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 agent’s nymphomaniacal wife.