Kingsley Amis, along with being the funniest English writer of his generation (see <i>Lucky Jim</i>) and a master of literary genres (his ghost story, <i>The Green Man</i>; his foray into science fiction, <i>The Alteration</i>), was a great chronicler of the fads and absurdities of his age. This is nowhere more apparent than in <i>One Fat Englishman</i>, from 1963, and <i>Girl, 20</i>, which came out almost a decade later, books that survey the social landscape of mid-century England and America with an unflinching accuracy and hilarious disdain. <br> <br> The hero of <i>One Fat Englishman</i>, a literary publisher and lapsed Catholic escaped from the pages of Graham Greene to the campus of Budweiser College in provincial Pennsylvania, is philandering, drunken, bigoted, and very very fat, not to mention in a state of continuous spluttering rage against everything, not least his own overgrown self. In America, he must deal with not so obliging suburban housewives out of John Updike, aspiring Jewish novelists who as good as clean his clock, stray deer, bad cigars, children who beat him at Scrabble (“It was no wonder that people were horrible when they started life as children,” Roger thinks), and America itself, as he makes ever-more desperate and humiliating overtures to Helen, a Scandinavian ice queen. If only Roger would dare to show some real feeling of his own. This comic masterpiece about the 1950s crashing drunkenly into the consumerist 1960s and a final scion of a disintegrating Old World empire encountering its upstart New World offspring, is one of Amis’s greatest and most caustic performances.