Martin Amis: fire away!

Flaubert's Parrot didn't leave a lasting impression. I got a copy of Bovary (the Lydia Davis translation, which Barnes hates) and am going to try that soon.

Amis knew Ballard's work very well, reviewed book after book as they came out, and I think knew Ballard personally also (Ballard had been good friends with his father). One might diverge from his particular views on Ballard but they're not based on ignorance or pretence.

I would be somewhat close to poster Woof's statement. Most people agree that most of Amis's novels were 'flawed' in some way or other (some of them I have actively thought were dreadful - including, I'm afraid, London Fields and The Information and Yellow Dog - a large slice of his career!), but he also had rare, prodigious talent and wrote many things that were amusing and memorable for many people. He was a big part of recent literary history. Literature has often been been more entertaining for his presence.

Evaluatively comparing MA to his father seems pointless. You might as well say he's inferior to Nabokov, Virginia Woolf or anyone else. It's enough to judge him on his own merits, if you can find them. Which I, to an extent, can.

It doesn't feel like that gen of British authors is being read with as much enthusiasm as Zadie Smith this century.

tbf she's 20 years down from them so that's full generational shift but yeah the whole lot ended up being overtaken by Hilary Mantel on both critical and popular fronts.

xpost in the same place, really. as some here will know, I'm more of a KA fan - who has his own v uneven oeuvre.

on ballard, leaving aside the weird 'creamy' line, I think MA is otm. Humour isn't a component of his writing, TDoJFKCaaDMR aside if you like, or maybe not - his mode was a form of surrealism. He was a suburban, conservative, pompous man, sure, but his approach to imaginative fiction was extraordinary in its effect. I'm sure I've said this ad nauseam elsewhere, but the minimal component parts of his writing were for his time not the most radical or up to date - c levi-strauss anthropology, frazer, jung, victorian adventure fiction - yet from them he produced something strange, brutal and mesmeric. unlike many other writers at all.

The main thing that damages MA for me is his misogyny. Which is incontrovertible in his fiction and parts of his non-fiction alike.

Evaluatively comparing MA to his father seems pointless.

well, yeah

Xy, in college I read every translation I could find and wrote an essay comparing them.

I am not sure if Barnes influenced me to prefer Eleanor Marx Aveling. But the project damaged my brain, and I cannot imagine attempting anything like that ever again.

At my current age and with my current attention span I count myself fortunate to make it through a day where I don't lose my car keys.

I only became familiar with Amis a couple of months ago when someone on my street put a copy of The War Against Cliché out on the sidewalk and I picked it up. I read it and enjoyed it far more than I expected to. Echoing what has been said elsewhere, his book reviews were very very good and his pantheon of great authors was so convincing it made me want to read late Saul Bellow novels among other things I never would've considered.

― Josefa, Monday, May 22, 2023

Great post! Ambushed by unexpected Amis.

Felt like a significant weekend, in terms of personal intimations of mortality. The Smiths and Amis were two things I loved beyond measure as a schoolboy in the mid-1980s - I can probably still recite bits of The Moronic Inferno or Money, just as I can replay every bass and guitar line from the entire Smiths discography on my mental iPod. Feel like both deaths have given a lot of people the opportunity to come out and unashamedly confess their love for something that has seemed slightly shameful for a few decades now - the Guardian/Observer in particular seems on the verge of publishing a special Amis commemorative special issue. I guess James Wood must have been fine tuning his NYer Amis obit for a while - seems like his health was an open secret - but I think he got it right in comparing Amis to Wodehous https://www.newyorker.com/culture/postscript/martin-amiss-comic-music In a funny, Empsonian way, both were pastoral writers?

Spent a bit of Sunday morning flicking through the War Against Cliche and Money and I think a lot of it, on a paragraph by paragraph basis, is still really funny. Went to a Ian Penman reading the other week where he was explaining his turn to the Europe of Derrida and Fassbinder in the late 70s - "what was the alternative? The second Martin Amis novel?" to much slightly smug chuckles. To be honest, these days I would much rather read a few pages of Money than anything by Penman.

tbf she's 20 years down from them so that's full generational shift but yeah the whole lot ended up being overtaken by Hilary Mantel on both critical and popular fronts.

― woof, Monday, 22 May 2023 bookmarkflaglink

I was trying to hunt for an article interviewing young writers (mostly women and many from BAME backgrounds) I saw a while ago but couldn't see it just now (Google is shit and must die). Smith 'broke' in 2000 and I think they were barely in their 20s so next generation.

I can't see a piece like that written about any of this lot. Be interesting to see if the reputation recovers.

Ballard was far, far better. I read his books on the back of a lot of genuine enthusiasm (decades after they were published) for what he did.

On twitter when a writer dies you often get some genuine affection but there isn't much, sometimes there is outright hostility as he was a bigot. If it wasn't for some of the posts here the other tributes would be from the likes of...Boris Johnson and Matthew D'Ancona.

Other twitter have come from Backlisted Pod and John Self. Who annoy me so..

And Paul Mason!

I agree with Wood's fine tribute, except that I don't remotely agree that THE INFORMATION is the best novel.

I largely agree with poster Gimbel, save that I don't comprehend what is meant by 'pastoral'. I never understood what Empson's book was about.

MONEY features a very minor character called Tab Penman.

I believe Amis in Koba the Dread compares the suffering he felt as a result of the crying of his infant child to the suffering of the victims of the Gulag, which to put it mildly seems a bit rich and was laughed at a great deal at the time of publication. OTOH Money was a good read when I was eighteen, so who's to say good or bad etc.

apologies, this amusing paragraph tells me Amis was taken to task by Orlando Figes of all people for "comparing the crying of his six-month daughter with the cries from Butyrki Prison in Moscow during the Great Terror."

On twitter when a writer dies you often get some genuine affection but there isn't much, sometimes there is outright hostility as he was a bigot. If it wasn't for some of the posts here the other tributes would be from the likes of...Boris Johnson and Matthew D'Ancona.

I would expect every tribute to come from British men aged 45-70, & mostly Oxbridge.

I know quite a few women who don't fit that stereotype who love Amis? Nicola Barker for one.

nicola barker is also a far better writer

unlike james wood

xps
Fair. Big lazy generalisation. But almost everything I've seen published so far does fit (James Wood, Boyd Tonkin, Sam Leith, Philip Hensher, everyone xyzzz mentions, Geoff Dyer, etc. That's putting aside his peer group novelists like Rushdie and Boyd.)

I think it says as much about the address books of broadsheet culture editors as it does about a particular writer's appeal. I imagine Kevin Barry could write something interesting too.

heh -- I wondered whether to bother with The Information.

Punchline here is pretty funny though.

The Information (1995) was notable not so much for its critical success, but for the scandals surrounding its publication. The enormous advance of £500,000 (almost US$800,000) demanded and subsequently obtained by Amis for the novel attracted what the author described as "an of hostility" from writers and critics

I'll stan for *The Information*. It's ugly in the usual Amis ways but has a horrible dark energy about it and mostly punches up/sideways.

And he spent most of the advance on his teeth, right? He came in for some weird extended criticism about this iirr? I mean, sure, bougie in the extreme to spend vast amounts on cosmetic surgery but the dude did have a tumour removed.

An what of hostility?

Eisteddfod, turns out

Oh, hyperlink broke zing, sorry.

But I thought you were making a Lucky Jim reference.

To this famous passage:

In considering this strangely neglected topic,’ it began. This what neglected topic? This strangely what topic? This strangely neglected what?

This Eisteddfod of what?

The teeth, yes.

Alfred and Chinaski, I suspect The Information would feel dated if one picked it up today.

Personally I think its treatment of diversity and inclusion might have seemed wry and perhaps vaguely satirical at the time, but would clang pretty badly in the current "war against woke" DeSantis era.

(Particularly thinking of the gag where a stable of "diverse" writers includes a Deaf writer as well as an British literary/experimental novelist. Maybe I am magnifying that in the distorted lens of memory.)

David Lodge was traumatized by London Fields Booker Prize incident? And Angela Carter was also excluded?

I didn't much like The Information but mostly remember shaking my head at the v. 90s here-comes-the-science-bit bits.

Oh, Lodge says Angela Carter was not excluded, she didn’t publish anything that year.

"His essays on Larkin ... were vital exercises in holding back the mob when Larkin’s reputation was in the dock." The mob? Really?https://t.co/v5WKDqz2zA

— Elvis Buñuelo (@Mr_Considerate) May 22, 2023

in what exercises holding back the mob? vital exercises what the mob? vital exercises holding back the what?

vital court security officers

Holding back Tom Paulin.

coventry crown court, Judge Roughneck yelling 'Take him away'

Anne of Eisteddfod, Patron Saint of Teeth

It doesn't feel like that gen of British authors is being read with as much enthusiasm as Zadie Smith this century.

Are any of Smith's novels as good as her debut? I managed to finish Autograph Man and NW and thought both were a mess compared to White Teeth. Her essays are good.

xp huh that’s funny you should say that. I’m sure I’ve said before that I don’t really know his work at all but one of the reasons I get major bullshitter vibes off him is from the piece he wrote when Ballard died. It was iirc mainly a personal remembrance and fine, quite touching even, but I’ll never forget the thudding wrongness when he got around to the work and praised the “creaminess” of JGB’s prose(!)

― michel goindry (wins), Sunday, 21 May 2023 bookmarkflaglink

There is always another POV:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/may/22/martin-amis-literature-crusader-peers-chutzpah

We repeated the exercise barely three months later when another of his great heroes and friends, JG Ballard, died. This time we made it to over 1,000 words. “Very few Ballardians (who are almost all male) were foolish enough to emulate him. He was sui generis,” Amis enunciated with verbal italics. “What was influential, though, was the marvellous creaminess of his prose, and the weird and sudden expansions of his imagery,” he continued. “Marvellous creaminess”, “weird and sudden expansions” – how did he do that?

lmao

*writes clunky and wrong description* it’s like watching a magic trick

Every time someone quotes a sample of Amis' purported verbal wizardry it looks awful. Flipping through the channels this morning, I was surprised to see Amis' lead Morning Joe; but when Ed Luce purred over some banal phrase (becoming a grandfather "is like getting a telegram from the mortuary” or something) and everyone on the panel laughed I just thought, right, they're politicos, what do they know.

*Amis' death lead

I don't know if Ballard was that influential on other writers. Weird and sudden expansions also doesn't quite do it for me. To have all this be described as the work of a genius...it's Guardian-y culture that had no answers when the cranks came for the UK's membership of the EU.

Meanwhile Ian Penman wrote a pretty good essay on a Chuck Berry biog last week.

The RJ Smith bio.

I assume

https://harpers.org/archive/2023/06/chuck-berry-an-anthropologist-of-filth

That Smith bio is first-rate.