Jill by Philip Larkin

I was confused about this book because when I read the summary, it said it was about 'an undergraduate at Oxford', and since the title is a female name, I assumed that it was going to be about a young woman at war-time Oxford. Consequently, I spent the first quarter of the book wondering where the main character was and who this annoying, feeble John Kemp was. It turned out that John Kemp is the main character, while Jill is at first his imaginary sister, then a girl named Gillian that he actually meets. I thought this novel was pretty weak though well-written, it reminded me of an Evelyn Waugh novel with no sense of humour. I felt very strange about the protagonist, because I found a lot of the things Larkin describes very touching and understandable (feeling out of place in a new school, feeling petrified with fear in social situations, wanting to become friends with cruel and indifferent people), but on the other hand, I found John Kemp so insipid and weak and limp, and his obsession with Jill sort of creeped me out, I definitely had no sympathy for him there. Class is everywhere (of course), and at times it seemed like a sort of parable against trying to disturb the class system. It was painfully obvious as soon as John started to hang around too much with his roommate from hell, Christopher, and isolate himself from his hard-working, lower-class (like John himself) would-be friend Whitbread, that everything would go wrong for him. I did really enjoy the style and narrative voice, but often I felt like Larkin was just describing random things, trying to imbue them with meaning and sound impressive (which is unsurprising since he was twenty-one when he wrote it).