Dixon has also been casually dating a female lecturer, Margaret Peels he is not very attracted to Margaret at all, but feels trapped in a relationship with her out of pity and inertia and social pressure. Dixon is on what they call a "two-year probation" and is in a constant state of fear that he will be let go by the erratic head of the History Department, Professor Ned Welch, and much of the novel's volume consists of Dixon trying to stay on Welch's good side-for example, by getting his admittedly boring article on the economic effects of innovations in shipbuilding in the 15th century published-and seeing his efforts upended by his own vices and shortcomings as well as bad luck. James Dixon, the Jim of the title, is a young academic who doesn't like to read very much (his "policy it was to read as little as possible of any given book") and for eight or nine months has held a junior position at a mediocre English college lecturing on medieval history even though he doesn't know what the word "scholasticism" means (Dixon doesn't let lack of comprehension of its meaning keep him from using the term every day, however) and mixes up Aquinas and Augustine. So from a Howard County library I borrowed a 2012 New York Review of Books Classics edition of Amis's first published novel, Lucky Jim, which is like 265 pages long in this edition. I have often thought I should read something by Kinglsey Amis, important British man-of-letters, fan of genre literature (he wrote a lot about James Bond, for example) and co-editor with Robert Conquest, the Anglo-American poet and historian, of SF anthologies.
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