“The English Novel in the Twentieth Century: 11; Kingsley Amis Versus Vladimir Nabokov,” in Contemporary Review, Vol. 269, November, 1996, pp. 254-56.

In the following essay, Bruce compares Amis's and Vladimir Nabokov's writing styles, praising Nabokov's evocative use of language, but criticizing what he considers to be Amis's incoherence and reliance on clichés.

‘Yes—oh dear yes—the novel tells a story,’ E. M. Forster describes himself in Aspects of the Novel as saying in ‘a drooping regretful voice’. He wishes that it could be something different from ‘this low atavistic form’. Kingsley Amis had in his critical writings no such misgivings. He regarded expression and style as qualities which merely forward the action. He deplores what he calls the ‘verbal shock tactics, dislocated syntax, unnatural epithets and other affectations of singularity’ which he deems to have originated in James Joyce's Ulysses. Amis, the erstwhile member of the Classical Sixth...