Entertainment For Lively Minds
Martin Amis 61 today.
Posted by Vorgongod on 25 August 2010 - 11:20am.
So the enfant terrible turns eminence grise -and 61 - today. Wondering what the Massive make of him. I still buy everything he writes, I'd still cross the road to avoid him in person and I still think that Visiting Mrs Nabokov is one of the most re-readable collections of journalism.
So is he irrelevant, misogynistic, racist, brilliant, misanthropic, hilarious or what?
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I like his journalism even when I disagree.
His literary criticism is pretty much spot on. The War Against Cliche is excellent. If Experience had been 200 pages about his relationship with Kingsley rather than a lot of moaning about teeth and Julian Barnes it would have been one of the finest books about father son relations ever written.
But I have always hated his novels. Money pissed me off enormously, it smacked of "educated guy slumming with the plebs." London Fields was so mannered I couldn't finish it. Success was just shite, The Rachel Papers I can't remember. By now I feel I've given him enough chances.
Great sentences, shame about the books in a nutshell.
Agree totally
I have never understood the cult of Amis. Great writer, terrible novelist. There are some terrific passages in both Money and London Fields (esp, re, that dreadful baby in London Fields) but the characters are caricatures at best, and his fondness for giving his characters silly names (John Self, Keith Talent, Nicola Six, Martin Amis) eventually gets so tiresome, and his plotting is little better.
His best journalism is as good as anything though, although Koba The Dread was very silly, ranting on about how the left denies the gulags and worships Stalin. Maybe once, and Amis is a generation older, but when my generation started reading in the late 70s , we read Solzhenitsyn, Pasternak, Nadezhda Mandelstam and Robert Conquest and we knew what they wrote was true. Amis belatedly discovering Russia and then defaming the entire left was risible.
I'd like to point out
In 'Koba the Dread' Amis was clearly writing about his dad's generation. Is there anything he says about that generation's denial of the Stalinist atrocities that you can demonstrate to be untrue?
To use phrases like 'very silly' and 'ranting on' when Amis is talking about the deaths of some 20 million people seems astonishingly complacent. But maybe, as old Joe said, 20 million dead is just a statistic.
I think you'll find
First of all , let us establish reference "ranting" to referred to the supposed denial, not the statistics ( the estimate of 20 million is not just a statistic : if anything it may be too low , with Solzhenitsyn suggesting as much as 66 million). And no, it was not just about his dad's generation, esp. Christopher Hitchens , but his interviews at the time he was declaring that this denial was still going on. It may have been a careless afterthought to his main battles, but it still rankled. Perhaps it is that I recall his posturing of the time more than the actual book. It has been a while.
But the things I did take away from the book were firstly its acting as if no-one knew or admitted Stalin's crimes, as if he, Amis , has just found it out and must bring it to an oblivious world, and secondly that its real subject was not the 20 million, or even Stalin, the supposed subject, but Martin Amis. The charge of narcissism is never far away from Amis. "Silly" is a pale adjective for this.
In my view if you want to know about Stalin and the purges you would do better with Robert Conquest or Simon Sebag Montefiore.
yeah
I'd pretty much agree with that, Gangle. Cliche and experience are top-drawer stuff, but I've been finding the novels heavy going of late. (House of Meetings is good though) Koba the Dread has some great writing....but then again, it's non-fiction.
I think that the best fiction he's written was the short story The Janitor on Mars, from Heavy Water.Should you ever decide to give him one last, albeit undeserved chance, go there.
I like some of his stuff
But I can't get past the fact that he looks like Larry Grayson crossed with Amanda De Cadenet.
oh jesus!
That's true!!!
Experience was a
truly moving autobiography, and read very differently from anything else of his. Highly recommended.
I´d agree with you
almost all the way but "Yellow Dog" is irremediable nonsense.
I served him once in a bookshop
And he was very nice ( moreso than most authors we got in); we chatted about how bad Thomas Harris' 'Hannibal' (newly out and breaking sales records) was.
Very much the curate's egg
Some stuff is just showing off (does he deliberately try to put an impossibly obscure word on every page, or is that just me?), some stuff is fantastic (Career Move has one of the best ideas for a short story I've ever come across).
But mostly it's a mixed bag - eg The Information has a great basic premise but about 25% of it could be easily cut out for being wordily pretentious.
Vorgongod - I saw MA read another story from Heavy Water (What I Did On My Holiday) and can confirm he reads his own stuff very well and wittily.
Tricky.
I loved The Moronic Inferno (essays on America)and Time's Arrow. I also very much enjoyed London Fields and Money, when I read them in the 80s, although I think now that those last two are very much products of their time.
As a callow youth of 25 I was very much taken with London Fields, and all its dazzling, heartless glory: if Amis could have found a way to bridge the emotional gap between me and it, then I think London Fields could have been A Great Book, as well as being a very important one.
The recent teleplay of Money didn't really work, did it? I'm glad no-one has ever tried to film London Fields. Probably unfilmable. Interesting thought, though: who would have played Nicola Six? Answers on a fiver, please.
Nicola Six = Keeley Hawes.
Keith Talent... can I at least audition?
Bloody Hell, that's a good idea!
Hadn't thought of that. Oooh-er, indeed.
basically
he just gets on my tits..go away..shut up..yes we get it..you have become your father ..now piss off..go on ..out of here!
he wishes....
As I've grown older, I've grown to admire Kingsley far more than his boy.The KingKs English is an absolute delight from A to Z.
He gets on my tits nowadays too.
Sorry,I forgot to mention this.
I grew up on him
Money and London Fields were classic texts for me. I knew he was showing off madly but I didn't mind at all.
Amis and Clive James taught me to write in rhythym. The upbeat, the downbeat. Pace and grace, like Bo Diddley. It took me fucking ages to stop doing that.
Now? It's not you, Martin, it's me
I like his
earlier funny stuff