Girl, 20 was published in 1971, to considerable critical acclaim.
The narrator is 33-year-old music critic Douglas Yandell but the book is dominated by the larger-than-life 54-year-old conductor Sir Roy Vandervane. Roy is both appalling and fascinating. He has achieved success and is a well-known public figure although the suspicion does attach itself to him that perhaps he has never lived up to his early promise and he has never quite reached the top rank as a conductor. He is a champagne socialist, an inveterate liar and an outrageous hypocrite. He has been a poor husband and a dismal father to his three children.
Douglas likes Roy but disapproves of him. Douglas is serious minded and fairly conventional in outlook and despises Roy’s political posturing.
Now Roy’s wife Kitty wants Douglas’s help. She fears that Roy has embarked on another of his “goes” this being her term for his affairs with younger women. He has had a long series of “goes” with progressively younger women. Kitty has at one time been one of his “goes” and she had succeeded in stealing him from his first wife. She fear that sooner or later one of these girls will steal Roy away from her for good.
Douglas becomes embroiled in Kitty’s plottings and in Roy’s. Roy has a way of manipulating people to do what he wants them to do. Even when you know what he is up to, and Douglas is most certainly aware, somehow you get sucked into his schemes anyway.
There are countless complications. There’s Douglas’s girlfriend Vivienne. There’s nothing serious between them but she suits him. There’s Roy’s eldest daughter Penny, whom Douglas tried to seduce a couple of years earlier. There’s Penny’s boyfriend.
Amis was a great comic writer and this is a very funny book. It’s perhaps a satire but if so Amis has a large collection of targets in his sights.
I think it’s important not to fall into the trap that so many readers today fall into, of assuming that the narrator’s opinions coincide precisely with the author’s. Douglas Yandell is what would later come to be known as a “young fogey” - a young intellectual who ostentatiously adopts old-fashioned attitudes and outlooks and aesthetic tastes. Douglas is also an intellectual snob. His field is music and he has nothing but contempt for current pop music but this contempt extends to all 20th century music, including Mahler! Amis may have had some such tendencies but it would be a mistake to assume that Douglas is merely an authorial mouthpiece.
Douglas is saddened by Roy’s desperate attempts to ingratiate himself with the younger generation. Roy is certainly an absurd figure, but Douglas is somewhat absurd as well.
And while he disapproves of Roy’s womanising that doesn’t stop Douglas from doing his best to get into Roy’s daughter Penny’s pants. He is a bit of a hypocrite as well. Perhaps Douglas mostly disapproves not of Roy’s womanising, but of the clumsiness with which he goes about it.
Douglas despises Roy as a champagne socialist. Amis himself was at one time a communist. From the mid-50s onwards he moved steadily towards much more conservative views (bearing in mind that such words had totally different meanings in 1971) but what makes Roy ridiculous is the shallowness and opportunism of his views.
Amis cannot be accused of having a limited stereotypical view of women. The female characters cover a broad spectrum. Kitty is neurotic and manipulative. Vivienne is basically a nice girl. Penny is a bit of a mess but given the utter chaos of the Vandervane household that’s hardly surprising. Sylvia, the object of Roy’s lusts, is a horror but she’s young so she has some excuse.
Girl, 20 is definitely takes an acerbic view of the emerging hippie culture, but Amis’s views of the arty-intellectual elite are every bit as acerbic.
This is a very very funny book by one of the four great humorous writers of the 20th century (the others being P.G. Wodehouse, Evelyn Waugh and Norman Lindsay). Very highly recommended.
