SOURCE: “Changing Social and Moral Attitudes,” in Kingsley Amis: In Life and Letters, edited by Dale Salwak, Macmillan, 1990, pp. 130-48.

In the following essay, Gindin, a professor of English at the University of Michigan, considers the nature of comedy as well as the political and moral tone of Amis's work.

The changes and inconsistencies in the social attitudes visible in Kingsley Amis's fiction over the past thirty-five years are not any better explained by his change from voting Labour to voting Tory than they initially were by the simplistic designation of ‘Angry Young Man’. Loyalty to one party or another masks the consistency within the changes in Amis's fiction, for his comedy has never promulgated an interpretation of experience that could follow a party doctrine or programme, never depended on a vision of what social experience should or might be. Rather, the sharp comic texture of Amis's prose...