Girl, 20: Analysis of Major Characters
"Girl, 20" offers a complex exploration of its major characters, each embodying distinct perspectives on life, relationships, and societal norms. The narrative centers around Douglas Yandell, a bachelor and classical music critic, who wrestles with his identity and self-worth amidst the indolence of London society. His growing connection with Penny Vandervane, Roy's daughter, highlights their shared aimlessness, although Penny's descent into heroin use marks a tragic attempt to escape her disillusionment with life. Sir Roy Vandervane, a successful conductor, grapples with the pressures of celebrity and the allure of youth, leading him to an affair that ultimately fractures his family. Penny's struggles are mirrored by Gilbert Alexander, the Vandervanes' factotum, who embodies a conflicting blend of social activism and personal conservatism, ultimately unable to save the family from its impending disintegration. Sylvia Meers, Roy's young mistress, represents the seductive yet destructive nature of youth, wielding her sharp wit and shamelessness to maintain control over her relationships. Collectively, these characters illustrate a poignant critique of contemporary society's values, the search for meaning, and the consequences of personal choices.
Girl, 20: Analysis of Major Characters
Author: Kingsley Amis
First published: 1971
Genre: Novel
Locale: London, England
Plot: Comic realism
Time: The late 1960's
Douglas Yandell, the narrator and coprotagonist. He is a bachelor and a classical music critic for a London newspaper, occupations to which he devotes himself equally. Thus, he has divided loyalties—or rather, divided antagonisms—toward London society. He stands out, by comparison, as a committed antiquarian. About him he sees indolence and habits of taste that are not simply bad but perversely opposed to human enjoyment. His habit of analysis comes with his critic's vocation, and his bachelor's avocation makes him appreciate laxness. The events of the novel make him doubt himself and his conviction that he is a holdout and a dissenter. The time seems ripe for him to form an alliance with Penny; these two lost souls, in their aimlessness, might help each other find direction. Penny, however, has found another, more desperate, solution. Douglas, newly aware that he is sick, ends the novel with no prospects of recovery.
Sir Roy Vandervane, the other protagonist, a fiftyish symphony conductor. Successful and well respected, he constantly struggles to keep up with the times and to increase his already considerable celebrity. There is nothing serious about him, besides his talent for music, but his energy, affability, and undisguised enthusiasm for low pursuits give him charm. Roy is dissatisfied with the respectability of married life and takes up with a seventeen-year-old mistress, despite her not-to-be-ignored, thoroughgoing faults. He feels that the taboos involved are a boon to his vigor. When his sincere attempt to betray classical music to ingratiate himself with youth ends in the smashing of his Stradivarius violin, he is chastened. The incident stirs his sentimental attachment to what the violin represents: excellence and the difficult, painstaking effort that is made to look easy. He does not learn this lesson well enough, however, and soon is increasing his efforts to curry favor with youth and accept its love for the easy made to look easy. By the end of the novel, he has made an open break with his wife, thus causing the disintegration of his family, and is making plans to marry his young lover.
Penny Vandervane, Roy's daughter by another marriage. She is a lost youth, with a well-developed horror of the entertainments, diversions, and purposes that the London society of her time offers, yet cynical about all of its alternatives. She feels compelled to do nothing, despises anything that by chance or design she happens to do, and is disgusted by her own idleness. Only her family and its troubles animate her. When the family dissolves, she solves the problem of having a life to live by taking heroin. By the end of the novel she has, in effect, begun a long suicide.
Gilbert Alexander, the Vandervanes' West Indian factotum. Although he has adopted a fashionable left-wing activist's personality and speaks in Third-World-liberationist cant, he is the novel's foremost social conservative. He works quietly and with bewildering efficiency as a Vandervane family partisan. He cannot save the Vandervane family; he cannot even save Penny, whose lover he has been and for whom he reserves his most personal attention. When the Vandervanes' situation becomes hopeless, he quits the battlefield. He takes for himself Douglas' girlfriend, winning her by offering demands and interference where Douglas offered merely freedom and independence.
Sylvia Meers, Roy's young mistress, a monster of youth. She makes herself master of every social situation by being eagerly insulting. She has enough native intelligence to give her insults sting, and she also draws on her complete shamelessness and an utter confidence in the virtues of youth. Her enthusiasm for railing against bourgeois mores and manners runs only slightly ahead of her enthusiasm for bourgeois privileges and luxuries. All the characters in the novel work against her affair with Roy, but she keeps her hold on Roy by the purity of her lewdness. At the book's close, they are making plans for their marriage.