Martin Amis: fire away!

Which was the THARG'S FUTURE SHOCKS version of London Fields?

I know I know that Sir Kingsley was terrible old reactionary - but also a much funnier, more humane and insightful writer than his rep/public image suggests. 'Old Devils' a brilliant portrait of dissapointed old age that pisses over anything written by Amis junior. 'Night Train', M.A.'s feeble attempt to write an American crime novel a la Elmore Leonard, is his career nadir, containing one of the worst opening sentences of all time - "I am a Police" etc.

I took against M.Amis when I heard him say on the radio in 1977 or 778: "The Blank Generation have no moral energy." (It has been pointed out to me subsequently that to harbour a death-dealing rage for 25 years over what may have been a throwaway wind-up joke where he changed his mind WITHIN MINUTES may well be a scenario which comes to bite me on the ass in times to come. LET IT COME: for he cannot write to save his life and that is all. Nabokov indeed.

Was it the poor grammar that riled you, mark?

I rather doubt he'll ever write anything as good as "the green man" by his dad, tho. xoxo

He did a good enough piece on the Californian pornography industry for the Guradian, although he did brag about his cosy chats with Salman Rushdie etc (Julian Barnes no doubt glowering in a corner).

Tharg's Porno Shocks was a lucrative idea too quickly dismissed by Fleetway.

on the other hand i then read the rachel papers and couldn't believe how bad it was.

so, classic for experience, dud for pretty much everything else, i guess.

zing

I's 100% certain I agree with everything the critic says without ever having to even glance at the book's front cover.

I's

Oops, bit of an Ali G moment there.

too bad the critic is Michiko Katatani.

I don't know who that is.

yeah i hate Michiko but hey she uses the word chucklehead within the first paragraph, so there's that.

I did like that, true.

There was an article in the Sunday Times or similar recently denouncing those hatin' on Nigella, because of her struggles as a single mother to make a success of her life. Yes, I know this isn't about Amis, but it kind of is really.

this is a great slapdown!

"this article is by michiko kakutani" is not really a cogent criticism. surely you can do better.

wait, this new Amis has fiction and non fiction in the same book?

9/11 changed everything

"this article is by michiko kakutani" is not really a cogent criticism. surely you can do better.

I thought "Michiko Katutani" was enough to alert our readers that a first-class pedant reviewed the book. This isn't a badly written essay though.

Is Koba the Dread worth reading?

not really unless you're invested in finding out what a pair of choads amis and hitch have become over the last two decades.

I think that, as a result of this latest piece of crap from Amis, people will now accept, retrospectively, that "Koba the Dread" was a load of bollocks too

Mr. Amis, ever the littérateur, prattles on about the appropriateness of the abbreviation “9/11” and how this formulation makes little sense in Britain, where the habit of noting the day first and the month second would make this “11/9."

oh christ he really is a pub bore.

how this formulation makes little sense in Britain

But it's true! When I say 9/11 no-one, but no-one, knows what I'm talking about!

Michael Haneke really ought to be paying Amis a residual, since the plot of Funny Games appears virtually unchanged in The Information.

Even before he turned reactionary just like his old man, I never got on with Martin Amis. For all his focus on the importance of style, I find his own style so horribly try-hard as to be almost unreadable: "The contrails of the more distant aeroplanes were like incandescent spermatozoa, sent out to fertilise the universe." I guess there are people who like that kind of sentence-making, but not me.

The last thing I read of his was "Night Train", a piss-poor effort at a crime novel.

Anyway, generally, "like father like son - sooner or later" shock horror youth cult probe...

aye that was bad. i suspect if i re-read the novels i claim to like, all of them read more than ten years ago, i would find myself not liking them so much. some of the critical essays i reckon are probably still ok.

xpost

The Information is hilarious.

You Britishers sure are crazy when it comes to Martin Amis

xp: Koba the Dread's pretty good. I certainly enjoyed it and there are lots of insane and entertaining facts in there, as one would expect I suppose. I like all those economicslite, diet sociology books, and Koba is like an equivalent for history - only with an exceptionally intrusive and highly-strung narrator, rather than a laidback Gladwell dude.

The last thing I read of his was "Night Train", a piss-poor effort at a crime novel.

lol

I suspect his novels wouldn't work for me the way the used to (except the ones I didn't like the first time round, like Yellow Dog or Night Train, which would work exactly the way they did), but I still maintain 'Experience' is a nifty, slightly mad, bit of wonderfulness.

yeah EXPERIENCE is fantastic. his best book since MONEY.

Experience is great because is quotes Kingley describing the first Terminator film as a "flawless masterpiece".

"koba the dread" is awful stuff, maybe worth reading only for all the moments where MA inadvertently proves what a first-class dick he is. my favorite: the part where he oh-so-seriously says if he had to choose he'd much rather be incinerated at hiroshima than die in a work camp.

also gripping character study of stalin: did you know he was a BAD MAN? who did BAD THINGS?

I put it down after 30 pgs, gagging on his naivete. His best buddy Hitchens took him to task for this a few years ago in a published review.

http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2002/09/hitchens.htm

To be fair, I too would rather be incinerated in a nuclear blast than die in a prison work camp.

Experience is great because is quotes Kingley describing the first Terminator film as a "flawless masterpiece".

-- caek, Thursday, April 10, 2008 1:32 AM (7 hours ago) Bookmark Link

lol yes -- i think hitch, mart, and kingers go to see 'beverley hills cop' and only KA digs it. obviously KA could be a dick but some of the stuff in that book is win.

One of the big differences between père and fils - Kingsley was always unashamedly into popular culture. He even wrote a James Bond novel - I'd be kind of interested to see what that's like! Hard to imagine Martin doing that. (Although now I think about it didn't Martin write a book about Space Invaders or something)

kingsley's book *about* bond (i haven't read the bond novel itself) is really good.

MA has written about popular culture -- iirc the space invaders thing is the name of a collection, which includes an essay on same -- especially hollywood: 'money' is partly based on his experience as a screenwriter. his critical books have interviews with speilberg and de palma, and maybe madonna -- i can't remember so well, suffice to say he was less at ease with this stuff than kingsley.

Martin says in Experience that Kingsley called one of the Terminator movies "a flawless masterpiece" as they exited the theater together.

A "flawleshhhhh mashterpieshe" more like

Experience is great because is quotes Kingley describing the first Terminator film as a "flawless masterpiece".

-- caek, Thursday, April 10, 2008 1:32 AM (7 hours ago) Bookmark Link

!

And this was also the period when what had partly been a put-on — the persona of the reactionary philistine — began to rigidify into something real and permanent. Kingsley became the very sort of person he used to make fun of, declaring, for example, that England’s best living writer was Dick Francis and that henceforth he wanted only to read books that began, “A shot rang out.” Christopher Hitchens says he thinks that the process of self-ossification was pretty much complete by 1984. “I remember that Martin, Kingsley and I all had dinner, and then we went to see ‘Beverly Hills Cop,’ ” he said a few weeks ago. “Naturally, you couldn’t go to anything French or Japanese or Polish. All through the movie Kingsley was laughing with what we assumed was pretend mirth, and afterward he announced, ‘Yes, an absolutely flawless masterpiece.’ Suddenly it became clear he wasn’t joking and that he meant to defend the virtues of the film with absolute fidelity. It was a very striking moment — the sense that the face had grown to fit the mask and that the pose had become himself.”

lol aging. my dad sort of hardened and narrowed his viewpoints in his 60s, not as flamboyantly as kingers but recognizably similiar, i think most people go thru this if they're lucky enough to live that long. to be honest I feel this happening already with regard to my musical tastes and I'm still in the spring of middle age.

also via google:

—Get your hair cut...Get your hair cut.
This suggestion was being offered to the television set, more particularly to the actress Linda Hamilton every time she appeared on screen. We were watching a tape of The Terminator (again). An old science-fiction hand, Kingsley was a great fan of The Terminator, and seven years later he would make no secret of his admiration for Terminator 2 ('a flawless masterpiece'), which I took him to at the Odeon, Marble Arch.
—Martin Amis, Experience

I suspect the "philistinism" was there more or less from the start. After all his very first novel Lucky Jim rips into academia, pretentiousness, preciousness etc., vs the joys of binge-drinking...

how did that business with that eagleton chap end?

rough sex

ewwwwwww

I haven't read Koba the Dread, but isn't there one particularly egregious section in which Amis compares the screaming of his baby in the middle of the night to the screams of gulag prisoners?

It's in the Hitchens' thing linked above:

"The sounds she was making," I said unsmilingly to my wife on her return, "would not have been out of place in the deepest cellars of the Butyrki Prison in Moscow during the Great Terror. That's why I cracked and called Caterina [the nanny]."

You couldn't make it up

Thanks, should have checked that. It's the nanny bit that really makes the quote, isn't it.

It's sort of comforting to know that Kingsley never had to witness Terminator 3.

David Cameron = Gwyn Barry

I wonder what he thought about T2?

I guess we'll never know.

another great moment comes when amis breaks down the way trotsky phrases something in his autobiography and goes on for like three pages about how subtly it proves how heartless and inhumane the man was -- evidently oblivious to the fact that he's reading a translation, not trotsky's actual words.

i dunno why everyone hates him, or why they love him so. but i read his interview in gq this month. hes an interesting figure. agreed with some of his points. his main problem with muslims becoming more religious though seemed to be that pre 9-11 he was able to fuck "muslim talent" (his words) and now since then, men like him (white upper class poshos?) have found it harder to do.

perhaps that has been the biggest downfall of the war on terror? less muslim women sleeping with old white men?

I read a piece a while back where he summed up his position as something like: 'for multiethnicity; against multiculturalism'. I think that was probably a better way of putting it.

he's been married for 15 years. well, 25. so idk if he'd openly talk about shagging other women. i guess he's making a general point.

A historical point in his case, I think - he did go on about former girlfriends in the piece I read.

yeah i know hes not really talking about himself, more his 'successors' perhaps.

"'for multiethnicity; against multiculturalism'. "

that makes sense.

it makes some kind of syntactic sense i guess

seems like hes saying hes fine with ppl of all diff races, just as long as its a bit more monocultural.

The novel Amis is currently working on, State of England, will, he believes, "be considered as the final insult" to his country. The story of a violent criminal, Lionel Asbo, who wins the lottery, it's "a metaphor which translates well, I think, our state of moral decrepitude: a huge reward for no effort".

Lionel Asbo.

lolsome piece generally
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/apr/18/martin-amis-england-moral-decrepitude

London Fields was the first novel I read that accurately portrayed modern evil. I thought: this will date quickly, like Hangover Square, and it has... but for that novel alone Amis has to be recognised as a great writer, despite his dire Islamophobia and general reactionary vibe.… pic.twitter.com/9UhAaceFT6

— Paul Mason (@paulmasonnews) May 20, 2023

Reading several old (Amis) reviews of Mailer et al today reaffirms an old assessment. Most people agree that Amis was uneven and flawed as a novelist. But he was, at his best, an unusually brilliant book reviewer. Such a humble trade, but I've seen few better at it, again and again. Eventually, understandably, he left it behind, but perhaps his most consistently outstanding work remains in this occasional genre.

Indeed.

Liked what he wrote about Ballard for example.

'Dead Babies' was a good read. The obsession with teeth was pretty creepy.

I haven't read a lot of his stuff, but his takedown of Hannibal by Thomas Harris is brilliant.

xp huh that’s funny you should say that. I’m sure I’ve said before that I don’t really know his work at all but one of the reasons I get major bullshitter vibes off him is from the piece he wrote when Ballard died. It was iirc mainly a personal remembrance and fine, quite touching even, but I’ll never forget the thudding wrongness when he got around to the work and praised the “creaminess” of JGB’s prose(!)

i only read the Rachel Papers, London Fields, the Information, and Time's Arrow, but I love all four of those novels. RIP grump.

Hmm. It’s been awhile but the thing I seem to remember him writing was something like “the way to get the hang of Ballard’s prose is to realize he has no sense of humor.” Maybe this was even in an old introduction to High-Rise. It’s sort of almost unfair but basically true at the same time. If he has a sense of humor it’s totally deadpan as if you are not quite sure that he is in on the joke or not like, say, Adam West.

Can’t find the exact sentences I am looking for, but the whole thing is mentioned here: https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/14764/3/14764.pdf

The War Against Cliché is at the top of the Amazon Charts! Well. one of them anyway.

That and *Experience* are both fantastic books. I'd take *Money* of the novels but have a soft spot for *The Information* and *Night Train*. I think he's right about Ballard, FWIW, but it does kind of miss the point? Bit like saying Stockhausen didn't bring the funk.

Hmm. He also wrote an introduction to Ballard's Complete Stories.

Yes surely the man who wrote 'The Assassination Of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered As A Downhill Motor Race' had no sense of humour

Experience is his best .

RIP.

As I've said in various threads he's someone I read a lot 15-23 & has always had too much room in my head - contemplating aspects of Mart has way too much draw for me & I ended up reading well past the recommended date.*

There isn't a novel without deadly flaws I think - even Money, there's an endless hundred pages (more?) where Self's almost redeemed and a worthless plot and, fuck, the 80s pomo with 'Martin Amis' and ofc anything to do with women. & it's been 25 years since I read London Fields & mostly remember the fucking Nicola Six nonsense and Keith Talent being a grotesque too far (but I think I'll re-read it now).

but but but the best parts of the best of them, when he's on his turf, I still think 'yes' - dense grotesque, shit old London, repugnant falling-apart men. A sometimes brilliant local comic novelist of sour grime who had some silly ideas about his own seriousness but was immense fun to read.

I'd take Success and Money as the best right now - agree that Experience is his most successful literary work but the other mess is what made/makes me interested in him.

Again RIP. I'm going to miss you being around

* imo Yellow Dog, genuinely bad & mechanically broken; Lionel Asbo, not as bad as I'd expected but that's an incredibly low bar; Pregnant Widow, did not finish; still reading Inside Story - some of his best stuff since Experience but really flabby, right down to sentence level. Gaps - Zone of Interest (will read), Koba the Dread, Night Train.

I sorta see what he might mean about Ballard but otoh "Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months"

"it's been 25 years since I read London Fields & mostly remember the fucking Nicola Six nonsense and Keith Talent being a grotesque too far"

how so

WHAT ABOUT THE CREAMY PROSE

Lol

Zone of Interest and Night Train weren't bad. Koba the Dread I never got round to.

Wonder if I made up the thing about the sense of humor or humour even. Don't think so.

Okay, this is what I found in his review of High-Rise:

I hope no one wastes their time worrying whether High-Rise is prescient, admonitory or sobering. For Ballard is neither believable nor unbelievable, just as his characterization is merely a matter of ‘roles’ and his situations merely a matter of ‘context’: he is abstract, at once totally humourless and entirely unserious. The point of his visions is to provide him with imagery, with opportunities to write well, and this seems to me to be the only intelligible way of getting the hang of his fiction. The prose of High-Rise may not have the baleful glare of that of Crash or Vermilion Sands, but the book is an intense and vivid bestiary, which lingers in the mind and chronically disquiets it.

Amis, Martin. The War Against Cliche (Vintage International) (p. 103). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

It's here, as you said:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/apr/25/jg-ballard-martin-amis

Ballard will be remembered as the most original English writer of the last century. He used to like saying that writers were "one-man teams" and needed the encouragement of the crowd (ie, their readers). But he will also be remembered as a one-man genre; no one else is remotely like him. He was a talisman. Very few Ballardians (who are almost all male) were foolish enough to emulate him. He was sui generis. What was influential, though, was the marvellous creaminess of his prose, and the weird and sudden expansions of his imagery.

Some of his books seems to be out of print in the US, including Money and The Rachel Papers.

they were mainstays of the remainder table for at least a decade

feels like that generation of british male authors (amis, will self, julian barnes) have failed to cultivate new readers in this century.

suppose this is true also of jeanette winterson, to keep it from being solely male authors. I'm in the US so perhaps this hasn't held true in the UK, but all of these writers got a large amount of international attention in the 80's and 90's and then they seemed to just vanish on the US market.

Just now recalled that Christopher Priest ended up considering the terrible reviews he got from Martin Amis as badges of honor.

I think he has them on his website for every book of his that Amis reviewed.

Priest is admittedly a very patchy writer. The Affirmation is really good though.

I have some remembered fondness for M. Amis, as well as some frustratingly not-quite-my-sort-of-thing bits. I do not think I want to reread any of him. The Information and London Fields had good bits but nothing I wish to revisit. Information especially was too much of its time.

I recall Rachel Papers being a trifle unpleasant, but Metroland being worse. Which one has the reused condom scene?

In contrast, though, I could really easily reread Sexing the Cherry, The Passion, Flaubert's Parrot, and possibly History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters (well, not all of it but I could skim the good bits).

Actually I think I DO reread

Actually I think I DO reread Flaubert's Parrot every 10 years or so.

I agree that authors like these are probably not attracting new readers in the current century. Neither is Douglas Coupland.

I only became familiar with Amis a couple of months ago when someone on my street put a copy of The War Against Cliché out on the sidewalk and I picked it up. I read it and enjoyed it far more than I expected to. Echoing what has been said elsewhere, his book reviews were very very good and his pantheon of great authors was so convincing it made me want to read late Saul Bellow novels among other things I never would've considered.

feels like that generation of british male authors (amis, will self, julian barnes) have failed to cultivate new readers in this century.

― I? not I! He! He! HIM! (akm), Sunday, May 21, 2023 11:25 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

idk - the generation is the first Granta list (& Self I think was really next-gen, effectively Amis mkII back in the day) & that's also McEwan and Ishiguro, who've done alright this century.

Even Barnes faded into mid-list respectability

sorry unfinished thought:

Even Barnes faded into mid-list respectability, which is a bit different from Self & Amis where you're puzzled by who reads this & sometimes what they think they're doing

https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/2023/05/20/martin-amis-1949-2023-a-sturdy-pillar-of-high-achievement-a-master-turner-of-phrases/

"it's been 25 years since I read London Fields & mostly remember the fucking Nicola Six nonsense and Keith Talent being a grotesque too far"

how so

Like I say, a long time, but iirc he's straight up prole-mockery, darts and curries. I'll re-read and see if I've got that wrong. In Money at least Self is from there and always collapsing back into that, & it's a bit more dynamic (and maybe Amis scratching at a fear - I am not a major novelist, I am basically a shabby man with fucked up teeth who wants to drink, fuck and play pool. & my real father is not Nabokov/Bellow/The Landlord but Kingsley/Fat Vince).

Kingsley >> Martin

It doesn't feel like that gen of British authors is being read with as much enthusiasm as Zadie Smith this century.

But I only tried one Julian Barnes novel, so hardly the target audience for this.

fwiw I once heard Ballard being interviewed on the radio and he came across as a pompous humourless old windbag - though his voice probably added to the aura of pomposity.

of course it's ill-formed -- like every single sentence this aggravating fvck wrote -- but as mark blacklock (writing for birkbeck abt ballard and humour and quietly linked above by JB) notes "at once totally humourless and entirely unserious" is not an entirely terrible way of approaching how surrealism works, viz via oxymoron…

hence, like the joke abt the dogs saying fuck off, i assume amis stole it from someone else. there's a preening glow of the second-hand to his "style" which i find just radioactively offputting, and i don't even generally rate originality as a virtue

I recall Rachel Papers being a trifle unpleasant, but Metroland being worse. Which one has the reused condom scene?

Rachel Papers. Haven't read Metroland in 30 years but I'd expect it to be a bit less unpleasant just because aiui Barnes thinks women are human.

Read 4 or 5 Barnes novels, cannot remember much about any of them except the bit in 10.5 Chapters where Leicester win the FA Cup.

Flaubert's Parrot didn't leave a lasting impression. I got a copy of Bovary (the Lydia Davis translation, which Barnes hates) and am going to try that soon.

Amis knew Ballard's work very well, reviewed book after book as they came out, and I think knew Ballard personally also (Ballard had been good friends with his father). One might diverge from his particular views on Ballard but they're not based on ignorance or pretence.

I would be somewhat close to poster Woof's statement. Most people agree that most of Amis's novels were 'flawed' in some way or other (some of them I have actively thought were dreadful - including, I'm afraid, London Fields and The Information and Yellow Dog - a large slice of his career!), but he also had rare, prodigious talent and wrote many things that were amusing and memorable for many people. He was a big part of recent literary history. Literature has often been been more entertaining for his presence.

Evaluatively comparing MA to his father seems pointless. You might as well say he's inferior to Nabokov, Virginia Woolf or anyone else. It's enough to judge him on his own merits, if you can find them. Which I, to an extent, can.

It doesn't feel like that gen of British authors is being read with as much enthusiasm as Zadie Smith this century.

tbf she's 20 years down from them so that's full generational shift but yeah the whole lot ended up being overtaken by Hilary Mantel on both critical and popular fronts.

xpost in the same place, really. as some here will know, I'm more of a KA fan - who has his own v uneven oeuvre.

on ballard, leaving aside the weird 'creamy' line, I think MA is otm. Humour isn't a component of his writing, TDoJFKCaaDMR aside if you like, or maybe not - his mode was a form of surrealism. He was a suburban, conservative, pompous man, sure, but his approach to imaginative fiction was extraordinary in its effect. I'm sure I've said this ad nauseam elsewhere, but the minimal component parts of his writing were for his time not the most radical or up to date - c levi-strauss anthropology, frazer, jung, victorian adventure fiction - yet from them he produced something strange, brutal and mesmeric. unlike many other writers at all.

The main thing that damages MA for me is his misogyny. Which is incontrovertible in his fiction and parts of his non-fiction alike.

Evaluatively comparing MA to his father seems pointless.

well, yeah

Xy, in college I read every translation I could find and wrote an essay comparing them.

I am not sure if Barnes influenced me to prefer Eleanor Marx Aveling. But the project damaged my brain, and I cannot imagine attempting anything like that ever again.

At my current age and with my current attention span I count myself fortunate to make it through a day where I don't lose my car keys.

I only became familiar with Amis a couple of months ago when someone on my street put a copy of The War Against Cliché out on the sidewalk and I picked it up. I read it and enjoyed it far more than I expected to. Echoing what has been said elsewhere, his book reviews were very very good and his pantheon of great authors was so convincing it made me want to read late Saul Bellow novels among other things I never would've considered.

― Josefa, Monday, May 22, 2023

Great post! Ambushed by unexpected Amis.

Felt like a significant weekend, in terms of personal intimations of mortality. The Smiths and Amis were two things I loved beyond measure as a schoolboy in the mid-1980s - I can probably still recite bits of The Moronic Inferno or Money, just as I can replay every bass and guitar line from the entire Smiths discography on my mental iPod. Feel like both deaths have given a lot of people the opportunity to come out and unashamedly confess their love for something that has seemed slightly shameful for a few decades now - the Guardian/Observer in particular seems on the verge of publishing a special Amis commemorative special issue. I guess James Wood must have been fine tuning his NYer Amis obit for a while - seems like his health was an open secret - but I think he got it right in comparing Amis to Wodehous https://www.newyorker.com/culture/postscript/martin-amiss-comic-music In a funny, Empsonian way, both were pastoral writers?

Spent a bit of Sunday morning flicking through the War Against Cliche and Money and I think a lot of it, on a paragraph by paragraph basis, is still really funny. Went to a Ian Penman reading the other week where he was explaining his turn to the Europe of Derrida and Fassbinder in the late 70s - "what was the alternative? The second Martin Amis novel?" to much slightly smug chuckles. To be honest, these days I would much rather read a few pages of Money than anything by Penman.

tbf she's 20 years down from them so that's full generational shift but yeah the whole lot ended up being overtaken by Hilary Mantel on both critical and popular fronts.

― woof, Monday, 22 May 2023 bookmarkflaglink

I was trying to hunt for an article interviewing young writers (mostly women and many from BAME backgrounds) I saw a while ago but couldn't see it just now (Google is shit and must die). Smith 'broke' in 2000 and I think they were barely in their 20s so next generation.

I can't see a piece like that written about any of this lot. Be interesting to see if the reputation recovers.

Ballard was far, far better. I read his books on the back of a lot of genuine enthusiasm (decades after they were published) for what he did.

On twitter when a writer dies you often get some genuine affection but there isn't much, sometimes there is outright hostility as he was a bigot. If it wasn't for some of the posts here the other tributes would be from the likes of...Boris Johnson and Matthew D'Ancona.

Other twitter have come from Backlisted Pod and John Self. Who annoy me so..

And Paul Mason!

I agree with Wood's fine tribute, except that I don't remotely agree that THE INFORMATION is the best novel.

I largely agree with poster Gimbel, save that I don't comprehend what is meant by 'pastoral'. I never understood what Empson's book was about.

MONEY features a very minor character called Tab Penman.

I believe Amis in Koba the Dread compares the suffering he felt as a result of the crying of his infant child to the suffering of the victims of the Gulag, which to put it mildly seems a bit rich and was laughed at a great deal at the time of publication. OTOH Money was a good read when I was eighteen, so who's to say good or bad etc.

apologies, this amusing paragraph tells me Amis was taken to task by Orlando Figes of all people for "comparing the crying of his six-month daughter with the cries from Butyrki Prison in Moscow during the Great Terror."

On twitter when a writer dies you often get some genuine affection but there isn't much, sometimes there is outright hostility as he was a bigot. If it wasn't for some of the posts here the other tributes would be from the likes of...Boris Johnson and Matthew D'Ancona.

I would expect every tribute to come from British men aged 45-70, & mostly Oxbridge.

I know quite a few women who don't fit that stereotype who love Amis? Nicola Barker for one.

nicola barker is also a far better writer

unlike james wood

xps
Fair. Big lazy generalisation. But almost everything I've seen published so far does fit (James Wood, Boyd Tonkin, Sam Leith, Philip Hensher, everyone xyzzz mentions, Geoff Dyer, etc. That's putting aside his peer group novelists like Rushdie and Boyd.)

I think it says as much about the address books of broadsheet culture editors as it does about a particular writer's appeal. I imagine Kevin Barry could write something interesting too.

heh -- I wondered whether to bother with The Information.

Punchline here is pretty funny though.

The Information (1995) was notable not so much for its critical success, but for the scandals surrounding its publication. The enormous advance of £500,000 (almost US$800,000) demanded and subsequently obtained by Amis for the novel attracted what the author described as "an of hostility" from writers and critics

I'll stan for *The Information*. It's ugly in the usual Amis ways but has a horrible dark energy about it and mostly punches up/sideways.

And he spent most of the advance on his teeth, right? He came in for some weird extended criticism about this iirr? I mean, sure, bougie in the extreme to spend vast amounts on cosmetic surgery but the dude did have a tumour removed.

An what of hostility?

Eisteddfod, turns out

Oh, hyperlink broke zing, sorry.

But I thought you were making a Lucky Jim reference.

To this famous passage:

In considering this strangely neglected topic,’ it began. This what neglected topic? This strangely what topic? This strangely neglected what?

This Eisteddfod of what?

The teeth, yes.

Alfred and Chinaski, I suspect The Information would feel dated if one picked it up today.

Personally I think its treatment of diversity and inclusion might have seemed wry and perhaps vaguely satirical at the time, but would clang pretty badly in the current "war against woke" DeSantis era.

(Particularly thinking of the gag where a stable of "diverse" writers includes a Deaf writer as well as an British literary/experimental novelist. Maybe I am magnifying that in the distorted lens of memory.)

David Lodge was traumatized by London Fields Booker Prize incident? And Angela Carter was also excluded?

I didn't much like The Information but mostly remember shaking my head at the v. 90s here-comes-the-science-bit bits.

Oh, Lodge says Angela Carter was not excluded, she didn’t publish anything that year.

"His essays on Larkin ... were vital exercises in holding back the mob when Larkin’s reputation was in the dock." The mob? Really?https://t.co/v5WKDqz2zA

— Elvis Buñuelo (@Mr_Considerate) May 22, 2023

in what exercises holding back the mob? vital exercises what the mob? vital exercises holding back the what?

vital court security officers

Holding back Tom Paulin.

coventry crown court, Judge Roughneck yelling 'Take him away'

Anne of Eisteddfod, Patron Saint of Teeth

It doesn't feel like that gen of British authors is being read with as much enthusiasm as Zadie Smith this century.

Are any of Smith's novels as good as her debut? I managed to finish Autograph Man and NW and thought both were a mess compared to White Teeth. Her essays are good.

xp huh that’s funny you should say that. I’m sure I’ve said before that I don’t really know his work at all but one of the reasons I get major bullshitter vibes off him is from the piece he wrote when Ballard died. It was iirc mainly a personal remembrance and fine, quite touching even, but I’ll never forget the thudding wrongness when he got around to the work and praised the “creaminess” of JGB’s prose(!)

― michel goindry (wins), Sunday, 21 May 2023 bookmarkflaglink

There is always another POV:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/may/22/martin-amis-literature-crusader-peers-chutzpah

We repeated the exercise barely three months later when another of his great heroes and friends, JG Ballard, died. This time we made it to over 1,000 words. “Very few Ballardians (who are almost all male) were foolish enough to emulate him. He was sui generis,” Amis enunciated with verbal italics. “What was influential, though, was the marvellous creaminess of his prose, and the weird and sudden expansions of his imagery,” he continued. “Marvellous creaminess”, “weird and sudden expansions” – how did he do that?

lmao

*writes clunky and wrong description* it’s like watching a magic trick

Every time someone quotes a sample of Amis' purported verbal wizardry it looks awful. Flipping through the channels this morning, I was surprised to see Amis' lead Morning Joe; but when Ed Luce purred over some banal phrase (becoming a grandfather "is like getting a telegram from the mortuary” or something) and everyone on the panel laughed I just thought, right, they're politicos, what do they know.

*Amis' death lead

I don't know if Ballard was that influential on other writers. Weird and sudden expansions also doesn't quite do it for me. To have all this be described as the work of a genius...it's Guardian-y culture that had no answers when the cranks came for the UK's membership of the EU.

Meanwhile Ian Penman wrote a pretty good essay on a Chuck Berry biog last week.

The RJ Smith bio.

I assume

https://harpers.org/archive/2023/06/chuck-berry-an-anthropologist-of-filth

That Smith bio is first-rate.

Are any of Smith's novels as good as her debut? I managed to finish Autograph Man and NW and thought both were a mess compared to White Teeth. Her essays are good.

I liked On Beauty a great deal. The plot is Forster's but it's far away the best attempt at doing this kind of thing I've ever read.

I do like her essays and I'd like to read her thinking through Amis. I think weirdly she's the next-gen equivalent - the UK's famous literary novelist.

i think that’s right, tho i don’t think i’d consciously realised it until now. in my head i’ve got a checklist “new yorker”, “young when they made their reputation”, and “essayist/state of the nation novelist”, plus the sense of someone with their hands on the wires of contemporary cultural mores and manners that defines them both. no not you lanchester.

Lol

also both good writers ofc. and it’s weird, because at the time it v much felt like MA was a *good* writer. now i can only really stick Money and Experience (which i do think is v good). he *is* a good reviewer, but the didacticism can flatten its subject. it feels simplistic. a martin amis show. his da was the same with books he didn’t like, but not with books he did like, which are by far his best reviews.

from a decent FT piece

His criticism was insightful, cutting, tightly wound, and as much a pleasure to take in as the fiction. His model was the Canadian literary theorist Northrop Frye, and his mode was authority, not ambivalence.

im bored by that, unless it’s wildly creative, abusing-its-position authority. like Empson.

in a different context i was thinking the other day that people are never so unfashionable as when they die.

sure there’s a flare of interest. but people are already sick of you.

that does of course mean there’s a shock, a gasp of breath, when people in their prime are taken from you - chadwick bozeman is jumping into my mind.

or Ronald Reagan

I often get that feeling of sorrow that the good ones die too soon, while the not-so-good ones just go on and on. Joe Strummer is dead, and Mike Love is still giving interviews.

This is not one of those times.

Mild lol at the idea that there is a "mob" of people who are following and/or caring all that much about the relative reputations of authors of English literary fiction in 2023.

Shame if something happened to that Booker Prize of yours.

I've just been thinking about poster Gimbel's statement about Amis's readers, and it's true: anecdotally, some of the most passionate enthusiasts for it I've known have been women.

Like others, I've gone back to THE WAR AGAINST CLICHÉ in the last few days. The amount of good writing in the book review genre that it contains is staggering. The amount of reading he did, also. Three or four reviews of Iris Murdoch in a row and you can see he'd read almost all of her voluminous output, and every time he finds a fresh way to say something that's amused but not contemptuous, sometimes admiring. Page for page - almost 500 - it may be the strongest set of book reviews I've picked up. (Not all of it is reviews - and indeed I suspect that the pieces that aren't reviews are less effective.)

In terms of 'that's dated badly', 'you wouldn't see that in print now', what stands out most recurrently is the use of the word 'queer' for a non-heterosexual, perhaps homosexual, person. One could reflect on this a lot. I won't do so here.

I suppose it stands out when a het man uses it. Me, I use "queer" to refer to anyone on the scale, preferring it to "LGBGTQ" -- unless it offends someone.

A racist is called a Prince by the liberal media.

If I accept the mightiness of Bellow & Nabokov it’s partly bc Amis persuaded me, both by the precepts of his criticism & the example of his fiction, which grapples with & overcomes their influence. What I mean is that I liked him better, & trusted him more https://t.co/jvHavN4Eyn

— Neri Zilber (@NeriZilber) May 23, 2023

Bad teeth or not, was Amis considered a catch? I watched a couple interviews last night just to be sure and...he looks in most of them like a mackeral-mouthed bounder.

He was also about 4 foot tall apparently (slight exaggeration).

similar proportions to his dad - “the same height sitting down as standing up” as he put it once.

I think the women of 70s/80s haute bohemian London were def into him but maybe he just really put the effort in.

He has been described as having Mick Jagger like looks in one of The Guardian write-ups.

yes I think that's a traditional comparison - a mini Jagger. He might even use it himself? (with some irony tbf)

btw happy to be corrected on the point of women being very into Amis - not my experience generally but I can think of a few exceptions

i think the jagger thing was coined by someone else, clive james? 'a stubby mick jagger'.

lol the hacks not shy of using it

I think (I don't remember it as published by Lit Hub) this was the piece where several, mostly young, writers from BAME backgrounds talk about the impact of Zadie Smith's writing on their own.

https://lithub.com/in-praise-of-zadie-smiths-london/

Being about 4 foot tall never stopped HG Wells wowing the literary laydeez.

lol the hacks not shy of using it🕸

xps
I could see a piece like that about Amis published in the early or mid 90s; the writers might be young but would likely not be from a BAME background.

Hmm interesting, might have a hunt around to see if there's anything online.

Tom D’s references to his height making me think of a certain Twilight Zone episode.

I've just read a couple of Amis's earliest reviews of Ballard. I'm surprised how harsh they are. I had thought Amis much more dedicated to Ballard, already. Maybe he became more that way later. A 2001 note to the CRASH review implies that.

The note also states that Ballard's stories '*are* hard SF, and they constitute the best hard-SF short stories ever written' (p.96).

Ballard's stories are not hard SF.

Who wrote that note?

Who wrote that what

how much cream

Amis wrote the note, to his own earlier text.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrbFQEcpJ3A

Although come to think of it maybe by creaminss he was making a comparison to a pint of Guinness.

Traven sat on the veranda, gazing with a glazed cornea over the creamy head of a pint of Guinness, past the gleaming bones of the dead Alsatian and into the leafy grean darkness of the gymnospheres in the distance.

Martins lay on his back in the anonymous NYC flat, surveying the old concern of rug & gut & gum, wincing from the pain that radiated from the hole in his Upper West Side, distracted by the beat of his tom-tom ticker, in his mind's eye envisioning the upcoming transfusion and resection in the gleaming Curry Hill laboratories of the DNA boys.

v. good article

https://newrepublic.com/article/172883/martin-amis-let-readers-joke?utm_campaign=SF_TNR&utm_medium=social&utm_source=Twitter

mini Jagger

Got the moves like Amis

Some valid appreciation in that New Republic article but is it cowardice, closing ranks or some sense of misplaced respect that so many articles are ducking the 'bigtoed arsehole' phase of Amis' life?

Yes, that's right: 5ft nothing, looked like Jagger and had famously big toes.

don't know how this is ducking

His most overtly political writing was his worst;

You want her to engage with his "worst" writing?

Why do all the examples in the paragraphs after the phrase "a brilliant prose stylist" in that New Republic piece suck so very, very hard? I could pull open a random airport crime novel and find a sentence on any page that would give me more pleasure as a reader than any of Amis's "look how clever I am! look how many words I know! oh, and look how much smarter you and I are than these people I'm writing about!" mini-tirades.

Why do all the examples in the paragraphs after the phrase "a brilliant prose stylist" in that New Republic piece suck so very, very hard?

Because you're not into Amis, and that's ok if you're not into Amis, and he's not for you?

You want her to engage with his "worst" writing?

I liked the article well enough but it seems fairly representative of a failure not to talk about the 'bad writing' so much as at least acknowledge his very public bigotry and particularly his Islamophobia.

I am still trying to recall the time in the 80s and early 90s when this guy seemed to be Our Guy, and his representation of what is now an Old Weird NYC seemed to be the next evolutionary step after, say, Bright Lights, Big City.

Hmm, Money and Bright Lights, Big City were published the same year, 1984.

Some valid appreciation in that New Republic article but is it cowardice, closing ranks or some sense of misplaced respect that so many articles are ducking the 'bigtoed arsehole' phase of Amis' life?

Or until it's determined whether or not his former agent will be taking on new clients.

Amis's agent was famously Andrew Wylie, so pretty sure the Jackal won't need to be touting for new business.

Reading Amis on Murdoch, Wilson, Burgess, Ballard, Weldon -- he was, as reviewer, such a student of what was then 'contemporary fiction'. He read huge amounts of it, including the books in between the ones you actually see him reviewing. If you were writing a study of 'post-war British fiction', that era that has become curiously dim ('novelists no-one reads anymore'), Amis would be an important source, one way or another, though not necessarily reliable on his own.

His relation to all this work is interesting. He is writing about elders, in a way. He's usually respectful, often affectionate, though often very critical. He usually quotes in detail, shows attention to texture. Later he would stop reviewing things that were current in this way, and he said some time that he wouldn't read younger writers.

When he reviews John Carey on Donne (1981), he indicates that he's already whole books by Carey on Milton, Dickens and Thackeray. Most of us haven't. He expresses quite finely and clearly the problems with reading the poems as direct expressions of emotion, which Carey appears to say they are.

On Ballard there's an odd inconsistency in that his earliest reviews are so harsh, and indeed he says things in every review that seem heavily negative, and yet he still declares himself a devoted follower.

The bad 2001 claim about Ballard's SF is expressed much better in a 1981 review, where he says 'hardcore' SF not 'hard SF' (a different thing, I fear), and more precisely states that 'His early stories [...] remain as good - as direct and logical - as anything by Fred Pohl or Arthur Clarke' (p.104).

On the whole the early reviews, pre-1990, form a marvellous body of work in itself, even if he'd never published fiction.

His feelings about Ballard mirror his father's maybe? Loved the early organic and psychic cataclysms, disliked the later 'social' turn, and bringing the earlier SF processes closer to the contemporary.

bad last clause...

'..and applying the processes from his earlier SF to the contemporary world'

I think he admits in his review of the Cronenberg adaptation that he was "haughty" about Crash as a kind of critical fancy dress because he couldn't adequately express his "nervous dismay" at the book. Each of his Ballard reviews seems to be apologising for the previous one.

Note on p.110: 'I see I am quoting my father here'.

But he keeps reading Ballard in detail - he doesn't give up on the work at all.

I'm reminded btw that Ballard reviewed a good KA collection of short SF stories, amusingly, about 40 years ago.

Gimbel is right - there is this odd dance with the Ballard reviews of echoing each other but correcting each other also. But certain features - 'Ballard's total humourlessness' - remain constant. And he repeats the phrase 'the motion sculpture of the highways' on pp.104, 112. Now I'd be surprised if he didn't also use it in a novel.

xp

That, and the comment his dislike about seeing penises on screen makes me wonder whether he had some sort of deep psychological sex horror. ofc it might just be good old-fashioned english class prudery (or is that the same thing?). and Crash is partly designed to elicit that response. still, i'm running with it.

What comment?

xp
makes sense - weird sex disgust is one of his strongest areas imo, and there is a corresponding odd prudery

OK, you weirdos persuaded me to give The Information a chance.

literature's mick jagger: nasty prudish and short

The tributes from hacks keep coming in.

HELL YEAH. https://t.co/5GDpwGzCHx pic.twitter.com/2bVodQfpH7

— Elvis Buñuelo (@Mr_Considerate) May 24, 2023

ah, i thought i'd seen it itt, but it was from the paywalled FT piece:

"What magnificent prose and what a peculiar personality underneath it. Amis wrote a long feature on the pornography industry for Tina Brown’s Talk Magazine in 2001 and only at the end confessed to his horror of seeing pricks on screen."

https://web.archive.org/web/20230522223450/https://www.ft.com/content/c0df7ab3-8512-4241-8a14-89a787ffc1fb

"magnificent prose"
"bits"

none of these fvcks can write

i guess bits wd work if leslie meant it like "it's a bit" (ie it's a sustained type of comedy performance) but he doesn't

expand the war against cliche into the straps and heds ppl

“I heard the ragged hoot of sirens, the whistles of twowheelers and skateboarders, pogoists, gocarters, windsurfers. I saw the barrelling cars and cabs, shoved on by the power of their horns. I felt all the contention, the democracy, all the italics in the air.”
Money, in New York.

Just marvelous.

There is quite a good joke in The Information. In fact a large part of the plot hinges on it, iirc.

yah The Information is great

xp yes - if it's the one I'm thinking of, it is neat & comes back to me a bit

Thing that stays with me from The Information is the air hostess saying “A Mr. Richard Tull? A Richard Tull at all? Richard Tull at all.”

I remember the agent from The Information with the ridiculous name of Gal Aplanalp or something like that. That and Richard Tull's kids singing 'daddy smells of shit!' at him when he's hungover.

One of my fave little gags is the title novel of the Tull book that gives everyone a migrane is Untitled. His previous novel is Dreams Don't Mean Anything.

One of the things I remember is "if the sham refocussings are going to work."

A narratalogical construct that depends on "sham refocussings" is so Nabokovian that it hurts. Not sure if it's meant as parody, satire, or something else.

Lol @ Eagleton writing for the cow dollar. On Amis.

https://unherd.com/2023/05/the-liberal-complacency-of-martin-amis/

TLS new issue to have Amis on the front. As indeed they already did recently.

LRB should pay a proper tribute in print. Unsure what form it should take.

TE's overview one of the best brief accounts of Amis to be published - unlike most people, he's able to situate things historically and see pros and cons together - though I don't agree with every word. (He overrates Rushdie and overstates 'liberalism', for my money.) My main reservation is merely that it's too soon after a person's death to be unkind about them.

Still reading old Amis prose, still greatly enjoying most of it.

About 50 pages from finishing The Information. I hope to post thoughts.

Think I might want to reread that one.

more like parting anus lol

The man has just died you know

he was an ass

I had forgotten the thing about his cousin.

I remember reading him on his cousin's murder, it was a rare occasion of Fred West being referred to by the name proper, Frederick. Someone lent me Dead Babies once and I didn't finish it. My impression of it was that the writer is an unfunny arrogant jerkoff and horribly English. I've got some vague memory of him enthusing about greyhound racing, classic poshboy posturing and seeing a glamour amongst the riff raff stuff iirc.

Calzino - this isn't the Blur thread!

:D

The marvellous creaminess of alex james brie

the mockney crew hitting Walthamstow for an evening meeting. And rubbing shoulders with low-level criminals and doing £10 tricasts and £50 singles on every trap 6 without studying any form. Drinking weak lager and feeling completely transformed! Good fun really!

I've never heard Amis attempting a mockney accent. But I think Albarn did, or did he? My memory says he did and made quite a fool out of himself. But I dont trust my memory.

I did a few nights temping bar work at Wimbledon greyhound track in the mid 90s. Unfortunately I never spotted any Blur members or Martin Amis there.

TBH I feel that Albarn still does, every time he talks.

The Amis / Albarn connexion is not merely a whim -- I think they actually met for a newspaper interview in 1994? Within Albarn's lyrics there was just enough to suggest the debt to Amis that was, I think, advertised ('trouble in the message centre', 'for tomorrow', 'colin zeal', you name it).

*Cough* - where are Alfred's thoughts on *The Information*?

I'm reading Alan Hollingshurst's *The Line of Beauty* and I'm sure it's partly recency bias but there are sections of this that remind me a lot of Amis. It's not as pointedly nasty, but some of the 'slumming it' quality of the satire is pure Amis.

I don't much agree with that. It's superbly written, but in a rather different way from Amis's. And that particular novel contains very little 'slumming it' -- rather the opposite: climbing above the author's station (according to him), and the protagonist's. Insofar as the novel is satire (which I think it verges into, but isn't primarily), the objects are mainly very rich or even aristocratic.

Maybe the resemblance to Amis is basic: we associate him with the 1980s, and we might associate him with Notting Hill / West London, and TLOB is a bullseye for both those criteria.

Hollinghurst is a way better novelist

And pinefox otm: it ain't satire

Yeah, ill-thought-through posts that look dumber the further away you get from them, part 23...

For some kind of clarity, I don't see the novel as satire at all, but there is something about writing about the ruling class that I somehow see *automatically* as satire, as if I can't take them seriously. I don't know if it's a defence mechanism or what, but some sections of the novel (the party at the Kesslers' for example) could read like satire, I think. And the bit that specifically made me think of Amis was a moment where the family are in the Feddens' kitchen and Gerald and 'Badger' (ffs) have returned from a game of tennis. The whole thing is such a florid absurdity...

The clumsy 'slumming it' comment acknowledges my hyper-awareness of class and the general unease I feel when Hollingshurst is writing 'down' and particularly when he writes about race. I need to dig into that a bit more.

And though Amis and Hollingshurst are aiming for different things, it's hard to disagree that Hollingshurst is the 'better' novelist - if we're taking 'better' to mean what the novel does best, ie tracking the tiny moment-to-moment shifts in experience, as part of the overall project of creating a unified consciousness. The attention to psychological acuity is extraordinary. The sex is great, too.

for sure he's one of the few novelists who doesn't step on a rake when describing sex.

I think inspiring Albarn must go down in the negatives column of Amis's legacy. Not sure what direct influence might go in the positives?

"I didn’t get into Martin Amis by choice; when I was at drama school I auditioned for a part in The Rachel Papers and when I got down to the last three or four I thought I’d better read the book. I didn’t really like it and I had no real desire to read anything else, until, in 1992, when Blur were doing our second tour of America, I read London Fields and it saved me. It gave me so many new options; I’d been quite traditional in my reading until then, stopping at Charles Bukowski and Saul Bellow. London Fields had a massive effect on me. It had a real sexual freedom. Keith Talent was so English and I wanted to be him. I wanted to read everything by Martin Amis after that. I thought Money had a kind of hedonistic energy about it, but the only other book which really grabbed me was Time’s Arrow. I lost faith with The Information. I didn’t relate to it at all. London Fields is so funny and sexy that you are distracted from the nihilism, but with The Information I thought Amis had lost all his optimism. There are two sides to Notting Hill: the good area to the east of Ladbroke Grove, which is where Keith Talent and I live, and the area on the west side where Martin Amis seems to have moved. And all the fuss about the $100,000 advance stank. I think he will have to write something really remarkable to make amends. Having said that, he changed a small part of my life for ever and in that sense he is a great author."
- Damon Albarn on Martin Amis, Arena Magazine, 1996

*Cough* - where are Alfred's thoughts on *The Information*?

― Stars of the Lidl (Chinaski), Sunday, May 28, 2023 4:09 PM

It began promisingly, and often his metaphors aren't overwrought, but the plot slipped through my hands sometime after Tull's tour of America.

I’d been quite traditional in my reading until then, stopping at Charles Bukowski and Saul Bellow.

The idea of Bukowski and Bellow as "traditional reading" and of Amis as a bold way out of that really feels like something out of a long distant era.

"London Fields had a massive effect on me. It had a real sexual freedom. Keith Talent was so English and I wanted to be him. [...] London Fields is so funny and sexy that you are distracted from the nihilism"

This is a really stupid comment about the novel LONDON FIELDS. The supposed "sexual freedom" that DA identifies with is repellent, violent and immoral. (I don't mean that real sexual freedom would be those things.)

His comment overall is bad and odd.

re Chinaski's post:

I don't think TLOB is absolutely not satire or satire. I think it's primarily an impressionistically realistic novel, but that it is fluent and adaptable enough that it verges in and out of satire. It is very different from the cartoonish Amis in this way. I agree with Chinaski that the satire is around the upper classes.

I don't share Chinaski's view that when AH writes about somewhat lower class characters, and black characters, he gives the impression of slumming it (nor of being satirical). I think he is quite sensitive, observant and thoughtful. Nuances of class, race and religion are delicately handled. However, I am thinking of TLOB here, whereas the other novels, like SP LIBRARY, might give a different impression.

I agree that AH is the better novelist in his way, but this is rather question-begging in that MA is, by definition, better at being a novelist in the MA way. We can say that there are different kinds of novels.

Chinaski is correct to say: "if we're taking 'better' to mean what the novel does best, ie tracking the tiny moment-to-moment shifts in experience, as part of the overall project of creating a unified consciousness. The attention to psychological acuity is extraordinary."

This is a totally sound description.

I think a lot of Britpop or whatever you want to call stupid British people in rock bands were Bukowski readers in the early 90's iirc from NME interviews at the time. Apart from Oasis who more than likely only read tabloid newspapers and lad magazines.

got to admit I really loved Ham on Rye at the time

"he changed a small part of my life for ever and in that sense he is a great author"

re Gimbel's post:

Psychedelic Furs' Richard Butler also claimed to be reading / influenced by Amis for 1981's TALK TALK TALK lp !

I started a re-read of London Fields - I'm (checks kindle) 20% of the way through and it does seem terrible to me - there's something thin about Keith Talent so far, not quite enough detail and attention to sustain the London grotesque (it doesn't help that his phonetic and syntactical mimicry sound way off to me - doesn't have his Dad's ear); doomy pompous paragraphs; stretches with a lot of Nicola Six, who doesn't immediately seem a counterargument to 'can't do women'.

The sex stuff hasn't really kicked off. I suspect I'll go some of the way with poster Pinefox here, though my descriptive terms would be different - I don't think 'sexual freedom' and 'sexiness' are really in Amis. Whenever I read him, sex = disgust, anxiety, fear, with a kink edge that he's not really reconciled to. So yeah, Albarn's description is barely recognisable as the book I'm reading.

If this is maybe a Nabokovian trick box - everything is from the perspective of the American writer who narrates and cannot treat these people as real - then I don't know, it's in the Ada or Ardor zone of the narrator's flaws boring me.

I'll carry on and see if I warm to it.

On the other hand I am really surprised that the Zone of Interest is working.

tbc I'm not surprised Bukowski was read amongst britpop types, more surprised they'd consider him "traditional reading".

On the other hand I am really surprised that the Zone of Interest is working.

I mean, the TLOB character I remember before anyone else is Leo Charles. I've no idea how well Hollinghurst captured the reality of a gay Black man and his mum in the early '80s, but he drew him well enough such that I can imagine a novel about him.

xp
The book - reading it alongside London Fields.

FWIW Leo's sister, and her (woman) partner, and the minute details of their late interaction with Nick Guest, are yet another small part of the fine texture of that novel -- another set of realisations (for Nick) about the unspoken complexities of that family he's only visited once.

In other words, as usual, I think this novel is very good.

Confession: took me a while to realize that by TLOB y'all mean The Line of Beauty.

For a second I wondered whether you were discussing "Life of Brian."

Edward Docx, New Statesman:

***

The second time I went to interview Martin Amis was again at his London house in Primrose Hill. He had no real reason to be kind to me that day and yet his spontaneous willingness to give me his time and encouragement was indicative of a lesser-documented quality in his character and, I think, his writing: the quality of generosity. And that’s what I want to illuminate a little here. Now that he has gone. Or, rather, as he would say: now that he has migrated permanently and exclusively to the shelf.

I buzzed the security gate that he felt it necessary to maintain. He opened the front door himself – a one-man essay in how bad posture and a nicotine-squint might perversely signal great courtesy and clarity of vision. (Like his generosity, this oddly paradoxical relation has its counterpart on the page.) Come on in. Come on in. His life, he said, was pretty full and also pretty full of shit – by which he meant actual nappies (he had infant daughters at that time) as well as the by-now brisk and regular dunking in excrement that he suffered at the hands of the British media. We sat down in his airy library with its ever-open volumes of the OED and I thought about asking him to sign my copy of his book, but then decided against – on grounds of faux-professionalism and real embarrassment.

There were many reasons for Martin not to be generous that day. For one thing, his daughters and sons twanged in and out of his afternoon with what seemed to be an escalating series of personal ultimatums. For another, he had come to loathe British journalists. He had already started work on possibly his most repulsive character in a world-class field: Clint Smoker, the journalist of Yellow Dog (2003) – “furiously commuting from Foulness, near Southend, where he had a semi… [and lived in]… a condition of untouchable sordor”. For a third, there was the regrettable truth that the paper I worked for at that time was – at best – a confused farrago of irrelevance with less than zero purchase on his career, standing or future. And, last but not least, there was the undeniable fact that I was insultingly young to be doing anything with anyone – let alone talking to a national figure about his life, times and intimate biography. And yet, here he was giving me the time of day, offering triple-distilled coffee, regretting the noises-off, remembering lines from my first interview, wondering how full Tom Wolfe’s novel A Man in Full had turned out to be now that I had finished reading it.

I got to know Martin a little in the period between Heavy Water (1998) and Koba the Dread (2002) – not well, but enough to risk calling him Martin and for him to know about my ambitions to become a novelist; enough to be invited to the occasional party and to speak a few times on the phone when, for example, he randomly wanted tickets for a Bob Dylan concert. (He loved “Subterranean Homesick Blues” and especially the lines: “Get sick, get well/Hang around the ink well.”) The first time we met had been for the now roundly unremembered collection Heavy Water. (Which, by the way, is casually littered with all the usual gleaming treasures of phrasing – the “highly calibrated insouciance” of a screenwriter called Alistair being a personal favourite.) But that day, the business before us was his life. We were supposed to be talking about his memoir – and one of his two masterpieces – Experience (2000).

I was there under false pretences. I had zero interest in his teeth, his money or his relationships. I didn’t even want to be a journalist. I wanted to be a novelist. I wanted to be a writer. I had spent all my then short adult life studying literature and what interested me was… well, how he wrote exactly, where he saw the novel going, how he turned a phrase this way and then that, how many drafts it took him to perfect his cadences, when he thought euphony was too much, when to deploy harshness, why did he neglect plot and character, what about when style wasn’t enough, what he thought of his literary opposites such as JM Coetzee, how many distinct skills did he think the novelist must have – could these be categorised, how many did he think he had – and why did so very few authors ever manage a masterpiece?

Writers are – or should be – the most perceptive people it is possible to encounter. And he was ever the most perceptive of the tribe. So, of course, he saw through me from the moment he first saw me at all. But he recognised, too, that there was no guile on my part: I was (and I still am) obsessed by these questions. And my somewhat ingenuous enquiries therefore had the virtue of putting him more at ease. He was relieved to talk shop. He was relieved that we were not, as he said, shovelling more shit on the mighty shit-mountain. Later, of course, to become the near-unscalable shit-massif that all but enclosed him.

Towards the end of the hour, in a desultory way – and feeling that I’d better go through the motions – I asked him about why he thought he was getting so vehemently attacked. This was before social media, when pile-ons were weekly rather than hourly and almost cordially elliptical by comparison. (Imagine Twitter bothering with the cost of his dentistry.) He said that he thought part of it was to do with the medium (for him everything, in the end, was to do with the medium) – which is to say that because journalists and gossip columnists used the same basic art form as novelists – writing – they therefore felt more entitled to have a go. A bit like, he noted, how everyone can kick a ball and thus everyone has a view on exactly how England’s leading striker should play or why he flunked that penalty when it really mattered.

The hour soon was over. I felt I’d soured the end of our conversation by panic-asking about his “celebrity”. But, on the way out, he enquired after how my manuscript submissions were going. I said that I’d had a close one – this was the second “first” novel I had written – but that I’d recently had the final “no” from the publisher I thought most likely to say “yes”.

Writing and the language itself meant everything to me then. It still does. And so, I must have evinced some kind of involuntary rawness about the recent rejection as we stood there in the hall. Maybe it felt extra-deflating after the conversation we had been having. Now I wonder if I didn’t think madly that I had somehow let him down. I don’t know. What happened in the physical world is that I just stopped moving for a second and then awkwardly half-offered him Experience to sign. He sensed something deeper than embarrassment and likewise stopped. And then he said, oh, in that case, leave all your stuff here and come and have a beer on the roof and we’ll have a proper conversation.

And that was it. He went and got two bottles and I followed him up through the house and we sat up on his roof garden for the next few hours and we really got down to “it”. And by “it”, I mean everything you can possibly imagine discussing in relation to the central question of which of the novelists and poets had the ability to render the human experience on the page in a manner that was resonant to other people, offered real readerly pleasures and yet was truthful and enduring? And what could we learn from them? Most generously of all, for the purposes of this conversation, he counted himself a student alongside me. Not in a phoney way and not to show off – he was way past that – but because he himself was greatly animated and compelled by these questions. By the end (a few bottles later) we were deep in a near line-by-line discussion (from memory on his part) of the sophistication of Jane Austen’s emotional choreography in the first assembly scene in Pride and Prejudice when Mary Bennet sings and Elizabeth despairs of her family.

He was astonishingly generous. He was astonishingly encouraging. Most of all, he was astonishingly intelligent. Lots of people are intelligent – and lots of species of intelligence are tedious – but Amis’s mind worked in a way that continually outflanked and astounded any thinking you were doing in parallel or response. There was the huge on-board library resource, of course, and he quoted paragraphs and verses at will – Conrad, Waugh, Austen, Larkin, Auden, George Eliot, Donne, endless Shakespeare, his father, Bellow, Nabokov – but, again, lots of people know things and that, too, can become a peculiar form of dullness. No, what was astonishing was the unexpected connections that his mind conjured – each next thought in a sequence of conversation would have been unimaginable beforehand and yet made a miraculous chain of self-evident understanding afterwards. And all of this he was able to articulate with a breathtaking precision.

There’s a great line in Experience where Amis writes about his father: “I wasn’t making the elementary error of conflating the man and the work, but all writers know that the truth is in the fiction. That’s where the spiritual thermometer gives its reading.” There isn’t space to go into all the brilliances (or failings) of Amis’s work here. And there are as many ways to write a great novel as there are great novelists. Coetzee or Hilary Mantel or Toni Morrison or, for that matter, Cervantes: they’re all going to teach you completely different lessons. Unlike Martin (or unlike he sometimes pretended), I am interested in all the different ways to do it – yes, even, as he would describe them, the clear-as-a-mountain-creek-merchants. And, for what it’s worth, I think there is a rebarbative sneer that occasionally corrodes his texts from the inside so that the surface brilliance tarnishes and rusts, becomes brittle. But for now, I want to read the spiritual thermometer the other way round – from man to work – because I think that the personal generosity that he displayed that day to me (and there are many others who experienced this) is also there in the writing. Not in the narrow sense of what he’s writing about – or who, or where – but in the sense of how he is writing.

So, by way of unpacking for the newly Amis-curious what pleasure his best work brings to those who admire it, here are three great generosities that are as alive in the style as they were in the man.

The first is to do with straightforward abundance. There’s a ravishing luxuriousness to all his writing. You get to revel and recline in the great opulent apparel of our language as if it were yours to drape yourself in all along. Which, of course, it is. In this way, he generously returns to you what you feel you have lost by hair-shirting your way through other writers of various pinch, beef and earnest. You feel more subtle in his company, you feel your own vocabulary expand, your sensibility for words is reconjured, your vow of love for the English language is remade; in the moment of reading his best work, you feel richer.

The second is to do with his scrupulousness and precision. Leaving aside macro concerns, you can as a reader always rest assured that there is no other British prose writer who has taken quite so much care over the word-by-word selection that goes into making a sentence. His status as a novelist is mercurial but his paragraphs are still the best in recent English. Most of this hand-to-hand stuff is intuitive for him (as was apparent when he spoke), but he also checked and double checked and read and reread his work until its sound and rhythm and timbre was (as he felt it) perfect. For many readers this assiduousness is strangely relaxing. Relaxing because you know you can trust him; because you never have the feeling of being let down on the sentence level by a cliché, or a repetition, or some other infelicity that breaks the all-important spell of authorial command.

The third generosity is to do with exuberance – an intoxicating joy, a pleasure, a live kinetic vitality that lives word to word in his work. As your author-guide, he is forever delighting you with unexpected phrase-making, with freshness, with ingenuity, with invention and ingeniousness. In his other masterpiece, Money (1984), you laugh, you gasp, you shake your head, you rush towards the next sentence at the same time as you back up to marvel at the last. Think again about the meaning of this word, he seems to urge the reader, and then look at this word next to that word. I never wholly bought his Nabokovian style-is-morality schtick. But I do believe that his work is existentially incandescent only because it is stylistically incandescent.

This last quality – of exuberance and spirit; the incandescent style – is more in the tradition of the poets than the novelists; it is also much more in the tradition of the 18th century – Tobias Smollett, Henry Fielding and the gang – than the writers he is often compared to – Evelyn Waugh and PG Wodehouse. If you combine these thoughts, the figure who comes to mind is the great 18th-century poet Alexander Pope. And, indeed, I have always thought that Amis has a great deal in common with Pope’s sensibility. The way Pope is a flat-out genius with words and in such Bach-like musical control; the way he is unsurpassable as a compassionate-but-mighty-and-scathing satirist; the way he is unable to write about matters of the heart organically; the way he is endlessly funny and arch and sly and collusive and playful; most of all, the way he loves and takes care of his readers. From the opening of Pope’s “An Essay on Man”:

Let us (since life can little more supply 
Than just to look about us and to die) 
Expatiate free o’er all this scene of man; 
A mighty maze! but not without a plan; 
A wild, where weeds and flow’rs promiscuous shoot; 
Or garden, tempting with forbidden fruit. 
Together let us beat this ample field, 
Try what the open, what the covert yield; 
The latent tracts, the giddy heights explore 
Of all who blindly creep, or sightless soar; 
Eye Nature’s walks, shoot folly as it flies, 
And catch the manners living as they rise; 
Laugh where we must, be candid where we can…

Martin would love that invitational “Together let us…” and the way all those different meanings are simultaneously alive in the single line as it runs – beckoning us – forward: “Together let us beat this ample field.” Come on in. Come on in.

Taken altogether these three qualities represent what, I think, is at the heart of Amis’s work: a delighted, forensic, monumental and epic commitment to language itself. That’s the quiddity. That’s the core reason so many writers and journalists enjoy reading him. And that’s the reason I don’t think the distinction between the non-fiction and the fiction holds. Because all his writing is like that. Sure, the non-fiction feels more anchored because of its ostensible subject. And, yes, the bad fiction feels worse than it is because its subject is so obviously ostensible. But really the subject in either case was not the subject; the true subject was always the language – its meaning and its music. And – about this – Amis is never anything other than serious, devout, sincere, interesting, sublime.

On the way out the second time, I was fixed. I picked up Experience again from the side table and this time boldly asked him to sign it. I’m chary of overstatement and – thinking about that day – I’m still not sure if this is a failing or a virtue. But in those few hours, he restored my faith. Writing fiction, publishing, editing, magazines, poetry – they’re all such fragile businesses and yet he was absolutely certain that they mattered, that their power was not only purposeful but transcendent. I soon began again on another novel. And this – my “third”, the next thing I wrote – became my debut.

It wasn’t until a couple of days later, though, that I opened up Experience. Only then did I read what he had written. “To Ed, keep going, Martin Amis.” Such a kind and generous thing to say. The same thing he had been saying to me all afternoon. I have the inscription in front of me now.

That seems tl;dr. Should I actually r it?

Anybody here
Seen my old friend Martin?

That seems tl;dr. Should I actually r it?

It was the most interesting such thing posted in this thread IMO.

yeah it was a very nice read, thanks for sharing it the pinefox

What I remember of The Line of Beauty is that its characters often saunter (along pavements) or dart (into and out of rooms) and occasionally linger (over light lunches): all things I think that would have boiled the piss of Martin Amis in the 80s.

For all the talk about keeping the dictionary open at all times, meticulously crafted sentences, etc., etc. I find myself as a writer responding much more to Elmore Leonard's famous 10 rules:

1. Never open a book with weather.
2. Avoid prologues.
3. Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue.
4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said"…he admonished gravely.
5. Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose.
6. Never use the words "suddenly" or "all hell broke loose."
7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.
8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
9. Don't go into great detail describing places and things.
10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

My most important rule is one that sums up the 10.

If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

That piece is something: Martin Amis had THREE layers of generosity?! Come on, now..

Cheese, guava, almonds

fwiw I'll buy that Amis was probably a nicer guy in person than he came across as (and made strenuous efforts to come across as). Who could be like that full time in public and private? Only truly rarefied titans of misanthropy like Ginger Baker can pull that off

No comparison to Pope. Pope was a foot shorter.

Nice piece. 'Devout' is well-chosen. A more generous way to look at the canon-hugging and status anxiety and the effortfulness of his weaker prose.

Lol at Ginger Baker comparison.

did he become a nicer person with the new fangs or

heh

Another hack tribute. This one was so desperate to get his tribute in he got it published in Norwegian

Here’s my tribute to Martin Amis 1949-2023 for @Vinduet touching on his influential style and unorthodox way of writing fiction (in Norwegian for now but some things transcend national and linguistic boundaries)https://t.co/urs4z2efnI

— Leo Robson (@leorobsonwriter) June 6, 2023

Fixed teeth transcend national and linguistic boundaries.

Picked up Nabokov's 'Speak, Memory', as it seems a little bit like Amis' Experience. Nabokov writes about his father a lot, though by no means exclusively so. Feels like -- both in The New Statesman piece above and the John Self piece where he talked it as the book for people who hate Amis -- that Experience could be the book that lasts as the white, Oxbridge-educated, middle-class hacks who cared to pay a tribute have been trying to sell it a bit more than some of his later novels, say.

Reading the Nabokov I could see why. Both were prickly, nasty people, who grew up well, but in these memoirs they write about things you are not going to be that nasty about. Get quite jaded about that attitude. Can't you be tender about people you made up?

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/jun/16/martin-amis-ian-mcewan-and-anna-wintour-honoured-in-kings-birthday-list

Amis's posthumous knighthood surprises me as

a) I have never heard of a posthumous knighthood
b) he writes in EXPERIENCE, I think, of knighthoods being ridiculous (at least he says that Sir David Hare's is)
c) if he didn't want it, he can't now turn it down. Or had he already agreed to it?

I believe that David Bowie refused honours. What if Bowie had been posthumously awarded them in Summer 2016?

I would also say
d) After Savile died we were told that he couldn't posthumously be stripped of his knighthood as it ended with his death anyway.

the ‘martin amis faked his death’ conspiracy theory starts here

Amis accepted it, apparently they told him about it last month. & they have dated it to the day before he died because the convention is still that knighthoods don’t apply posthumously (can’t change that or Charles might have to officially revoke that of his hero savile)

So the idea is amis is officially retroactively a Sir for one day and then not, it’s v pointless

or the knighthood killed him

It would be great if it had that effect on all recipients

a sudden nerve twinge made charles slash instead of dub, rip martin

Given that Fosse won the Novel today I should bring up this tweet.

Where, like Fosse, we have some deployment of repetition

Anyone who says Martin Amis wasn’t a stylist is, frankly, an idiot pic.twitter.com/orr7Q0ieLe

— Max Lawton (@maxdaniellawton) September 1, 2023

*Nobel