FUNNY STORIES
— CONSULT YOUR PILLOW, by John Coates; Victor Gollancz, English price 10/6. LUCKY JIM, by Kingsley Amis; Victor Gollancz, English price 12/6. SIMPLE TAKES A WIFE, by Langston Hughes; Victor Gollancz, English price 12/6. JOHN ISKANDER, by Donald C. Eyre; Robert Hale, English price 10/6. STORY with a moral, carefully inverted, Consult Your Pillow, proves the efficiency of the carefree drifter, the ne’er-do-well, at coming out on top, or falling on his feet. The adventures of Eric Cooper, the artist who becomes a business tycoon by a series of wholly involuntary accidents, are made into a witty comedy by this dangerously ‘selfconscious writer. John Coates’s very first paragraph takes us embarrassingly into his confidence about the problems of portraying his hero. No writer has his tongue deeper in the cheek; his inven‘tion is even so sluggish that he uses the same device, an unexpected will, no fewer than three times. But we may forgive him much in gratitude for the creation of.Eric, who finds and conquers the comfortable women of Renoir on so many occasions and whose silliest actions always prove his wisest. Anether good comedy, but with a bitter undercurrent of satire, Lucky Jim js the decline and fall of a probationary lecturer in history at an English Redbrick university. This glimpse of academic backyards has a distressing realism, though the hero — apart from the final happy ending-is too heavily victimised for the book to have anything but surface verisimilitude. Langston Hughes’s Negro hero is also something of a victim, almost wholly his own. This new series of sketches of an engagingly feckless character is not as good as Simple Speaks His Mind, but the same wry humour runs through it. There are occasional side-swipes at the treatment of the Negro even in "liberal" New York. The last novel on our list, John Iskander, is an adult relative of one of those romances of action which found
such satisfied audiences in the Boys’ Own Paper. The behaviour of a mighty avalanche in the Himalaya will surprise mountaineers: even so. it serves the
exigencies of the plot.
David
Hall
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19540723.2.24.6
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 783, 23 July 1954, Page 14
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350FUNNY STORIES New Zealand Listener, Volume 31, Issue 783, 23 July 1954, Page 14
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Copyright in the work University Entrance by Janet Frame (credited as J.F., 22 March 1946, page 18), is owned by the Janet Frame Literary Trust. The National Library has been granted permission to digitise this article and make it available online as part of this digitised version of the New Zealand Listener. You can search, browse, and print this article for research and personal study only. Permission must be obtained from the Janet Frame Literary Trust for any other use.
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