Thank you, Lucky Jim

For some of us, satire and humour bring solace during difficult times. For me, a classic “campus novel” helped my revisit my definition of “success” and reorient myself on a happy path.

In my early twenties, I was studying history in graduate school and having a miserable time. I knew in the first week that I was in the wrong place but didn’t know what else to do with myself. I was on scholarship had committee myself for the year an hadn’t had a back-up plan to becoming a professor for several years.

Thank goodness for Kingsley Amis and Lucky Jim. For those who have not read the story, Lucky Jim was published in 1954 as Great Britain embarked on a plan to widely expand their post-secondary school system, building new universities and creating jobs for a wider pool of young academics.

The story details the the academic and romantic trials of Jim Dixon, a reluctant history lecturer at an unnamed provincial, “red-brick” English university. As he battles through departmental politics, a publishing crisis and a volatile romance, he finds salvation in the form of a big-city socialite with a golden heart and a vast network of business connections. After drunkenly speechifying on the pretentiousness of university culture, he loses any chance of teaching at the university but gains the opportunity to move to London and work for a corporate titan.

I know that is not the fairy-tale ending that everyone long for but that was exactly the kind of story I needed to hear before perhaps embarking on largely forgettable and regretful career of toxic mentors, savage mediocrity and complete occupational precocity. I eventually made my own move into the private sector and it was much better than the academic alternative for me.

If you are at a similar point in your path, why not choose fun, family and a normal, you should do the same. If you have doubts, read Lucky Jim.