Does Lucky Jim stand up well against is American contemporaries?

One of those truisms that actually is true: English novels tend to be about inclusion, bringing the hero/heroine into society (Dickens, Austen being the paradigms); American novels tend to be about exclusion, with the hero/heroine "setting off for the territories" or floating free on a coffin. In the 20th century, the categories began to break down considerably. That in part explains why "Lucky Jim," so tame and antiquated today, was a shocking success in postwar England. Here was a novel about a misfit, a loser, an outsider - atypical of British fiction. But after the war young writers in England were challenging British society and conventions in the way that American writers had been doing forever. But does Lucky Jim stand up against its contemporaries? Not hardly. The postwar American cohort of writers was so much more profound and funny, playing for much bigger stakes: think of Roth, Heller, Yates, Mailer as the leading edge of writers making sense of life after the war. Their characters suffered, they beat their heads against the war, they threw up their hands in despair, they said no in thunder. Kingsley Amis's aimless protagonist, Dixon (which I misspelled yesterday) rails against - what? - the tenure system in a provincial English university? Pretty small stakes, that. But in its time, I think British readers saw this as the leading edge of a revolution in British letters. It's still a funny book, and Amis is a solid, deft writer, scene by scene, but the world he inhabits, or at least the world he created, is bound pretty tight.