Take A Girl Like You
First edition
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| Author | Kingsley Amis |
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| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Comic novel |
| Publisher | Gollancz |
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Publication date
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1960 |
| Media type | Print (Paperback) |
| Pages | 320 pp |
Take a Girl Like You is a comic novel by Kingsley Amis. The narrative follows the progress of twenty-year-old Jenny Bunn, who has moved from her family home in the North of England to a small town not far from London to teach primary school children. Jenny is a 'traditional' Northern working-class girl whose dusky beauty strikes people as being at odds with the old-fashioned values she has gained from her upbringing, not least the conviction of 'no sex before marriage'. A thread of the novel concerns the frustrations of the morally dubious Patrick Standish, a 30-year-old teacher at a local private secondary school and his attempts to, by hook or by crook, accomplish the seduction of Jenny; all this against a backdrop of Jenny's new teaching job, Patrick's work and his leisure time with flatmate and colleague Graham and their new acquaintance, the well-off and somewhat older man-about-town, Julian Ormerod.
Take a Girl Like You is Kingsley Amis's fourth novel. Unlike his previous works, in which the point of view of the narrative is exclusively that of the male protagonist, in this novel Amis has set himself the challenge of supplying the point of view of the female protagonist, Jenny Bunn and the male protagonist, Patrick Standish. Amis never allows the points of view to merge within the text but presents them in separate, alternating sections, several chapters at a time. Although written in both cases in the third person, the device allows the reader to get inside the minds of the two people, see how they view their environments and each other and follow the development (or non-development) of their morals and outlooks on life.
Although they share an academic setting, unlike the eponymous hero of Lucky Jim, who is, for all his comic antics, a fundamentally decent and morally upright figure, Patrick is a 'cool guy', a sports car-driver and 'skirt-chaser', who manages to maintain his teaching duties and finds time for commitments such as play-staging, film club organising and local Labour Party involvement. Much of the novel's comic element stems from Amis's presentation of down-to-earth Jenny's observations of the curious ways of the Southerners around her and from Patrick's escapades, which have a tendency to backfire.
The novel opens with Jenny Bunn's arrival at her lodging-house. She's a young, strikingly beautiful, Northern girl who has moved to a small town outside London, to take her first teaching job. Jenny has rented a room in the home of middle-aged couple, Dick and Martha Thompson. Dick is apparently some sort of auctioneer and Martha is a housewife, who is bored, cynical and at times openly hostile towards young Jenny. Anna, the Thompsons' other lodger, is a changeable young woman who is apparently French.
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