The N-Word and Christ

When we went to Disney World last year, I took along Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood. It’s my idea of irony: going to the South to the “happiest place on earth” with a wackily gothic author.

So this year I repeated it (yes, we went again) and upped the ante. Along with A Good Man is Hard to Find, by Flannery O’Connor (1953), I also brought The Groucho Letters: Letters To and From Groucho Marx (1967) and Witold Gombrowicz, A Guide to Philosophy in Six Hours and Fifteen Minutes (1971). The only one I actually finished while there was the Guide to Philosophy. (It and the Groucho Letters are highly recommendable.)

But I finally finished the other two as well. At first it’s a little difficult for me to get into O’Connor’s world (see title of post for reasons why), but once I got going, it became more and more engaging and ultimately awesome. I almost feel like reading them once is just a warm-up to reading them again, which I’ll do eventually, but not yet, because “the list” beckons.

Lucky Jim, Lucky Reader

I’ve seen this book on several lists, so I won’t say too much yet and see if there might be some discussion later.
My favorite moment is probably a little throwaway line:

[…] an unlit building with a painted sign, faintly visible, reading Car’s for hire – Batesons – Repair’s.

It might get missed because it goes without comment, but in today’s blogoriffic world, the misplaced apostrophes would probably appear accompanied by several LOL’s.
Back to the book. A fun read. Anyone who has a chance to sit back take a little time with it over a few evenings is a lucky reader, indeed. Jacket copies invariably include comparisons to Wodehouse. But Amis’s plot and characters matter a bit more than Wodehouse’s, so the book seems a slow starter, in order to accommodate a certain build-up.
As a former grad student, the college setting makes sense, as does this bit about an article Dixon (the titular fortunate James) wrote:

It was a perfect title, in that it crystallized the article’s niggling mindlessness, its funereal parade of yawn-enforcing facts, the pseudo-light it threw upon non-problems.

I’m looking forward to tossing out some questions to others who have read it. Or, to be more honest in the vein that Amis seems to call for: I’m looking forward to attempt to impress you with the groped-at meanings I’ve forced on a work that primarily aims at entertainment.