Books, Arts & Manners: De Senectute

The Old Devils, by Kingsley Amis (Summit, 294 pp., $16.95)

Kingsley Amis, the Evelyn Waugh of our time, has even come to look and act like Waugh. On the telly, showing full jowl and beefy complexion, and sporting loud check suits, Amis condemns, with reactionary relish, all the vulgar manifestations of contemporary existence: “the orchestrated onslaught on our whole culture and way of life.” In its remorseless scrutiny of the frailties of the flesh and its loathing of physical decrepitude, The Old Devils resembles Waugh’s Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. One skeletal character has a skull so narrow that it is “inadequate for an adequate amount of brain without compression of some sort.”

About the Author

Jeffrey Meyers

Mr. Meyers is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the author of John Huston: Courage and Art.

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The Old Devils, by Kingsley Amis (Summit, 294 pp., $16.95)

Kingsley Amis, the Evelyn Waugh of our time, has even come to look and act like Waugh. On the telly, showing full jowl and beefy complexion, and sporting loud check suits, Amis condemns, with reactionary relish, all the vulgar manifestations of contemporary existence: “the orchestrated onslaught on our whole culture and way of life.” In its remorseless scrutiny of the frailties of the flesh and its loathing of physical decrepitude, The Old Devils resembles Waugh’s Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. One skeletal character has a skull so narrow that it is “inadequate for an adequate amount of brain without compression of some sort.”