Martin Amis: fire away!

I did like that, true.

There was an article in the Sunday Times or similar recently denouncing those hatin' on Nigella, because of her struggles as a single mother to make a success of her life. Yes, I know this isn't about Amis, but it kind of is really.

this is a great slapdown!

"this article is by michiko kakutani" is not really a cogent criticism. surely you can do better.

wait, this new Amis has fiction and non fiction in the same book?

9/11 changed everything

"this article is by michiko kakutani" is not really a cogent criticism. surely you can do better.

I thought "Michiko Katutani" was enough to alert our readers that a first-class pedant reviewed the book. This isn't a badly written essay though.

Is Koba the Dread worth reading?

not really unless you're invested in finding out what a pair of choads amis and hitch have become over the last two decades.

I think that, as a result of this latest piece of crap from Amis, people will now accept, retrospectively, that "Koba the Dread" was a load of bollocks too

Mr. Amis, ever the littérateur, prattles on about the appropriateness of the abbreviation “9/11” and how this formulation makes little sense in Britain, where the habit of noting the day first and the month second would make this “11/9."

oh christ he really is a pub bore.

how this formulation makes little sense in Britain

But it's true! When I say 9/11 no-one, but no-one, knows what I'm talking about!

Michael Haneke really ought to be paying Amis a residual, since the plot of Funny Games appears virtually unchanged in The Information.

Even before he turned reactionary just like his old man, I never got on with Martin Amis. For all his focus on the importance of style, I find his own style so horribly try-hard as to be almost unreadable: "The contrails of the more distant aeroplanes were like incandescent spermatozoa, sent out to fertilise the universe." I guess there are people who like that kind of sentence-making, but not me.

The last thing I read of his was "Night Train", a piss-poor effort at a crime novel.

Anyway, generally, "like father like son - sooner or later" shock horror youth cult probe...

aye that was bad. i suspect if i re-read the novels i claim to like, all of them read more than ten years ago, i would find myself not liking them so much. some of the critical essays i reckon are probably still ok.

xpost

The Information is hilarious.

You Britishers sure are crazy when it comes to Martin Amis

xp: Koba the Dread's pretty good. I certainly enjoyed it and there are lots of insane and entertaining facts in there, as one would expect I suppose. I like all those economicslite, diet sociology books, and Koba is like an equivalent for history - only with an exceptionally intrusive and highly-strung narrator, rather than a laidback Gladwell dude.

The last thing I read of his was "Night Train", a piss-poor effort at a crime novel.

lol

I suspect his novels wouldn't work for me the way the used to (except the ones I didn't like the first time round, like Yellow Dog or Night Train, which would work exactly the way they did), but I still maintain 'Experience' is a nifty, slightly mad, bit of wonderfulness.

yeah EXPERIENCE is fantastic. his best book since MONEY.

Experience is great because is quotes Kingley describing the first Terminator film as a "flawless masterpiece".

"koba the dread" is awful stuff, maybe worth reading only for all the moments where MA inadvertently proves what a first-class dick he is. my favorite: the part where he oh-so-seriously says if he had to choose he'd much rather be incinerated at hiroshima than die in a work camp.

also gripping character study of stalin: did you know he was a BAD MAN? who did BAD THINGS?

I put it down after 30 pgs, gagging on his naivete. His best buddy Hitchens took him to task for this a few years ago in a published review.

http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2002/09/hitchens.htm

To be fair, I too would rather be incinerated in a nuclear blast than die in a prison work camp.

Experience is great because is quotes Kingley describing the first Terminator film as a "flawless masterpiece".

-- caek, Thursday, April 10, 2008 1:32 AM (7 hours ago) Bookmark Link

lol yes -- i think hitch, mart, and kingers go to see 'beverley hills cop' and only KA digs it. obviously KA could be a dick but some of the stuff in that book is win.

One of the big differences between père and fils - Kingsley was always unashamedly into popular culture. He even wrote a James Bond novel - I'd be kind of interested to see what that's like! Hard to imagine Martin doing that. (Although now I think about it didn't Martin write a book about Space Invaders or something)

kingsley's book *about* bond (i haven't read the bond novel itself) is really good.

MA has written about popular culture -- iirc the space invaders thing is the name of a collection, which includes an essay on same -- especially hollywood: 'money' is partly based on his experience as a screenwriter. his critical books have interviews with speilberg and de palma, and maybe madonna -- i can't remember so well, suffice to say he was less at ease with this stuff than kingsley.

Martin says in Experience that Kingsley called one of the Terminator movies "a flawless masterpiece" as they exited the theater together.

A "flawleshhhhh mashterpieshe" more like

Experience is great because is quotes Kingley describing the first Terminator film as a "flawless masterpiece".

-- caek, Thursday, April 10, 2008 1:32 AM (7 hours ago) Bookmark Link

!

And this was also the period when what had partly been a put-on — the persona of the reactionary philistine — began to rigidify into something real and permanent. Kingsley became the very sort of person he used to make fun of, declaring, for example, that England’s best living writer was Dick Francis and that henceforth he wanted only to read books that began, “A shot rang out.” Christopher Hitchens says he thinks that the process of self-ossification was pretty much complete by 1984. “I remember that Martin, Kingsley and I all had dinner, and then we went to see ‘Beverly Hills Cop,’ ” he said a few weeks ago. “Naturally, you couldn’t go to anything French or Japanese or Polish. All through the movie Kingsley was laughing with what we assumed was pretend mirth, and afterward he announced, ‘Yes, an absolutely flawless masterpiece.’ Suddenly it became clear he wasn’t joking and that he meant to defend the virtues of the film with absolute fidelity. It was a very striking moment — the sense that the face had grown to fit the mask and that the pose had become himself.”

lol aging. my dad sort of hardened and narrowed his viewpoints in his 60s, not as flamboyantly as kingers but recognizably similiar, i think most people go thru this if they're lucky enough to live that long. to be honest I feel this happening already with regard to my musical tastes and I'm still in the spring of middle age.

also via google:

—Get your hair cut...Get your hair cut.
This suggestion was being offered to the television set, more particularly to the actress Linda Hamilton every time she appeared on screen. We were watching a tape of The Terminator (again). An old science-fiction hand, Kingsley was a great fan of The Terminator, and seven years later he would make no secret of his admiration for Terminator 2 ('a flawless masterpiece'), which I took him to at the Odeon, Marble Arch.
—Martin Amis, Experience

I suspect the "philistinism" was there more or less from the start. After all his very first novel Lucky Jim rips into academia, pretentiousness, preciousness etc., vs the joys of binge-drinking...

how did that business with that eagleton chap end?

rough sex

ewwwwwww

I haven't read Koba the Dread, but isn't there one particularly egregious section in which Amis compares the screaming of his baby in the middle of the night to the screams of gulag prisoners?

It's in the Hitchens' thing linked above:

"The sounds she was making," I said unsmilingly to my wife on her return, "would not have been out of place in the deepest cellars of the Butyrki Prison in Moscow during the Great Terror. That's why I cracked and called Caterina [the nanny]."

You couldn't make it up

Thanks, should have checked that. It's the nanny bit that really makes the quote, isn't it.

It's sort of comforting to know that Kingsley never had to witness Terminator 3.

David Cameron = Gwyn Barry

I wonder what he thought about T2?

I guess we'll never know.

What I remember of The Line of Beauty is that its characters often saunter (along pavements) or dart (into and out of rooms) and occasionally linger (over light lunches): all things I think that would have boiled the piss of Martin Amis in the 80s.

For all the talk about keeping the dictionary open at all times, meticulously crafted sentences, etc., etc. I find myself as a writer responding much more to Elmore Leonard's famous 10 rules:

1. Never open a book with weather.
2. Avoid prologues.
3. Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue.
4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said"…he admonished gravely.
5. Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose.
6. Never use the words "suddenly" or "all hell broke loose."
7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.
8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
9. Don't go into great detail describing places and things.
10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

My most important rule is one that sums up the 10.

If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

That piece is something: Martin Amis had THREE layers of generosity?! Come on, now..

Cheese, guava, almonds

fwiw I'll buy that Amis was probably a nicer guy in person than he came across as (and made strenuous efforts to come across as). Who could be like that full time in public and private? Only truly rarefied titans of misanthropy like Ginger Baker can pull that off

No comparison to Pope. Pope was a foot shorter.

Nice piece. 'Devout' is well-chosen. A more generous way to look at the canon-hugging and status anxiety and the effortfulness of his weaker prose.

Lol at Ginger Baker comparison.

did he become a nicer person with the new fangs or

heh

Another hack tribute. This one was so desperate to get his tribute in he got it published in Norwegian

Here’s my tribute to Martin Amis 1949-2023 for @Vinduet touching on his influential style and unorthodox way of writing fiction (in Norwegian for now but some things transcend national and linguistic boundaries)https://t.co/urs4z2efnI

— Leo Robson (@leorobsonwriter) June 6, 2023

Fixed teeth transcend national and linguistic boundaries.

Picked up Nabokov's 'Speak, Memory', as it seems a little bit like Amis' Experience. Nabokov writes about his father a lot, though by no means exclusively so. Feels like -- both in The New Statesman piece above and the John Self piece where he talked it as the book for people who hate Amis -- that Experience could be the book that lasts as the white, Oxbridge-educated, middle-class hacks who cared to pay a tribute have been trying to sell it a bit more than some of his later novels, say.

Reading the Nabokov I could see why. Both were prickly, nasty people, who grew up well, but in these memoirs they write about things you are not going to be that nasty about. Get quite jaded about that attitude. Can't you be tender about people you made up?

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/jun/16/martin-amis-ian-mcewan-and-anna-wintour-honoured-in-kings-birthday-list

Amis's posthumous knighthood surprises me as

a) I have never heard of a posthumous knighthood
b) he writes in EXPERIENCE, I think, of knighthoods being ridiculous (at least he says that Sir David Hare's is)
c) if he didn't want it, he can't now turn it down. Or had he already agreed to it?

I believe that David Bowie refused honours. What if Bowie had been posthumously awarded them in Summer 2016?

I would also say
d) After Savile died we were told that he couldn't posthumously be stripped of his knighthood as it ended with his death anyway.

the ‘martin amis faked his death’ conspiracy theory starts here

Amis accepted it, apparently they told him about it last month. & they have dated it to the day before he died because the convention is still that knighthoods don’t apply posthumously (can’t change that or Charles might have to officially revoke that of his hero savile)

So the idea is amis is officially retroactively a Sir for one day and then not, it’s v pointless

or the knighthood killed him

It would be great if it had that effect on all recipients

a sudden nerve twinge made charles slash instead of dub, rip martin

Given that Fosse won the Novel today I should bring up this tweet.

Where, like Fosse, we have some deployment of repetition

Anyone who says Martin Amis wasn’t a stylist is, frankly, an idiot pic.twitter.com/orr7Q0ieLe

— Max Lawton (@maxdaniellawton) September 1, 2023

*Nobel