Jake's Thing

Jake's Thing is a satirical novel written by Kingsley Amis, first published in 1978 by Hutchinson. According to Craig Raine, it is a fictionalised account of Amis’s affair with the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard.^[1]

First edition
Cover art by Quentin Blake

Plot summary

The novel follows the life of Jacques 'Jake' Richardson, a 59-year-old Oxford don who struggles to overcome the loss of his libido.

Reception

In the magazine Prospect, critic Andrew Marr discussed his expectation that Amis' work would be retrospectively beyond the pale. "What slightly spoils this diatribe, however, is that to prepare for it I went back to Kingsley Amis’s novels and enjoyed myself more than was convenient for my purposes. Jake’s Thing, for instance, famously rancid with misogyny, turns out, on re-reading, to be surprisingly tender in parts, and intensely moving on the humiliations of impotence."^[2]

Writing in The Millions, critic Catherine Baab-Muguira acknowledged the novel's "comic brio."^[3]