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Lucky Kingsley

The CBC website has a feature on Lynn Coady’s new novel, Mean Boy, a satire of academic mores set at a fictional New Brunswick university in the 1970s. Journalist Andre Mayer places Coady’s novel in the tradition of the academic satire, a fertile subgenre of English-language fiction that includes Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin, Mary McCarthy’s The Groves of Academe, and perhaps the most famous of the bunch, Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim. Mayer asked Coady about Lucky Jim, prompting this condescending assessment of the never-gone-out-of-print novel and it’s author’s careeer: “Say what you want about Kingsley Amis as a person and a novelist, I like that he had the confidence to write a book that was just poking fun at academia.” In Other Media is sure that Amis, author of more than 20 novels, three poetry collections, several essay collections, and winner of dozens of literary awards and citations, including the Booker Prize in 1986, will sleep a little sounder in his grave after receiving such a ringing endorsement from a third-time Canadian novelist.

Related links:
Read Andre Mayer’s article on the CBC website

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