One reads Jake's Thing now in a mood of embarrassed depression: embarrassed by the details we're given of a failing middle-aged libido and the efforts undergone to fix it, and depressed by the general context of 1970s suburban England, which here seems desperately poky and insular – a succession of small houses inhabited by small minds.

This was nominated for the Booker Prize in 1978, and like that year's eventual winner (Iris Murdoch's The Sea, The Sea), it takes the misogyny of its central character as a guiding concern. Even from Iris Murdoch I found it wearying – here, where it's played for comic effect, it's twice as exhausting and ten times as objectionable.

The tone is set early, when Oxford don Jake Richardson goes reluctantly to a therapist to deal with his lack of sexual desire, which, we already sense, is linked to a vague distaste for women and their bodies in general. Sent off to examine a sheaf of porn mags, Jake stares gloomily at the focal point of the centrefolds – an organ which, he decides, looks

like the inside of a giraffe's ear or a tropical fruit not much prized even by the locals.

OK, this is at least funnyish out of context – but it gets harder to laugh the more Amis indulges his protagonist in the long misogynistic speeches which begin to predominate in the later parts of the novel. During a university debate about the possibility of admitting female students, Jake is allowed to rant:

‘All this will go and there will be women everywhere, chattering, gossiping, telling you what they did today and what their daughter did yesterday and what their friend did last week and what somebody they heard about did last month and horrified if a chap brings up a topic or an argument. They don't mean what they say, they don't use language for discourse but for extending their personality, they take all disagreement as opposition, yes they do, even the brightest of them, and that's the end of the search for truth which is what the whole thing's supposed to be about.’

The question is, are we supposed to be laughing at Jake's obliviousness, or nodding in agreement? Amis clearly knows that many readers will object to Jake, but I felt a creeping suspicion that his opinions were being shown to us in a sort of nudge-nudge, ‘this is what we're all thinking’ way. The expected reaction to the passage above is, I think, not ‘Oh my god his opinions are garbage’, but instead a thrilled ‘Oh my god someone said it out loud!’ And even if not, who gives a shit what people like that think? Who wants to spend 200 pages in their head? Although Jake is basically a harmless old duffer, the violence implicit in his attitudes is there, at least conceptually:

‘Once I even played with the fantasy that the point of women being in season all the time with only brief interruptions, and even those aren't treated as interruptions among primitive peoples I read somewhere, anyway if they were like dogs or rather bitches with intervals of several months during which they aroused no sexual feelings at all then most of 'em wouldn't make it, they'd get their bloody head kicked off before they could come on heat.’

Comedy sits uneasily with passages like that. Oh, did I give the impression that I'd finished? Nah, there's also plenty of space to rail against women's

concern with the surface of things, with objects and appearances, with their surroundings and how they looked and sounded in them, with seeming to be better and to be right while getting everything wrong, their automatic assumption of the role of the injured party in any clash of wills, their certainty that a view is the more credible and useful for the fact that they hold it, their use of misunderstanding and misrepresentation as weapons of debate, their selective sensitivity to tones of voice, their unawareness of the difference in themselves between sincerity and insincerity, their interest in importance (together with noticeable inability to discriminate in that sphere), their fondness for general conversation and directionless discussion, their pre-emption of the major share of feeling, their exaggerated estimate of their own plausibility, their never listening and lots of other things like that, all according to him.

The least that can be said of this is that it's tiring. And it's hard to escape the conclusion that Amis is using this character to tell us what he thinks, to say the things he wishes he could say ‘openly’.

I was about to write that the book has not aged well, but I suppose I have to reconsider that. Maybe if I'd read this any other week I would have had more of a sense of humour about it. Despite Jake's shortcomings, even as a fictional chauvinist he is far too polite ever to say that he just grabbed women he liked by the pussy, whereas someone who said exactly that can in 2016 be elected President of the United States – so perhaps in the nightmarish Black Mirror clusterfuck world that we are now living in, this tiresome throwback will find an appreciative audience after all. ( )

Jake, a middle-aged Oxford don, experiences a drastic decrease in his libido. (Yes, the “thing” in the title is referring to what you think it’s referring to.) Despite all evidence pointing toward the fact that Jake is a complete bore, he apparently has always been quite the womanizer, so this turn of events is alarming. He seeks medical and then psychiatric treatment to remedy the problem, but with little success. He also enlists the help of his wife Brenda and together they engage in elaborate homework assignments and group therapy headed by the sadistic and possibly unqualified Ed. Is it a physical problem or a psychological problem, and is it worth fixing in the first place? I won’t spoil it for you.

So, putting aside the fact that one of my least favorite things to read about is middle-aged, male angst, I really tried to give this a chance. And there are good things. For one, Amis is a talented comic writer and many bits are clever and some are laugh-out-loud funny. In that respect, it wasn’t complete torture to read this. There was even a point when I was hopeful and thought a more complex study of male/female relationships might be going on. Then I read the last two or three pages (which I will avoid writing about so as not to spoil anything), and that theory was refuted. Unfortunately, the underlying assumption that women are twittering idiots without valid thoughts and feelings is present throughout the novel. (And I haven’t even mentioned the anti-Semitism!) I’m not sure what the cut-off point is for having to tolerate sexism and bigotry in literature, but I’m going to put it well before 1978. It might seem like I’m overreacting a bit, but, really, this is that offensive. No more Kingsley Amis for me, thank you. ( )

I read this soon after it came out. Loved it - it was one of my favorite Amis novels. On the first page you come across a typically Amis touch: "disliking your GP was a good insurance against getting dependent on him."

Now, to re-read, after 30 or more years. ( )

הפעם אמיס מטפל בליבידו ואימפוטנציה ( )

Not one of Amis's best, although, as ever, there's some very acute social observation, brilliant dialogue, and acerbic wit. The plot line is a bit weak and most of the characters are somewhat two-dimensional: illustrative exemplars rather than fully-developed characters. Still, the observations of academia, marriage, psycho/sexual therapy, drinking, and the vicissitudes of everyday life make it an entertaining read.