Martin Amis: Where do I start?

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.