Many readers consider this the best of Amis’s early novels.
He’s a lout, he’s a slob, he’s a mess — and he is enormously fine company on the page.
“The book’s dash and heft and twang serve a deeper energy," our reviewer, Veronica Geng, wrote.
Our reviewer, Bette Pesetsky, called “London Fields” “a picaresque novel rich in its effects,” a “virtuoso depiction of a wild and lustful society.
Friendly, readers learn, is the latest of the man’s pseudonyms: Years earlier, he was a Nazi doctor who escaped Europe for the United States.