Of an Age

Kingsley Amis, dead in 1995 from drink and anger, wrote twenty novels and many works of non-fiction. They were all reliably diverting and funny. But Amis worried that his first book, Lucky Jim, which he published in 1954, would surpass all the rest, even though he was later twice shortlisted for the Booker Prize and then won, in 1986, for The Old Devils (an inferior work). In his latter years, Amis grew cranky, sulky, paranoid, and sometimes abusive. His early joie de vivre, mostly sexual, was exhausted.

The critic Phillip Lopate, another young-life sexual athlete, wrote a wry essay in 1986, “Against Joie de Vivre,” which decried other people’s earthly pleasures even while regretting his own. I loved his elegant takedown of hedonism when I first read it as a youthful graduate student, but my balance went sideways when Lopate published a cranky and abusive review of my 2006 book about the Empire State Building. I suppose that is on me, not him? I...