Kingsley Amis is one of my favorite writers, and Lucky Jim (1954) of course is probably his most famous novel. It's also his first novel, which makes him one of those writers who spent their entire career trying to live up to early success. Despite Lucky Jim's preeminent reputation, several later novels are at least as good: I'd mention as my personal favorites The Anti-Death League, The Green Man, Ending Up, The Alteration, and The Old Devils.
I think this is my third reading of Lucky Jim. It remains a very enjoyable book. It's the story of Jim Dixon, a history lecturer at a provincial English university shortly after the second world war. Jim is involved in an unsatisfactory relationship with a drippy fellow lecturer called Margaret Peel, who uses emotional blackmail such as implicit suicide attempts (she took sleeping pills after breaking with her previous boyfriend) to keep him on the string. He hates his job, and he hates his boss (Professor Welch) if anything even more, while worrying that he won't be retained for the next school year. He hates phoniness in general, particularly that represented by Professor Welch, who is into recreations of old English music (recorders and all).
The plot revolves mainly around Dixon's growing attraction to Christine Callaghan, a beautiful girl who is nominally Professor Welch's son Bertrand's girlfriend -- but Bertrand is also fooling around with a married woman, and he's a crummy artist to boot. Also, Dixon is working on a lecture about Merrie Olde Englande, which he hopes will impress Professor Welch enough that he can keep his job, but every sentence of which he hates. The resolution is predictable, if rather convenient for Dixon (involving a rich uncle of Christine's), but it satisfies. The book itself is really very funny: such set-pieces as Dixon's hangover-ridden lecture, and his disastrous drunken night at the Welch's, remain screams after multiple rereadings.
I should say that some things bother me a bit. Some of Dixon's stunts (such as stealing a colleague's insurance policies and burning them) seem, well, felonious. And of course Margaret Peel really is someone he's better off breaking up with, but the way Christine is presented as naturally good because she is beautiful does seem rather sexist. Still, all this can be laid to accurate description of a certain character -- and if we root for Jim (as we more or less naturally do), it should be with some uneasiness.
All this said, Lucky Jim is deservedly a classic of 20th Century fiction, and an enormously entertaining book. This edition includes an introduction by David Lodge, who is both an first rate writer of comic novels in the same mode as Lucky Jim, and a first rate critic as well.