Difficulties with Girls.

SINCE THERE ARE all kinds of girlsnot all of them female there can be all kinds of difficulties with girls. Kingsley Amis knows all about them, and he's willing and able to tell you.

That rakish fellow Patrick Standish had difficulties with girls, including Jenny Bunn, whom he deflowered, impregnated, and committed to marry in Take a Girl like You (1960). He declared then, "I'll be altogether different." But now we see, nearly thirty years later for us though only seven or so fictional years for him, that Patrick did not become altogether different after all. When he isn't ogling women, he's picking up copies of Titter and Twosome to eyeball. Patrick's headed for trouble; Jenny knows what he's up to. So in Difficulties with Girls, these two continue in their own version of the dialectic of the sexes.

Like many another, Patrick is a bit of a fool. Even he sees the pointlessness and boredom of his dalliance with Mrs. Porter-King. Mrs. Porter-King is so awful that Patrick has to ask her three times if she is an American. That's hardly the basis for a serious relationship, anyone would agree.

But Patrick's womanizing is only an obvious difficulty with girls. Another character, Eric, has serious and even violent difficulties with Stevie, otherwise known as Steve. Tim has also had some difficulties, so he believes the psychiatrist who tells him he's a latent homosexual. Graham, remembered like Patrick and Jenny from 1960, has difficulties with his wife, but he seems to know where he stands: "From time to time . . . my wife accuses me of thinking her boring. It doesn't seem to have occurred to her that this might be because she's boring. . . . To her mind, her being boring is a thing I do."

These examples, however, do not exhaust all the difficulties, nor are difficulties the exclusive concern of this novel. Amis's satirical shafts find their marks in the broader world of cultural decay, neo-Marxist "poets," trendy publishers, and much of the Sixties scene in swinging London. Amis has here skewered enough targets to qualify Difficulties with Girls as a regular shish kebab of a book,

Personally, I have always relished Amis's books for their idiosyncratic passages, their unique expressions. Staring into these hypnotic episodes, we tend to forget who we are or what we are reading. The "making strange," or ostranenie, is so strong that it creates a world of its own. Notice, for instance, how the following passage does not say, There was a guy named Cyril wearing a vest: "Over his very white shirt he wore a waistcoat-shaped woolen garment of a tan-and-yellow pattern too awful for the thing not to have been specially knitted by somebody close to him, assuming there to be any such person. He had been heard to answer to the name of Cyril." Such verbal powers can be put to higher uses, too. We can see the reification of a cliche-"sexual politics" -when Patrick realizes how much nonsense he has to listen to just in order to get through the process of fornicating with Mrs. Porter-King:

Experience had brought him to see that this kind of thing was nothing more than the levying of cock-tax, was reasonable and normal, in fact, even though some other parts of experience strongly suggested that what he had shelled out so far was only a down-payment. There was also a touch of your cosmetic element at work, representing this afternoon's doings as something more than a short-notice bash with the next-door neighbor. He had come across that kind of thing before too, and had likened it in the past to the proclamations of a dictator, full of talk about ethnic integrity and his historic mission, when all he wanted was to seize the industry and mineral wealth of some helpless, peaceable neighboring state.

Such sheer verbal ability, the power to create through words a vision that leaves "humor" and "wit" behind, has its price. Amis's imposing abilities as a satirist and his skills as an entertainer have sometimes disguised his probity as a moralist. No matter how much he makes us laugh, after all, Amis is a serious man. He shows us the foolhardiness of folly as a negative example-which makes him a traditional writer in a way that is as rare today as it is remarkable.

Amis knows that this quality has not always been so rare. I think this is why he has Jenny herself, in a revelatory moment, pull out her copy of Tom Jones and quote from it to Patrick. We are reminded of the homage to Fielding rendered in a scene at that author's tomb in Amis's I Like It Here (1958). By extension, the mention of Elizabeth Taylor, the celebrity, is not to be confused with two citations of Elizabeth Taylor, the late novelist, to whom, also, Amis tipped his hat in I Like It Here.

Difficulties with Girls treats mod London as Amis did in Girl, 20 (1971), and deals with a married man's philandering as he did in That Uncertain Feeling (1955). His latest novel shows no signs of slackening of his familiar powers. We badly need Kingsley Amis to make us laugh, so that we are braced and ready to receive a painful truth from him. Somehow, through her good sense and good will, Jenny withstands the stresses her husband puts on her; and he comes to value her for what she's worth. That doesn't make everything easy to bear, though: "What's done cannot be undone. For years she had thought that was meant to cheer you up after something bad had happened, to encourage you to get on with your life, the same as saying there was no use crying over spilt milk. But since then she had come to the conclusion that it was actually about as sad as anything you could say."