1.
The first time I read
Kingsley Amis's classic campus novel,
Lucky Jim, I did it to impress a girl.
I was in my early 20s, living in Seattle during my first year after finishing college, and had just started seeing a graduate student in English. Compared to me, she and her friends all seemed intellectual and sophisticated. I listened to
Supertramp, they listened to
Paul Hindemith, and the first time I saw a recording of
Vaughan Williams's "Five Mystical Songs" at the woman's apartment, I pronounced the composer's name "Ralph" and she had to correct me: "You say it '
Rafe.'"'
I'd been a voracious reader ever since I'd discovered the Hardy Boys when I was eight or nine but, compared to the woman I was seeing and those in her circle, I was woefully ignorant of literature. I had a degree in communication and, outside of what I'd had to read for school and a short time when I was a boy and my physician father, who'd minored in philosophy as an undergraduate at a Jesuit college, offered me dollar bills to convince me to memorize selections from
The Great Books of the Western World, I had read little that was published earlier than the first decade of the twentieth century, and not much that wasn't by an American writer. In truth, at that point, I had little literary interest beyond science fiction and the Beats. On the other hand, the woman and her friends took courses in Old English and seemed not only to have read
Spenser's entire
Faerie Queene but could quote from it.
One day, perhaps to find some intersection between us aside from our being two young people in a strange city two thousand miles from home (I was from Ohio; she, Missouri), she suggested I might enjoy Amis's book. "It's funny," she offered. So I borrowed her paperback copy and read it.
She was right: it was funny but, beyond that, I found I identified in many ways with the novel's almost hopelessly inept main character, Jim Dixon. True, he was more a contemporary of my parents' generation than of mine. Amis wrote the novel in the early 1950s (it appeared in the UK in 1954) and, like my parents, Dixon would have come of age during World War II. Putting aside the accident of dates, geography and occupation (Dixon taught college, I was a bank teller), however, I saw much of myself in him.
2.
In the novel, Dixon is in his first year as a junior lecturer in history at an unnamed provincial college somewhere in the English countryside. His principle quality is that he is unsettled without any notion of what he wants to do with his life and seemingly no ability to affect its direction or express directly how he feels. As the novel opens, his primary concern is convincing the head of his department, Ned Welch, not to fire him – but he's trying to hold onto a job he doesn't particularly like. At one point, Dixon comments to another character, apropos of his discipline, "Haven’t you noticed how we specialize in what we hate most?"
Even in his personal life for most of the novel, Dixon is incapable of taking charge. Without intending to, he's caught in a relationship with a woman, Margaret Peel, who's adept at emotional blackmail; it's a relationship Amis tells us Dixon was "drawn into" rather than one he pursued and it's disastrous. Margaret precipitates fights because she craves drama for the sake of drama; she accuses him of slights he doesn't commit; she either attempts a suicide or claims to (Amis is intentionally ambiguous on this point until nearly the end of the novel) but, in either case, Dixon's perception of Margaret as fragile binds him to her all the more.
Beyond this, I found Dixon an engaging protagonist because he is clearly a fish out of water. His colleagues, especially Welch, celebrate the past and high culture while Dixon has no use for either, despite his job as a history lecturer. One of the pivotal sections of the novel centers on an "arty weekend" that Dixon attends at Welch's home (to score points to help him hold onto the job he abhors), where the guests sing madrigals, perform a play by
Anouilh in French, and listen to "an amateur violinist" perform Brahms. Dixon prefers jazz to part songs and downing pints at an English pub to the refined repasts at the arty weekend, where Welch "poured Dixon the smallest drink he'd ever been seriously offered." Dixon, who cannot read music, fakes his way through a tenor part in one of the madrigals. Later, as he stumbles back from the pub he sneaks off to late at night during that weekend, he sings, enthusiastically, an American country ballad, fittingly, given his life, about a train wreck.
Despite Dixon's bumbling, his behavior that, even against his own better judgment, seems to be sending his life along a track toward sure ruin — he
will lose his job; he will
never be able to extricate himself from a relationship with Margaret — because it's largely a comic novel, it's not ruining a great surprise to say that Amis allows Dixon a triumph at the end: he does lose his job (thanks in large part to an embarrassing public lecture an inebriated Dixon delivers to the entire college community) but at the book's close it's clear he's set for a better life than it appeared he might have when we first encounter him on page one.
Thirty-plus years after reading
Lucky Jim for the first time, I don't remember exactly what I thought of the book, why it struck the chord it did with me, why it would turn out to be one of the most important books in my life.
I could say, perhaps, that the fact that Jim, for all of his bumbling, comes to a good end gave me hope for my own life, but that seems too pat, too much like something someone might write to wrap up, neatly, his relationship to a book he loved in his younger years.
What I do remember distinctly, however, is this:
I was on the bus I took home each day from the bank when I read the last sentence. Dixon is with a woman altogether different from Margaret in every way, the woman that Amis makes plain Dixon's future lies with. They encounter the Welches on the street as the family is getting into their car and Dixon tries to say something to express his outrage against Ned Welch but cannot find the words. The woman tugs on his arm, and the book ends:
The whinnying and clanging of Welch's self-starter began behind them, growing fainter and fainter as they walked on until it was altogether overlaid by the other noises of the town and by their own voices.
I remember being on the bus, reading that sentence, then reading it again and my eyes filling with tears at how perfect a last sentence it was.
Not long after that, I married the woman who loaned me the book, but we divorced more than a dozen years ago.
As for
Lucky Jim, it's still part of my life. I read it a second time not long after the first. Then I read it again. And again. Eventually, I did find a career — writing and teaching college — and, for most of the past two decades, I have re-read
Lucky Jim annually to mark the start of the new academic year.
3.
On a certain level, it's perhaps an odd thing to read a book perhaps two dozen times and to plan to read it yet again. After all, the primary force that pulls us through a work of fiction is the desire to find out what happens next and after we've read to the last page the first time, we know the sequence of events that make up the narrative.
As a writer, I've often re-read work that I've admired so that I can figure how the author accomplishes whatever he or she does: How does
Gustave Flaubert build the structure of
Madame Bovary so that Emma's suicide seems inevitable rather than melodramatic? How does
Vladimir Nabokov convince me to feel connected to Humbert Humbert despite his desire for twelve-year-old
Lolita? How does Stewart O'Nan make
Emily, Alone or
Last Night at the Lobster compelling novels despite the fact that little of seeming dramatic consequence occurs in them? How does
Margot Livesey make
The Flight of Gemma Hardy a fresh story despite its clear echoes of and debt to
Jane Eyre?
Certainly, at least some of my trips through
Lucky Jim have taught me something about how to build a novel: one of the reasons it succeeds is that Amis uses the comic moments more than merely for a laugh but as integral parts of what is really an extremely tight structure that allows us to accept that the unhappy and largely incompetent protagonist we begin with who is able, in only roughly 250 pages, to become the sort of man who deserves the happy ending he comes to, who deserves the good job and good woman he has by the final line that brought me to tears for its profound rightness that first time.
But two dozen times through? Is there profit in that?
Even beyond that question, I have come to see that it's perhaps also odd to celebrate the start of another school year by re-reading this particular book since it doesn't paint the brightest picture of life in academia. Not only does Dixon hate it, several times in the novel Amis has him say some rather bleak things about teaching and scholarship. At one point, for example, another character says to him,, "I've a notion you're not too happy in [the job]. . . . What's the trouble? In you or in it?"
Dixon responds, "Oh, both, I should say. They waste my time and I waste theirs."
At another point, thinking about a scholarly article he wrote to try to secure his position, he cringes at his own work's "niggling mindlessness" and "funereal parade of yawn-enforcing facts, the pseudo-light it threw upon non-problems."
Lucky Jim is not unusual in this regard, of course, since so many campus novels would not go far as recruiting materials for the profession.
Richard Russo's hilarious
Straight Man (in which Russo gives a nod to Amis, as his narrator's nickname is "Lucky Hank") is populated by a host of characters unhappy after decades in the professoriate, discovering they've settled for mediocrity and petty squabbles.
John Williams's brilliant and under-appreciated
Stoner is flat out one of the saddest novels I have ever read. It begins, in part,
William Stoner entered the University of Missouri as a freshman in the year 1910 at the age of nineteen. Eight years later . . . he earned his Doctor of Philosophy degree and accepted an instructorship at the same University, where he taught until his death in 1956. He did not rise above the rank of assistant professor, and few students remembered him with any sharpness. . . . Stoner's colleagues, who held him in no particular esteem when he was alive, speak of him rarely now . . .
Then, of course, there are even darker visions of life in academia, like
James Hynes's collection of novellas,
Publish and Perish, in which his lecturers and junior scholars face not only the tough road to tenure but threats from the occult, or the ubiquitous campus murder mysteries that suggest that those who work in higher education are not good risks on life insurance actuarial tables.
4.
And so, given
Lucky Jim's pessimistic take on the career I've pursued and the fact that, after so many times through it, I know the novel better than any other I've read, I ask myself:
Why do I keep reading it every autumn? Why did I read it this year?
The answer is complicated.
On one level,
Lucky Jim is a well-crafted novel that holds up even nearly sixty years after it first appeared; even after so many re-readings, its comedy still works, especially two long sections that center on misfortunes that Dixon has because of his drinking: The first occurs during the arty weekend, when he falls asleep smoking and causes a minor fire that damages the room he's staying in at the Welches', a small disaster he makes worse by one bad decision after another. The second, which serves as the novel's climax, occurs during Dixon's unfortunate public lecture in which he succumbs to a catalogue of missteps that makes his performance representative of the fears of so many who have to stand up and talk in front of groups of strangers.
Its merits continue to earn
Lucky Jim praise long after books that sold far better the year it came out but which are out of print and nearly out of our universal consciousness. (How many of us, for example, remember
Morton Thompson's Not as a Stranger, which was the top selling work of fiction that year?)
Lucky Jim, on the other hand, continues to show up on list after list of the best novels of the twentieth century or the funniest novels of all time. In 2005,
Time included it on its list of "100 Best English Language Novels" since 1923 (the year of the magazine's first issue). A decade ago, the late
Christopher Hitchens described it as the funniest novel of the previous half-century in an essay he wrote for
The Atlantic and, in 2008, when the
New York Times polled the editors at its
Book Review, asking them to name the funniest novel ever,
Lucky Jim got the most votes. (It's interesting that so many of the novels on their list were campus novels: aside from Amis's, others included
David Lodge's Small World, Russo's
Straight Man, and
Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys.)
The
New York Review of Books has even made
Lucky Jim its "Classic Book Club selection" for October, saying that it is "regarded by many as the finest, and funniest, comic novel of the twentieth century."
NYRB, which resurrected
Stoner for a new generation of readers when it returned the novel to print with a new paperback edition in 2003, is also issuing a new edition of
Lucky Jim in October.
5.
But there are many novels on those lists that I've read and appreciated, and read more than once and appreciated each time, but I don't have re-reading any of them on my annual calendar as I do
Lucky Jim.
Partly, of course, I re-read it because of the ritual; reading it is my own personal academic convocation that marks a call to another year in the classroom.
Partly, I re-read it because of what
Walker Percy calls "repetition" in another of the most important novels in my life,
The Moviegoer, another novel about someone trying to figure out how to make his way in the world. "A repetition," Percy writes, "is the re-enactment of past experience toward the end of isolating the time segment which has lapsed in order that it, the lapsed time, can be savored of itself and without the usual adulteration of events that clog time like peanuts in brittle."
As I read it, I am the young man on the bus, with no idea of the shape my life will have, hoping I can find something in the book to make the girl I am seeing like me a bit more.
As I read it, I am in my early thirties, walking into my first class as a teacher with little idea of what I am doing, in a fourth-floor room with a scarred wooden floor and beat-up desks in disorganized rows where nine women sit, assuming I will be able to organize some notions I have in a way that might help them become better writers. I'm in my mid-forties when my marriage to the girl who gave me
Lucky Jim is ending and, reading
Lucky Jim, I wonder if Jim were not fictional how would his life have turned out with the woman that Amis gave him at the end of the novel? This year, reading the novel, it strikes me that my youngest son is the age I was when I first read it, is roughly the age that Jim is in the book, and I think: we are connected by the experience of being young men in our twenties. And I think, where did the years go?
But even beyond its connection to Percy's concept of repetition, I re-read the book every year because of that last sentence that moved me on the city bus in Seattle decades ago. I still find the sentence beautiful: "The whinnying and clanging of Welch's self-starter began behind them, growing fainter and fainter as they walked on until it was altogether overlaid by the other noises of the town and their own voices."
The words that make the final sentence work for me, seal up the novel once and for all, are the last three: "their own voices." In the middle of the crowded, hectic town, Amis has isolated Dixon and the woman he's with, has made clear that Dixon's world is now separate from the miserable one he inhabited for nearly the entire novel.
It's a sentence that closes the book up with a hopefulness that has eluded Dixon for nearly all of the roughly 250 pages that come before it and, every year when I read the novel, I know that the sentence is there, sitting on the last page waiting for me to come to it; its existence colors all of the absurd failures that Dixon endures before it.
Turning the last page, as I come to the sentence, I hold my breath as I read it and then, as I did the first time, I read it again.
It still moves me to tears.
Quotation marks are punctuation, just like periods and commas. We can just do without all of them if you like. They don’t get in the way of my reading, but rather they enhance the reading experience. If you are bothered by them, then you aren’t a very good reader.
Fiction writers who don’t use quotes must do so carefully. The examples you give are actually confusing to read. I can’t tell whether the character is thinking or saying their words, especially when the content is emotional and the words are just as likely to be thought or spoken. If the writer is trying to focus on plot, rather than character development through dialog, then I can see an weak argument for the excision of quotes; but, under 99% of prose conditions, quotes need to be used to separate thoughts from words. All forms of punctuation enhance what a writer can communicate, and quotation marks are no exception. Good fiction writers do what they need to do without resorting to gimmicks. Gimmicks are the thick coat of makeup that show the plain girl’s desperation.
Jack M: I’m not sure how anyone’s preference for or against quotation marks could make him a bad reader. That doesn’t even make sense.
Over the years, I’ve come to basically the same feeling towards the dastardly quote. In direct opposition to Jack M’s comment, it is more of a mind workout for the reader as the author is not holding yr hand and guiding you through the prose. You develop a keener eye for what should be spoken and what shouldn’t be.
I’m currently reading “J R” by Gaddis, which is both lacking quotation marks and made up of primarily dialogue. And it works.
I like when some writers don’t use quotes and dislike it when others don’t. It depends on the style. It works really well I think with someone like Cormac McCarthy, where the dialogue kind of moves dreamily with the style. But other writers with a less ornate way of writing, it comes off as annoying and precious. I don’t think it’s a one-way only type of thing.
And, hey, let’s write a book without “a” while we’re at it.
Oh. I mean, write a book without a while we’re at it. No, wait…
Or, how about spaces between words? Theyaresoarbitraryandtheancientsdidnotneedthem!
To say that quotation marks are not necessary, and that they should be done away with completely, is certainly someone else’s opinon, However, if a reader thinks they are distracting and useless, then yes, I would call that type of person a “bad reader,” meaning one who can’t concentrate on what they are reading to the point where the quotation marks are unnoticed.
Thanks for your thoughts on this. I’m in a novel writing program at Stanford. I’ve been working without quote marks and getting mixed response in workshop for the past year.
I had seen it done in the past by Saramago and Doctorow, and I just felt it was right for this project. The narrator is first-person, with what I hope is a distinctive voice, and I want the reader to always be in touch on some level with that voice, even when he is relating the dialog of others. I feel quote marks undermine the effect I’m seeking on a subconscious level. I also think they can interfere with the rhythm of the sounds of the language in our mind’s ear.
I understand that some readers aren’t seeking a high level of artistry in their prose, and I think that’s fine too. Sometimes I can enjoy a straight forward page turner just like anyone else. But I think there is plenty of room for ambition and experimentation as well.
Hmm, I’m occasionally open to quoteless dialog–the Cormac McCarthy example is a pretty good one. I don’t see it with the Miranda July example, though. It would read better with quotes and furthermore, I think not using them looks more or less like what it is: a quick and cheap way of making a piece of conventional exposition and dialog look arty.
Any thoughts on using the em-dash to set off dialog, a la James Salter? I really like it with his stories, not sure why.
Very interesting — the examples you gave actually do work differently — But have to agree with M Morgan — imagine no one rule can fit all prose. Eradicating quotation marks could easily become just as reflexive as using them. Surely it depends on the writer.
But — don’t the dashes or em-dashes (Moe Murph, where are you to explain the diff??) used by Joyce function in lieu of quotes? How are they really different? Don’t they function as flashing neon signs that someone is talking, albeit minus the end mark?
Priskill,
Em dashes do work that way, but the lack of a second closed dash creates a kind of ambiguity that makes dialog blend in with action. It’s a limiting technique in the sense that it’s difficult to vary placement of dialog–to embed it within a paragraph, for example–but when used well it seems to strike a balance between quotes and no quotes.
Esoteric Bob Parsons:
Thank you, that really does make sense. It is both limiting and yet somewhat open-ended in its, well, open-endedness. Merging dialog into subsequent action with no clear delineation so the reader is standing on fishes much of the time. Nice clarification thank you!
I am late to this conversation but wanted to say that while I am perfectly fine without quotation marks, I cannot abide dialogue written in italics. What is up with that??
I should give an example: Elisa Albert’s novel Afterbirth which was just released. I was going to buy it until I saw the dialogue was written in italics. It looks really good otherwise!
“Some writers, no matter how well it’s done, will never jump on the quote-less train. They just hate it. When asked, other, less annoyed writers say they’ll continue to use quotes for the sake of clarity and convenience. Why risk confusing the reader unnecessarily? But is this their only reason for the continued usage of something plenty of writers have shown is not vital? Is convention the only thing keeping it going?”
I am not sure the case has been definitively made that quotes are NOT vital. that’s just YOUR opinion.
Until then, yes, they do provide clarity and pander to the hoi polloi who expect spaces between words, caps on the first words of sentences, and periods at the end. We can’t all be ee cummings or William Gaddis. Thank fucking god.
Joe,
re: the quoted paragraph, the value of quotes is precisely how conventional they are. It’s like using the word “said” to denote a character speaking–it’s so conventional as to be invisible, and invisibility is usually a desirable feature in narrative where mechanical elements like speech attribution are concerned. Now, this is not to say that there can’t be good reasons to not use quotes, but that’s just it–since quotes are such an invisible formal convention, a writer needs to have a technical/structural/aesthetic reason for dispensing with them. Again, to my mind, the Miranda July example fails that test, as it doesn’t seem to be doing anything very unconventional or structurally adventurous (though maybe that’s just not a great example, and there’s a reason she’s going quoteless).
For me, the problem with not using quotation marks is it sometimes makes the dialogue look lifeless and flat. But maybe that’s because I just read The Road, where a lot of the dialogue really was lifeless and flat:
Are you tired?
No.
No?
No.
Okay.
….
I’m hungry.
I know.
Are you cold?
No.
No?
No.
Okay.
There were also definitely times in that book, when the dialogue was more expanded, that it wasn’t entirely clear who was speaking, on first read.
If we’re listing McCarthy, Erdrich, Miranda July et al as proponents of not using quotes, I’d like to offer, as a counter, a few hundred or so of the greatest writers who ever lived who do/did use them. But it’s not a big deal, really. Tell a good story and I won’t be too concerned with how you tell it. I roll my eyes at McCarthy’s faux-cowboy prose mannerisms, but adore his stories, characters, and themes.
I had read a fellow writer’s story where there was just a couple lines of dialogue and they did not use quotes. It seemed right. As an extremist, I wanted to look into using that for my writing, which is more dialogue heavy. Reading this article convinced me to continue using quotes. While it wasn’t the author’s intention, I still appreciate the clarity it provided me.
I agree with Jonathan Russell Clark. Quotation marks, whether they are euphemistic or dysphemistic, can alter a story. To me, they are no trespassing signs and tell the reader that his/her imagination is not required. I wish to draw the reader into my story and let him/her take control. That may sound inviting to an entry lever writer, but he/she must face a literary agent who may not read past the first dialogue without quotation marks.
That may be what happened to me on my first book McConnell Verses MacConnell. I did not get an agent, and my self published book is lost in a sea of twenty three million others on Amazon. Publishers only accept submissions from agents. Agents control the publishing world. You may think I gave up and used quotation marks on my second book. I did not. I bit the bullet and doubled my list of agents receiving unsolicited submissions.