I have certainly seen him write far better sentences than that.
― the bellefox, Thursday, 17 March 2005 14:58 (nineteen years ago) link
― Jonathan Z. (Joanthan Z.), Thursday, 17 March 2005 16:38 (nineteen years ago) link
― STAMBOUL TRAIN, Thursday, 17 March 2005 16:46 (nineteen years ago) link
― Ken L (Ken L), Thursday, 17 March 2005 17:34 (nineteen years ago) link
A better sentence would be, 'He shot his load like a fighter pilot.'
The Amis sentence looks quite playful to me. And there's an awful lot in it.
― PJ Miller (PJ Miller), Thursday, 17 March 2005 17:40 (nineteen years ago) link
― PJ Miller (PJ Miller), Thursday, 17 March 2005 18:13 (nineteen years ago) link
I say Money is the cut-off point.
― PJ Miller (PJ Miller), Friday, 18 March 2005 12:24 (nineteen years ago) link
― the bellefox, Tuesday, 12 April 2005 14:50 (nineteen years ago) link
I hate it when books have information in them. I mean, if you want information, you can always read an information book, can't you? CAN'T YOU?
― PJ Miller (PJ Miller), Tuesday, 12 April 2005 16:01 (nineteen years ago) link
― frankiemachine, Tuesday, 12 April 2005 16:22 (nineteen years ago) link
― dylan (dylan), Wednesday, 13 April 2005 04:42 (nineteen years ago) link
― Sam (chirombo), Wednesday, 13 April 2005 11:38 (nineteen years ago) link
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/tg/detail/offer-listing/-/0224050613/used/ref=sdp_usedb/202-8095063-7235853
― PJ Miller (PJ Miller), Wednesday, 13 April 2005 13:48 (nineteen years ago) link
― Ken L (Ken L), Wednesday, 13 April 2005 13:57 (nineteen years ago) link
― dylan (dylan), Wednesday, 13 April 2005 16:20 (nineteen years ago) link
I read a Denim article in Mojo. Nothing else.
― PJ Miller (PJ Miller), Thursday, 14 April 2005 09:10 (nineteen years ago) link
― lauren (laurenp), Thursday, 14 April 2005 09:51 (nineteen years ago) link
― the bellefox, Thursday, 14 April 2005 13:07 (nineteen years ago) link
― Sam (chirombo), Thursday, 14 April 2005 15:32 (nineteen years ago) link
I think I got my threads muddled up somewhere along the line.
― PJ Miller (PJ Miller), Thursday, 14 April 2005 15:36 (nineteen years ago) link
I'm no doubt prejudiced though - I've never understood the appeal of Amis. He's not interested in plot, his characters are uninteresting and self-hating, his overly showy style is just hopeless to my eyes.
― Jonathan Z. (Joanthan Z.), Friday, 15 April 2005 08:24 (nineteen years ago) link
Not to mention implausible and ludicrously stereotyped as soon as he gets away from the people he meets in his own social circle. A Martian who'd seen two episodes of Eastenders could write more convincing working class characters than Amis.
― frankiemachine, Friday, 15 April 2005 10:17 (nineteen years ago) link
But Z, I think you have to put my approval of the book in the context at my bewilderment at Amis's capacity for squandering his gifts in other books. I think he squanders less, here, for the reasons I tried to give.
― the bluefox, Friday, 15 April 2005 11:02 (nineteen years ago) link
― Ally C (Ally C), Tuesday, 19 April 2005 21:51 (nineteen years ago) link
― Ann Sterzinger (Ann Sterzinger), Tuesday, 19 April 2005 21:56 (nineteen years ago) link
― Ken L (Ken L), Tuesday, 19 April 2005 22:32 (nineteen years ago) link
― Jerry the Nipper (Jerrynipper), Wednesday, 20 April 2005 08:14 (nineteen years ago) link
― the bellefox, Wednesday, 20 April 2005 13:34 (nineteen years ago) link
― Jeff LeVine (Jeff LeVine), Monday, 18 September 2006 18:30 (seventeen years ago) link
― jed_ (jed), Monday, 18 September 2006 20:38 (seventeen years ago) link
Then read somebody else.
― Why does my IQ changes? (noodle vague), Monday, 18 September 2006 21:23 (seventeen years ago) link
Well ... I happened to start w/ The Information, loved it, and moved onto London Fields and Time's Arrow, then to a few of the non-fiction books (War ... Cliche, Visiting Mrs. Nabokov). Guess I'm one of the few that prefers his fiction to his non-fiction. I thought Amis wrote the bitter/oblivious writers of The Information well.
Are there differing summary judgments of Amis in a US/UK breakdown?
― Jamesy (SuzyCreemcheese), Tuesday, 19 September 2006 00:58 (seventeen years ago) link
it's flawed (i almost threw the book out the window at the point where amis idly muses that, all things considered, he'd much rather be incinerated at hiroshima than sentenced to the gulag), but pretty much everything he sez about lenin AND hitchens (haha, the ideal couple!) is OTM.
― J.D. (Justyn Dillingham), Tuesday, 19 September 2006 05:47 (seventeen years ago) link
this thread is very British. innit.
― tom west (thomp), Tuesday, 19 September 2006 06:25 (seventeen years ago) link
― J.D. (Justyn Dillingham), Tuesday, 19 September 2006 07:36 (seventeen years ago) link
and someone said "pretentious sixth-form puffery"!
― tom west (thomp), Tuesday, 19 September 2006 09:01 (seventeen years ago) link
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jan/26/colm-toibin-teaching-martin-amis
― the pinefox, Wednesday, 26 January 2011 11:06 (thirteen years ago) link
he sounds rather decent there, surprisingly.
― thomp, Wednesday, 26 January 2011 15:26 (thirteen years ago) link
unfortunate url. colm toibin teaching martin amis to do what?
― thomp, Wednesday, 26 January 2011 15:27 (thirteen years ago) link
Yes, he sounds decent in that piece, misleadingly.
Not that Amis has no decency, necessarily, but the things he says here are a farrago of facades.
I'm not sure how much I like Toibin. His novel Brooklyn is widely read but very blank. And his LRB reviews, in a worrying sign, are sprawling, unstructured and unilluminating.
― the pinefox, Thursday, 27 January 2011 08:27 (thirteen years ago) link
if we must have fictionalised accounts of henry james eyeing up the bootboy, give me david lodge any old day
― Ward Fowler, Thursday, 27 January 2011 09:03 (thirteen years ago) link
Enjoy Toibin in the LRB, mostly – article on the Pope was great – but his crit doesn't stick with me. Still, I imagine he'd be a better or more engaged teacher than Amis; probably a better guide to the conventional mechanics of fiction?
― portrait of velleity (woof), Thursday, 27 January 2011 09:45 (thirteen years ago) link
I liked Brooklyn: a minor thing very well done.
― Rich Lolwry (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, 27 January 2011 11:58 (thirteen years ago) link
he's a better novelist than Amis.
I tried and could not get into The Information, and then I did what I think I haven't done with any other novel -- skipped the first section, and thoroughly enjoyed the remaining couple hundred pages.
― An Artily Shot Sesame Street (Eazy), Thursday, 27 January 2011 17:19 (thirteen years ago) link
in some ways i'm a big amis fan -- adore the war against cliche, some other essays, and time's arrow -- but i'm halfway through the very slim house of meetings and it's taking me forever, not because it's hard but because it feels... rushed. a little too sure of itself? and there are plenty of good bits of elegiac Christ-what-happened-here prose, but amis isn't robert conquest when it comes to the weird blend of detachment, irony, and utter brutal specificity that works so well for descriptions of stalinism. (there are not a lot of robert conquests.) plus his method of approaching The Human Aspect is to overlay this nasty love triangle ganked from nabokov, which keeps falling into this very particular tone of weird affected sexual wisdom that feels callow in a postwar british schoolboy way. (this happens in other books too.) in some ways i preferred koba the dread even though everything everyone said about that was pretty much right.
― difficult listening hour, Thursday, 27 January 2011 18:00 (thirteen years ago) link
Different Amis, same Conquest, but perhaps just about worth noting that The Egyptologists (written by Conquest, heavily revised/co-authored by Amis) is a dreadful dreadful piece of shit.
Just in case anyone was ever tempted to check it out. A horrid stain on both their sometimes rather dubious careers.
― Herr Kapitan Pugvosh (GamalielRatsey), Thursday, 27 January 2011 18:17 (thirteen years ago) link
For those of you who are keeping an eye on him...
― alimosina, Saturday, 30 April 2011 18:49 (thirteen years ago) link
Ms. Egan belongs to the slice of the Brooklyn literati that has just entered its prime. The book contracts are steady and robust. The glossy assignments come so easily they can be comfortably turned down. Some of these writers can even afford sports cars.
Wait -- is this true?
― My mom is all about capital gains tax butthurtedness (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Saturday, 30 April 2011 18:53 (thirteen years ago) link
I like to think that he will take it all in stride, and then in three years a book will come out that will be a perfect send-up of the neighborhood
oh dear
― Ismael Klata, Saturday, 30 April 2011 19:01 (thirteen years ago) link
I have long thought that Amis merited a great deal of criticism, censure and dissent.
Yet 'tin ear' seems a peculiarly inapt - perhaps even tin-eared - way of registering this, as his gift was a poet's ear, for assonance, surprise and rhythm in the combination of words.
Poster Woof is shrewd in pointing out the change in literary journalism as a material basis for Amis's shifted reputation. Yes, such context is crucial.
My own first reference for this, though, is always the Guardian - which has thus changed. (Its Review 20 years ago was a terrific publication; now almost vanished into the depths of its Saturday section.) Have other broadsheets likewise changed? They seem still to be heavier than the now slim Guardian. Meanwhile the TLS, LRB, NS (for which Amis wrote) are still going.
I reflect that the Guardian's quantity of books coverage might not be lower than 30 years ago (when Richard Gott and James Wood were still around?). Though it might be lower in quality.
re Amis's forthcoming repute, I wonder if the best he can hope for is to be like Mailer. Remembered as a colourful polemicist, original journalist, fixture of an era, yet patchily read for his fiction.
(The comparison has the slight merit of Amis having written well on Mailer, decades ago. It would still be worth rereading that MORONIC INFERNO material.)
― the pinefox, Monday, 20 February 2023 09:56 (one year ago) link
When I consider Good Amis Journalism, it's Moronic Inferno that I think of.
― Malevolent Arugula (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, 20 February 2023 10:23 (one year ago) link
I agree about the whole “major writer” framing & the test of time is bunk but any excuse to mock this arsehole (whom I largely haven’t read)
― piedro àlamodevar (wins), Sunday, 19 February 2023 bookmarkflaglink
Twitter is (or was, as it's dying) pretty good a marker for seeing what people have feelings for. In the way people share a passage and enthusiasm for the force of the word. I've never seen anything of Amis' that is shared at all.
And I look at what woof is saying about the literary culture that celebrated a man who wrote things that look like will die with that culture, and you think what good was there in the first place, if the words do not appear to have survived at any kind of organic level as the economics have dragged it down.
― xyzzzz__, Monday, 20 February 2023 11:43 (one year ago) link
I have seen someone like Will Self also talking in some interview about how he hasn't really emulated writers he loved while growing up, which you feel sad for him. For about a second, before you think "good, suffer some more".
― xyzzzz__, Monday, 20 February 2023 11:54 (one year ago) link
I like Amis by the page, but the thought of reading a whole novel is exhausting to think about, let alone attempt.
― Chuck_Tatum, Tuesday, 21 February 2023 16:00 (one year ago) link