Martin Amis: Where do I start?

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.