Jake Richardson, an Oxford don nearing sixty with a lifetime's lechery behind him, is in pursuit of his lost libido and heads off to the consulting room of a miniature sex therapist. Not one to disobey a doctor's orders, he runs the full humiliating gamut of sex labs and trendy 'workshops', where more than souls are bared. He decks himself with cunning gadgetry, dreams up a weekly fantasy, pets diligently with his overweight wife and browses listlessly through porn magazines behind locked doors. Is sex really worth it? As liberationists abuse him, a campus hostess bores him into bed - and even his own wife starts acting oddly - Jake seriously begins to wonder.
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 3.5 / 5.0
Should be required reading in medical schools:
Anyone who has had to seek out an elusive medical diagnosis should laugh aloud. The novel is scabrous and cringe-inducing---and uproariously funny. It should be required reading in all medical schools.
a great quote::
"...[T]heir concern with the surface of things, with objects and appearances, with their surroundings and how they looked and sounded in them, with seeming to be better and to be right while getting everything wrong, their automatic assumption of the role of injured party in any clash of wills, their certainty that a view is the more credible and useful for the fact that they hold it, their use of misunderstanding and misrepresentation as weapons of debate, their selective sensitivity to tones of voice,... more info
Bit thingy about the thing:
In a new millennium awash with exotic and mainstream treatments for the euphemistically phrased class of conditions referred to as `erectile dysfunction', Jake's Thing reads as an interesting period piece from less medically interventionalist times. What exactly is Jake's Thing? Surely a decline in libido is to be expected as one approaches 60. Maybe his thing is no more than a reaction to his overweight, frustrated (and as we later learn desperate) housewife. According to his treating physician,... more info
A nice title:
The title is of course nice, in the sense of precise, referring to the way a counsellor might euphemistically refer to Jake's "problem", his impotence, also to Jake's penis, and also perhaps to Jake's attitude.
This was the first of the trilogy of Amis Pere's trilogy of deeply angry, anti-humanist and misogynist novels (the others being _Stanley and the Women_ and _Russian Hide and Seek_), and perhaps the funniest. The objects of Amis' satire (trendy doctors and counsellors, the "helping professions" in... more info
