Martin Amis: Where do I start?

I'd pass on "Time's Arrow; it's dull. "Dead Babies" isn't a great book, but it's gruesomely fun.

1. The War Against Cliche
2. Money
3. London Fields
4. The Moronic Inferno
5. The Rachel Papers
6. Experience
7. The Information
8. Visting Mrs. Nabakov
9. Einstein's Monsters
10. Success
11. Time's Arrow
12. Heavy Water
13. Night Train
14. Other People
15. Dead Babies

Never seen a copy of Invasion of the Space Invaders.
Experience improves exponentially if read w/Letters of Kingsley Amis

i always liked time's arrow as a one-off concept with a big payoff and london fields for the puzzle-solving shtick.

the information is his best "mature" novel that isn't dead awful.

Hey, somehow I forgot Yellow Dog, too. I actually enjoyed it, but it's definitely MA lite. His take on pornography interests me.

This piece, on the other hand, is fucking amazing.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/printFriendly/0,,1-531-1458940-531,00.html

The only DeLillo I've been able to finish (or didn't hurl at the wall) was Libra which I gather is pretty atypical of his oevre.

is he really not that good a writer?

if what you say is true: i would kind of like to kick his ass.

I agree with Lovebug about starting with the journalism. 'The Moronic Inferno' gives you a good grounding on where he's coming from.

Money is a kind of satire, maybe; that's what I heard.

It is kind of sweet the way how in any discussion (real-life, I mean: in my experience) of Amis, however critical, the minute journalism is mentioned people say - 'Oh, yes, as a *journalist*, he's *excellent*...'.

A long-standing claim is that he can write sentences, but not novels. Oddly, in his big book of reviews he sometimes says that other people (Tom Wolfe?) can't properly write novels neither.

I saw a scan of it somewhere in the internet once. It is a guide to playing the game Space Invaders better. It definitely did improve my performance a little - I was not aware of many of the bonuses available, etc.

I think Martin Amis's journalism is Sunday Supplement crap.

I will read Yellow Dog (Up High in Banana Tree) and Report Back. I bet it's quite good.

Money is kind of about Thatcherism, I think. It is funny and entertaining and enjoyable. It played a bit-part in the essay what I got the highest marks what I ever got ever for, which was about Laurence Sterne. It is (Money) a good book made up of good sentences.

Long may his star continue to rise because I have a first edition of London Fields complete with free sample chapter given away by WHSmiths. I hope one day to retire on the proceeds.

I disagree. I think he's a hopeless stylist. It's all "look at me Mum" style writing:

"the contrails of the more distant aeroplanes were like incandescent spermatozoa, sent out to fertilise the universe."

If you think the above sentence is wonderful, then Martin is the man for you. If you think it's preening sixth-form puffery, then I advise staying well clear of him.

I have certainly seen him write far better sentences than that.

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.

Then read somebody else.

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?

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.

this thread is very British. innit.

and someone said "pretentious sixth-form puffery"!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jan/26/colm-toibin-teaching-martin-amis

he sounds rather decent there, surprisingly.

unfortunate url. colm toibin teaching martin amis to do what?

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.

if we must have fictionalised accounts of henry james eyeing up the bootboy, give me david lodge any old day

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?

I liked Brooklyn: a minor thing very well done.

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.

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.

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.

For those of you who are keeping an eye on him...

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?

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

omg. Daniel Radosh quote was pretty funny.

"Martin Amis is exactly who we've all been waiting for," said Starlee Kine, a journalist and prominent radio personality at work on her first book in Williamsburg, where she lives next door to Henry Miller's childhood home. "And if there was ever a neighborhood that could use someone like Martin Amis, it's Cobble Hill."

is this a joke?

Starlee Kine ... can't see what the joke would be.

but the sentiments cannot be serious.

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.

bullshit

also LOL @ Kurt Anderson's "I was here first" one-upsmanship

It occurs to me that Martin Amis's place in literary history has been shrinking.

I suppose I mean that he might not be remembered as a very major writer.

You wanna put money on that?

It occurs to me that Martin Amis's place in literary history has been shrinking.

I suppose I mean that he might not be remembered as a very major writer.

Feels nailed on to me too yeah. I mention this all the time but I’ll never get over learning that he had a new book out and it was a the way we live now satire called LIONEL ASBO and had send ups of like Katie Price, just the unavoidable true fact sitting right there forever that this guy is Ben Elton and everyone who touted him as something else needs to be embarrassed

If assessing his late career we should also look beyond ASBO (which I'm afraid I started and didn't finish - maybe I should try again?) and remember that he wrote THE PREGNANT WIDOW, HOUSE OF MEETINGS and the one about a concentration camp - decreasing public interest in all these I'd say - before issuing INSIDE STORY, which seems to have been a really bizarre book, a fictionalised autobiography (again I'm talking about something I've only glanced at).

If he'd published that, say 20 years earlier then surely it would have made a big splash. Now he can't seem to generate that publicity somehow, whatever the writing's like.

I don't think his earlier work need be tainted by the later - it can be tainted enough in itself. But I do feel, somehow subjectively, that the passage of time is making it smaller in the rear view mirror rather than canonically larger.

Latest of his I've read is Time's Arrow, which was quite impressive when I was 15 but suspect wouldn't be quite so good now - also it is suspicious similar in concept to an episode of Red Dwarf from the previous year. I remember the release of The Information being a big deal, since then have only noticed him when he says something stupid in an interview.

I enjoyed bits of Inside Story, which reminded me that, as I learned from Experience (still his most fully realized book), his best subject is his own self-regard.

bad form to repost myself maybe but i feel i got this one right:

picture an entire body made of tin ear

― mark s, Thursday, 5 October 2017 13:06 (five years ago) bookmarkflaglink

I did not finish Inside Story, which I had to check was not called Inside Job. I may yet - it was a mix of bafflingly terrible and actually quite likeable.

& I looked back over me and fizzles on Amis (taking place during the old queen's funeral earlier this year) & tho ~major writer~ feels like an odd and slightly bogus idea nowadays, you get the sense that Amis probably really fucking minds about not being a major writer.

Also - I think his disappearance has been assisted by something that's sort of 'death of the monoculture/apparent cultural consensus' but I think is more concretely the cull of the separate broadsheet books sections and literary editors - about 15 years ago now iirc. The major place for eg Robert McCrum to say ah yes but Money is a major novel to a general audience (also interview with Amis, Amis face on cover) collapsed p quickly.

So I'd guess he just isn't someone that literary guys(*) under 40 would have read at the age (15-25 or so?) where he gets to become a permanent part of your head furniture.

* I mean guys, it was always guys

a mix of bafflingly terrible and actually quite likeable.

like most male novelists

it was a mix of bafflingly terrible and actually quite likeable

Got really stuck at a point where he's spelling his name aloud:

"Martin Amis," I said. "That's eh em eye ess."

I just kept pronouncing 'eh' over and over to make it recognisable as A but didn't quite get there.

^^^^ strong support for

picture an entire body made of tin ear

Eh?

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)

There used to be a BBC radio show called "My Word."

One time they had a topic of "unlikeliest book titles," and someone said "My Struggle, by Martin Amis."

I think about that a lot. Mostly in the context of how hard it was for Julian Lennon or Jakob Dylan to get a record deal, but in other contexts as well.

There are some fun parts of London Fields and The Information. Time's Arrow is not bad but it is basically one joke. Some not bad essays in Visiting Mr. Nabokov.. Personally I don't regret reading these books, but don't feel the need to revisit any of them. Rachel Papers is pretty unpleasant IMO.

Not even cancelled.

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.)

When I consider Good Amis Journalism, it's Moronic Inferno that I think of.

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.

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".

I like Amis by the page, but the thought of reading a whole novel is exhausting to think about, let alone attempt.