Martin Amis
Christ, Martin Amis is dead.
It’s a tiny list of writers who have meant as much to me as Martin Amis, the great English author and public intellectual who died on May 19 at age 73. If I recall correctly, he published twenty-two books in his lifetime, copies of twenty of which rest on my shelves; I’ve read nineteen of them (so far). He was, to my mind, the greatest prose-stylist of the late twentieth century.
I consider myself fortunate to have met Amis. He was appearing at the Texas Book Festival to promote his book The Zone of Interest, and I escorted him across the grounds of the Capitol building to a book signing. He gave careful consideration and thoughtful answers to the questions I asked as we walked, answering in perfect paragraphs in keeping with the way he always spoke – beautifully. His generosity to interlocutors and young writers went almost un-noted, at least until he died. As is the way of these things.
Amis has been out of fashion with literary critics for years. Most pointedly, he endured a torturous relationship with the English press, who resented him for his lineage (Kingsley Amis, father), his early success, his talent, his rock star image (he was frequently described as a ‘literary Jagger,’ a sobriquet which went hand-in-hand with a somewhat unlikely reputation as a literary playboy). There’s nothing that turns people off in England like success though, is there? Predictably, in the days after his death, that much battered reputation gave way to a vast reconsideration as writers and critics crawled over one another in recognition of his genius.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/may/20/martin-amis-obituary
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/22/books/review/martin-amis.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/20/books/martin-amis-dead.html
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/martin-amis-remembered-by-writers
https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2023/05/martin-amis-death-books-jennifer-egan/674207/
Amis himself was a critic of astounding acuity. He was an imperfect and uneven novelist, but all of his books contain sentences and paragraphs of incomparable brilliance and wit. Money, written in 1985 is his undoubted masterpiece, and his memoir, Experience (2000) is an exemplar of the form.
In January of this year I re-read House of Meetings (2006) and late last year I re-read The Information (1995). Just after his death I ordered a collection of short stories, Einstein’s Monsters, and read his debut novel, The Rachel Papers (1973) for the first time. One thing it clarified for me was where the strain of ‘misogyny’ claims against him emerged. Parts of it are cringeworthy, as he himself admitted when looking back on it. It’s very much the work of a man in his early twenties. It’s also satire, as much of his best work is, and as such, laugh-out-loud funny in many places.
In his criticism, Amis always pointed towards the source text, something I have notably failed to do here. But to close, here’s a startling and brilliantly spot-on observation from The Rachel Papers that remains very fresh in my mind. Our protagonist takes the object of his attempts at seduction, Rachel, to an artsy French movie. Unfortunately, they arrive at the movie house early, in time to catch the B feature, called Nudist Eden.
‘It was grisly. The film presented itself as a documentary, just taking a look around a real nudist camp. The interviewer gave facts and figures, interviewed satisfied customers. The camera patrolled the grounds, examined the facilities. Grubby colour, low-budget incompetence; it had a nightmare quality: you can’t tell whether you’re going mad or everyone else is going mad; you stare around the cinema to check your bearings; you expect the audience to make some spontaneous gesture of protest. What was more, the producers could only afford middle-aged actors and actresses.
I shifted in my seat as the camera inexpertly focused on a parade of oldster genitals. The men had pricks like hand-rolled cigarettes, balls like prunes...’
Christ, Martin Amis. No-one like him.