Roger Micheldene, an English publisher, is on the loose in the U.S. He spends an October week shuttling between New York and Budweiser College in Pennsylvania. This exercises all his British appetites...snobbery, gluttony, anger, sloth and lust.

But Amis roasts Americans as well and serves us familiar dishes, though in a piquant sauce: the precocious undergraduate author of a far-out novel, an earnest young priest, and an alcoholic literary agents nymphomaniacal wife.

They are all presented with glee and gusto and the keenest wit, but it is Roger Micheldene--at once a prototype of the insufferable Englishman and an individual with sufficient humor to win our sneaking sympathy--who dominates a supremely entertaining comedy of bad manners.