Martin Amis: fire away!

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