Girl, 20 [Paperback]

Kingsley Amis, along with being the funniest English writer of his generation was a great chronicler of the fads and absurdities of his age, andGirl, 20is a delightfully incisive dissection of the flower-power phase of the 1960s. Amis’s antihero, Sir Roy Vandervane, a conductor and composer who bears more than a passing resemblance to Leonard Bernstein, is a pillar of the establishment whohas fallen hard for protest, bellbottoms, and the electric guitar. And since vain Sir Vandervane is a great success, he is also free to pursue his greatest failing: a taste for younger and younger women. Highborn hippie Sylvia (not, in fact, twenty) is his latest infatuation and a threat to his whole family, from his drama-queen wife, Kitty, to Penny, his long-suffering daughter.

All this is recounted by Douglas Yandell, a music critic with his own love problems, who finds that he too has a part in this story of botched artistry, bumbling celebrity, and scheming family, in a time that for all its high-minded talk is as low and dishonest as any other. “As always, Amis’s aim at the modern world, not to mention eternal human foibles, is dead on.” —Los Angeles Times

“After the early splash withLucky Jim, Kingsley’s books got better and better, until a peak in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when he publishedThe Green Man;Girl, 20(my favorite); andEnding Up.” —Geoffrey Wheatcroft, The Atlantic Monthly

“InGirl, 20the character of whom Amis most disapproves politically is also made irresistibly charming, while—this is a really brilliant knight’s move—the activity on which Amis himself had expended the most time (adultery) is shown by the actions of this very charmer as destructive to all parties.”—Christopher Hitchens

“For satiric ends the cast of characters has been adroitly shaped tolƒ½