Girl, 20 by Kingsley Amis

First published: 1971

Type of work: Comic realism

Time of work: The late 1960’s

Locale: Greater London

Principal Characters:

• Doug Yandell, the narrator and co-protagonist
• Roy Vandervane, the protagonist, a composer, conductor, and eccentric
• Kitty Vandervane, his wife
• Penny Vandervane, his daughter by a former marriage
• Sylvia Meers, Vandervane’s teenage mistress
• Vivienne “Vivy” Copes, Yandell’s mistress
• Gilbert Alexander, Penny s West Indian lover
• Harold Meers, Yandell s editor and Sylvia s father

The Novel

Music critic for a London newspaper, narrator Doug Yandell has just left the office of his priggish editor, Harold Meers, when he receives a call from Kitty Vandervane, the wife of his friend, Roy, a composer, conductor, and ne’er-do-well celebrity. Arriving at the Vandervane home, he learns from Kitty that Vandervane has taken still another mistress, this one even younger than his others. She urges Yandell to help Vandervane, to save him from the irreparable ruin that would ensue if her fifty-seven-year-old husband decided to run off with his latest mistake.

The “mistake” is Sylvia Meers, the Girl 20—though she is actually only seventeen—the daughter of Yandell’s editor, Meers, a philistine who already despises Vandervane as he does all artists whom he does not appreciate or understand. As for Vandervane himself, he readily admits his infatuation with Sylvia. He unashamedly explains that he finds her youthful sexuality a healthful tonic, exciting, stimulating, renewing.

The narrator, too, is no stranger to purely sexual relationships. He shares Vivienne Copes, his mistress, with “another bloke” about whom Vivienne is tactfully reticent; Yandell is also in love with Vandervane’s daughter, Penny, who has taken Gilbert Alexander, a black West Indian, as her lover.

With these relationships clearly defined, the story moves quickly. Vandervane convinces Yandell to help him, not in Kitty’s meaning, but in supplying him with access to Yandell’s apartment, where he and Sylvia can pursue their lovemaking. Additionally, Yandell finds himself lending a semblance of respectability to the affair by accompanying Penny on a double date with Vandervane and Sylvia. After a madcap evening (“the night of the favour”) at a pub and then at a wrestling match, the couples separate. Penny gives herself to Yandell, but only on condition that they never become intimate again or see each other except as acquaintances.

Over the next few weeks, the narrator becomes more involved with Vandervane’s creative life as well, attending his conducting sessions and learning with some dismay that Vandervane has planned to lead a rock concert at which he will play one of his own compositions, Elevations 9, a sexual pun. Meanwhile, Sylvia’s father, Harold Meers, has discovered the relationship between his daughter and Vandervane. Inviting Vandervane and Yandell to dinner, he gloats over his knowledge and threatens to publish an expose which will ruin Vandervane’s reputation. Vandervane is blase, irritatingly cavalier, taunting the editor to follow through on his threat.

Yandell voices these concerns to Vivienne, but she, while sympathetic, brings him along on a visit to her father, who understands his daughter’s sexual appetites and enjoys an evening of philosophical and cultural conversation with Yandell, this latest of “Vivy’s” men.

The climax of the book is Vandervane’s performance of Elevations 9. Despite Yandell’s objections and the narrator’s attempt to sabotage the concert by greasing Vandervane’s bow, Vandervane is brilliant. In a hilarious scene, Vandervane plays his Stradivarius with passion and skill while the rock group, Pigs Out, accompanies him on the bongos. After the concert, as Vandervane and Yandell are leaving, a gang of toughs attacks them, breaking Vandervane’s Stradivarius and knocking Yandell unconscious.

Recovering, Yandell pays a last visit to Vandervane and learns that Vandervane and Sylvia have indeed decided to run off, Meers’s blackmail threat notwithstanding. Meers, in fact, has already fired Yandell for his part in the affair. In a final twist, Yandell also discovers that he has lost Vivienne; she has decided to run off with “the other bloke,” who is revealed to be Gilbert Alexander, Penny’s former lover.

When Yandell meets Penny in the final scene, he remarks how much happier she appears now that all relationships have been either severed or consummated. Penny responds that she has gone on to hard drugs and that, indeed, they are “all free now.”

The Characters

On one level, Roy Vandervane seems nothing more than a melodramatic comic embodiment of the male in middle-age crisis. His taking a girl one-third his age without regard for reputation and decorum is a contemporary redaction of the great Romantic artist-cad who took what he wanted because the world had to pay that price for his art. As his name suggests, Roy Vandervane is a vain, regally uncaring man who pursues his own needs, indifferent to moral values or societal obligations.

Yet Vandervane’s sexual wanderings, comic as they often are, reveal a desperation, a frenzy that comes close to tragedy. Sex for him, as he tells the narrator, is not simply a renewal of a jaded appetite, but a kind of freedom from the mediocre as well. Vandervane knows that he is growing old, knows that his relationship with Sylvia is scandalously obscene, but his own spirit of respectability, which forces him to use comic euphemisms such as “Christian gentleman” for vulgar expletives, seeks release from his wife, family, and second-rate artistic pretensions. What Roy realizes more cogently than anything else is that his art is as conventional as his life. His attentions to Youth are attempts to begin life afresh, to be recognized, even adulated.

As for Kitty, she is the true melodramatic heroine, the comic study of the injured wife. She shows what Yandell calls her “paraded bravery” when she implores the narrator to help Vandervane, and she attempts to maintain an aggrieved dignity when she confronts Sylvia, only to get herself entangled in an undignified brawl. Kitty is, in sum, respectably dull.

Respectability of sorts also characterizes the position of Doug Yandell, the narrator. His seeming stability as hack critic on a minor newspaper, and his reputation for being judicious and fair-minded, make Kitty’s choice of him as ambassador to her husband apt yet ironic: Yandell’s personal relationship with Vivienne is itself only tenuously respectable. He amorally accepts her being shared by another man and has no intention of marrying her; he is even fearful that she might one day expect marriage as the price of her fidelity. He lusts after Penny, secretly admiring her body each time they meet. Ironically, he can muster the proper chagrin at Vandervane’s conduct yet is himself something of a moral coward, unable to make a commitment to a belief or to a spiritual value. He surprises Vivienne, for example, by his’ casual admission that he leads his life from day to day without much belief in immortality.

Penny Vandervane leads the same kind of life, a slow, daily drift toward the undefined. She is neither happy nor unhappy but exists in a humorless, loveless relationship with her West Indian boyfriend out of the simple human need for connection with someone or something. Her one-night affair with Yandell is not an affirmation of passion but a preemptive act to destroy the need for any deeper feelings. As she tells him: “Talking soft is not part of the contract.” This trend leads to her ultimate lapse into mind-distorting drugs.

A mindless sexuality is all that characterizes Sylvia Meers. One of the most unattractive characters in all of Amis’ fiction, Sylvia is representative of the grossest elements of the Youth movement of the 1960’s and 1970’s. Iconoclastic, insensitive, irresponsible, Sylvia—despite the Romantic evocations of her name—is the very antithesis of Romance, an ironic foil to Vandervane’s attempt to escape the reality of growing old. Clearly anti-Establishment, she is, for all of her sexuality, a sort of neuter, committed only to the cause of uncommitment.

Finally, Vivienne Copes is the most appealing woman in the novel. Caring, sympathetic, and tactful, she has a sense of decency and morality, but her decision to take up with Penny’s former lover shows that, like all the other characters, she, too, has lost her footing in the slippery world of unstable relationships.

Critical Context

Like his first novel, Lucky Jim (1954), Kingsley Amis’ ninth, Girl, 20, draws on contemporary manners, pointing out their comic shallowness and the grim pathos of their implications. Lucky Jim pilloried the educational establishment, showing the hypocrisy, the priggishness, the ultimately dehumanizing aspects lurking behind a facade of respectability and staid cultural norms.

Girl, 20’s ambience is the superficial world of pop culture, of boutiques, discos, rock groups and lowbrow entertainment. Unlike earlier novels, however, Girl, 20 is more cynical, less affirmative in tone. Amis’ playfully poetic language is richly descriptive, often breezily colloquial, as in his earlier work, but the humor of Girl, 20 is bleaker, the laughter drawn not so much from a sense of fun or even outrage as from a sardonic view of life, a pessimism about the human condition. The book is evidence of the growing seriousness in Amis’ work, a sense of bitterness unrelieved by energetic horseplay or wholesome comedy.

Bibliography

Caplan, Ralph. “Kingsley Amis,’7 in Contemporary British Novelists, 1965. Edited by Charles Shapiro.

Cooper, Arthur. Review in Newsweek. LXXIX (March 6, 1972), p. 77.

Gardner, Philip. Kingsley Amis, 1981.

The New Yorker. Review. XLVII (February 5, 1972), p. 102.

Rabinovitz, Rubin. The Reaction Against Experiment in the English Novel, 1950-1960, 1967.

Sheppard, R. Z. Review in Time. XCIX (February 7, 1972), p. 88.