For instance:

“He’s got a sensual face.  But he doesn’t know much about women, I think.  He talks all the time, and this isn’t necessary, as we women soon learn.”

Or:

He kissed her very thoroughly, without trying to do anything else, and indeed without any of the toiling and moiling, let alone the moaning and groaning, gone in for by the too-serious ones, and/or the ones who put up a show of being serious.

pp.169-171 have the best analysis of “lookism” I have seen.

Amis understands the slippery slope phenomenon very well.  He even suggests that greater promiscuity is bound to lead to regularly bisexual women.

Recommended, an easy and fun read, and if it helps you norm my evaluation I did not love Lucky Jim by him.