Books, Arts & Manners: From Russia with Love

The Russian Girl, by Kingsley Amis (Viking, 296 pp., $22.95)

‘IT was the perfect title,” thought Lucky Jim Dixon, forty years ago, while contemplating his own academic article on “The Economic Influence of the Developments in Shipbuilding Techniques, 1450 to 1485”: “it crystallized the article’s niggling mindlessness, its funereal parade of yawn-enforcing facts, the pseudo-light it threw upon non-problems.” Ah, those were the days! How preferable were uselessness and obfuscation to the multicultural gerrymandering of today’s bluestockinged professoriate. For Kingsley Amis to revisit society’s most degraded province just to write a new novel is nearly a heroic act.

TM

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Thomas Mallon

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The Russian Girl, by Kingsley Amis (Viking, 296 pp., $22.95)

‘IT was the perfect title,” thought Lucky Jim Dixon, forty years ago, while contemplating his own academic article on “The Economic Influence of the Developments in Shipbuilding Techniques, 1450 to 1485”: “it crystallized the article’s niggling mindlessness, its funereal parade of yawn-enforcing facts, the pseudo-light it threw upon non-problems.” Ah, those were the days! How preferable were uselessness and obfuscation to the multicultural gerrymandering of today’s bluestockinged professoriate. For Kingsley Amis to revisit society’s most degraded province just to write a new novel is nearly a heroic act.