Martin Amis: fire away!

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