The writing in [Jake's Thing] is determined throughout by Jake's manner of speaking, and it has all the virtuosity of Amis at his comic best, though there are those who will be offended by its strain of hostility and contempt. The prose is ultra-conversational, abusive, and yet allusive, too, and elegantly syntactic….

The description of [Jake's neighbor] Geoffrey has a … significance which relates to the underlying tensions of the present book. Here is a backward-looking chap forwardly using oaths which would not have been printed before the Second World War. The oaths used by the recent young, and the spirit of an age whose student activists mail him a plastic phallus, don't appeal to Jake, but the old oaths do. His swearing and womanizing form part of a liberation, in other words, but it has been overtaken by another that he can't abide…. The main question that emerges...