The hero of One Fat Englishman, 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, Roger Micheldene must deal with not so obliging suburban
housewives, 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"),
and America itself, while making 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 Kingsley Amis's greatest and most caustic
performances.