Luck was his lady.

I keep reading these books that tempt me to decipher the male psyche. That's dangerous! And I may just be doing a plum awful job of it. Feel free to tell me so.

Lucky Jim is not a famous book in more general terms; it is a very famous book among academics, though, and particularly grad students. Published in 1954, it's British and a bit old, but it remains one of the only works of fiction truly submerged in the cloistered circles of academic life in the humanities. Kingsley Amis tears down the ornately- (but, at least in his world, very thinly-) crafted walls of tenure with little ceremony; his character Jim Dixon, a first-year junior faculty member in the history department of a provincial university in England, has already given up on the dog and pony show at novel's start. He got his degree, sold himself as a Medievalist, and now he's walking the streets of this tiny college town chain-smoking cigarettes because there's not much else to do and because he knows he'll probably get fired after the first year unless he impresses the tenured folks. How would he do that? Publish in the best journal, perhaps (although, here as in real life, sadly even the most esteemed journals have about ten dutiful readers per quarter, and the rest of the recipients just toss it next to the telephone as a notepad or a coaster every few months). Or he could join the boys' club, smoke fancy cigars, and whine about budget cuts. Ah, he'd rather embrace his still-youthful cynicism. Jim's a drinker, too, and curses himself for the comprising positions he finds himself in...but does them anyway. He's been semi-involved with a half-crazy female colleague. He's in brown-noser cahoots with an absent-minded senior professor named Welch, but secretly Dixon knows that Welch probably wants to can him. The old man just wants someone to listen to him, really. And then Dixon gets all involved in a love quadrangle that is ultimately his acamedic undoing.

Or is it?

I realized about halfway through this book that although Amis' commentary of academic life is pitch-perfect, right down to the finagling of the price of a beer in a bar or the pitfalls of heading over to a colleague's house for tea, there's a reason his title does nothing to betray his subject. This thing's all about luck, and about luck and ambition juxtaposed against privilege.

See, Jim is really, really smart. You have to be to finish a dissertation, to please a committee and convince them that you've mastered a whole lineage of historiography and that you care enough about the professional vocabulary to want to make it your livelihood. It's just that once he starts to practice the damn show, he realizes he's facing a life sentence of second-best. That's because in academia, only a few truly become the top dogs. It's more ferocious than some might think, this world, which is often built atop a shaky foundation of ulterior motives and raised noses. The pedigreed ones, the legacies, they make it. And the ones who, by sheer chance in many cases, happen upon a topic that cashes in on a historiographical trend? They make it too. But there are many more of the workhorses out there--the Jims who have had enough bad luck and rough edges to understand that they're hanging on to this world of intellectual privilege by only the skin of their teeth (or, in this case, the publication of a half-assed article). The Jims latch on to this world as grad students, initially, because they believe that belonging to even the periphery of the intellectual elite will satisfy their desires for a career, for comfort, for mid-grade prestige.

So at first, luck is bad for Jim all around; he does what so many of us often do when faced with really awkward or compromising turns-of-events. He blames the circumstances, and he blames those around him for the fact that he doesn't exactly fit into the academic mold. He wakes up one morning after a departmental function only to realize that he's burned cigarette holes into the bed linens at the colleague's house at which he's crashed. Bad luck, right? The universe is out to ruin him, right?

Not exactly. But first I want to unpack the concept of "luck" just a tad. Amis does this great thing with Jim's psyche, especially in the beginning. He describes other peoples' appearances, but filtered in great detail through Jim's eyes. Every nervous twitch, every change of expression, every crease of the aging eyes. Margaret, the lovelorn professor who's got eyes for Jim, a chip on her shoulder, and a questionable suicide attempt in her past, well she reminds us (through Jim's musings) that even the most brilliant among us are fragile--rather, easily bruised by the accidental but painful happenings in adult life. Jim reminds us that human interactions, even in seemingly professional settings, require compassion. There is such a thing as bad luck, and unless you're fortunate enough to have stockpiles of money and a direct line to the Queen, there might be times when you'll be at the very bottom of the proverbial totem pole. So yes, in an ideal world there's an allowance for bad luck.

Amis juxtaposes Jim against Welch's son Bertrand--a son of education and money who drags around a beautiful girlfriend and a suitcase of cocky smiles. Welch doesn't believe in luck (much like Cal Hockley didn't in the movie Titanic, but the 13-year-old in me will ward off such digressions); he believes that men like himself have a right to the good things in life.

Jim's charade comes crashing down once he gets involved with Bertrand's gal, and that whole experience turns into the straw that breaks the camel's back--and the camel, of course, is his future in academia. Back to the original question. Was it his fault that he didn't feel accepted or wanted in the hallowed halls of the history department? Amis, it seems to me anyway, wants the reader to realize that it is, actually. Jim Dixon is so well-equipped as a person, mentally anyway. He's got the brains, the right amount of practicality and cynicism to take things as lightly as most things should be taken, and the compassion that wills him to care about the plight of those around him. He realizes he's been hiding out in a world that he has no passion for. And one of the reasons that so many judge him there is that they can tell he doesn't have any! It's easy to complain about something; it's much harder to change it or simply leave it behind.

Ultimately Jim uses a string of bad luck to make some good decisions. Moral? Bad luck exists, but we also make our own. Or, better yet, take a bad luck lemon and make "start-a-new-life lemonade."

And at that thought, I shut the book with a smile on my face.

I guess some hardcore academics are at peace with this book because it's so well-written, it's so funny, and it still allows room for those doing the "real" work to go about their business. In other words, Amis writes Jim out of a picture that goes on existing, and might actually be better without the Jims running it amuck. I tend to accept its full weight, though. It's a send-up of a system that's been in place for a long time and certainly shows its age. Jim Dixon is a restless characters, young and unimpressed with the maze of people he's told to impress, to work for, or to pay homage to. He's modern because he (at least in the end) decides that his integrity demands straightforwardness. People need to mean what they say and say what they mean. Politicking gets you nowhere but dark, expensive bars and in awkward conversations with people you don't even like that much. Honesty opens doors all over the place, even if some of them end up sucking too. All these cliches are true.

Congrats. You made it through another disjointed book review.

If you're a grad student, read this book. It'll make you feel super smart for having made the same cynical observations about your tenured faculty and their rusty habits. (It did me!) But like any great satire, it's exagerrated. And the disclaimer here is that I am NOT hell-bent on feeding all of academia to the wolves. I'm just joining an increasingly vocal group of scholars, journalists, laymen, you name them, who want to see the system overhauled and improved.

[Thanks to the Huff household for this amahzin' stack 'o books on my coffee table, of which this was the first tackled.]