Take a Girl Like You may well be Kingsley Amis's most ambitious
reckoning with the serious subject at the heart of his work: the sheer
squalor--emotional, material, sexual, you name it--of modern life. It
also introduces one of the rare unqualified good guys in Amis's
rogue-ridden world: Jenny Bunn, a girl from the (English) north country
come south to teach school in a small smug town where she hopes to find
love and fortune. Jenny is a beauty and men and women are crazy about
her, most of all handsome Patrick Standish, who Jenny also likes. But
Jenny and Patrick live in a world where it's becoming ridiculously
difficult--disastrously difficult--to sort out the claims of sex and the
claims of love.