Girl, 20

by Kingsley Amis

Paperback, 1989

Status

Available

Call number

823.914

Genres

General Fiction

All Topics

Fiction

Collection

Your library

Publication

Summit Books (1989), Trade Paperback, 253 pages

Description

Douglas Yandell, a youngish music critic, is enlisted by Kitty Vandervane to keep an eye on her roving husband - the eminent conductor and would-be radical Sir Roy - as he embarks on yet another affair.

Media reviews

Times Literary Supplement

Amis seems to have learned, like Shaw, that it may pay artistically to allow the devil a lot of the best lines. Even the appalling Sylvia and Roy’s daughter Penny, who has an affair with Douglas, are allowed to state their case. When Sylvia, whose behaviour throughout is at best indifferent to

other human beings and at worst totally vicious, is attacked by the cautious and bourgeois Douglas, her retort has its power... Girl, 20 was praised on its publication in 1971, but still not praised enough. It is a masterly novel, one in which Amis co-ordinates for the first time his tastes, his theme and his talents. The episodic form is perfect for what he wants to convey; the picture of a self-ordered hell in which people move around endlessly in the same routine has a consistent power absent from most of his writing.

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User reviews

LibraryThing member gbill

What a difference 17 years makes; from 1954’s ‘Lucky Jim’ to 1971’s ‘Girl, 20’, with Amis going from 32 to 49. The style is still there: eminently British, of course, with dry humor and clever turns of phrase, and with a plot featuring adultery and alcohol, two of his favorite things,

but my goodness, how stodgy he seems to have become. The plot to ‘Girl, 20’ is pretty straightforward: a distinguished, well-known, and married musician has had a series of affairs with increasingly younger women, and is now seeing someone who is 17. He has a friend and confidant in a music reviewer who dislikes the girl, but what he really hates is the fact that the musician has taken on a collaborative project fusing classical music with pop, which he doesn’t consider music. It’s through this confidant’s eyes that the novel is narrated, and who Amis channels his satire of the younger generation of the 60’s. Yes, he saves most of his righteous indignation for that, rather than the underage relationship. In addition to the music, he criticizes the anti-war movement, idealism, and the questioning of materialism and established ways of living. He does it in a rather snide way, showing youth of the 60’s as not only misguided and puerile, but mean and violent. He also seems to try to walk a line on race, having his characters express openness to interracial relationships, but others express stereotypes. Amis’s writing is engaging (though sometimes cryptic, as he is fond of subtle references and multiple negatives, among other things), but his plot in this one doesn’t really go anywhere. There were times when I chuckled while I read it, but as I think about it now, there’s just not a lot of joy here, and it’s a letdown compared to ‘Lucky Jim’ and ‘The Green Man’.

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4 more

LibraryThing member AdonisGuilfoyle

I wanted to read a novel from the 1960s, or of the 1960s, instead of modern stories set in that decade, and in that sense, I enjoyed Girl, 20. However, I doubt I would read Amis' novel again. I can't put my finger on what was wrong - not the narration, because the acerbic writing is amusing, and

not the lack of likeable characters or a happy ending, because I wasn't expecting either, but for a brief book (just over two hundred pages), I spent nearly a week trying to finish the thing.

Douglas Yandell (that's Yandell, not Randall), is a music critic whose best friend, the famous composer Sir Roy Vandervane, is going through the mother of all mid-life crises. After a series of affairs with younger women, Sir Roy becomes fixated on the girl of the title (although the obnoxious Sylvia is actually 17) and decides to leave his highly-strung wife, troubled daughter and bratty son for her. Douglas is caught in the middle, trying to be a friend to both Roy and Kitty Vandervane, while lusting after daughter Penny and sharing part-time girlfriend Vivienne with another man. All very permissive, wryly humorous and dated, interspersed with middle-class culture. Perhaps that's why I struggled with Kingsley Amis - he's merely a coarser version of Barbara Pym, and I can't stand her books either.

I did enjoy the narration, if not the narrator, and actually quite agreed with a lot of Amis' criticism of 1960s liberal culture (especially children left to run wild, and 'youth' conforming to non-conformity), but a lot of the social, political and musical references left me behind. Roy disgusted me, no doubt intentionally, Penny and Sylvia made me wonder what Roy and Douglas could find attractive in them, and I would personally have liked to reach into the novel, drag Ashley out by his ear and beat him (and all spoiled children) with a cricket bat, but Douglas was entertaining at least.

Interesting, amusing, but far from endearing. I think I'll try Georgy Girl next, for the female 1960s perspective!

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LibraryThing member DinadansFriend

Roy Vandervane, a competent musician, and a great popular success, strains his family by indulging himself with a love affair with a much younger woman. An example of high ideals and low practices written with great skill. So funny, so tragic!

LibraryThing member larryking1

I have been reading and hearing the names of the father-son writing duo of Kingsley Amis and Martin Amis for many decades now, and I have even dipped into Martin's oeuvre now and again. (Name Drop Alert: one time I met novelist Margaret Drabble -- her Ice Age was the best book I read in 2019 -- and

I mentioned MA's coming to LA in a week and she bristled. Why the dislike? I had to know.) I think I get it now. You see, when Kingsley pere's first novel, Lucky Jim, appeared in 1954, his comic 'tear down the ramparts' approach was part of the Angry Young Men movement of his time, but Amis was anything but angry. He was hilarious and the establishment of that time withered under his caustic onslaughts. Times change. In the space of 17 years and over twenty novels, Amis slowly morphed into a reactionary. What happened? In a word, the 60's. He saw "that for all its high-minded talk [it was] as low and dishonest as any other." He also turned into a curmudgeon, both antiquated and misogynistic. As a music devotee myself, I enjoyed the novel's premise: can the brilliant composer/conductor, sixtyish Sir Roy Vandervane keep both family and career together during his madcap serial pursuits of a younger and younger collective of women, nay, girls? You see, the last one, 17 year old Sylvia (whose father is the editor/boss of our narrator, one Douglas Yandell) is a bull in a China closet. Throughout the story, Douglas is writing away, record reviews of Hayden and Bach boxed sets, concert reviews now and then, a Webern biography, and following his older friends attempt to master Mahler's (aka 'Gus' herein) 8th, all the while courting two wonderful women of his very own. Roy is clearly the younger Yandell's mentor. Quite a literary romp, this one, with a splendid denouement, and leaving me with a craving to revisit Blowup!

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LibraryThing member m_k_m

More uncomfortable than it intends to be, at 50 years' distance. But it's a useful cultural artefact in that regard and its satire of countercultural pretensions still works.

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