Martin Amis died last Friday. He’s been my favourite novelist ever since, aged eighteen, I first read The Rachel Papers. Eighteen was a good age to be reading a literary novel about impending adulthood, first love and the problem of having to make life-defining decisions without the relevant experience, written by an author who was only six years older, when he wrote it, than I was when I read it. Never before had I known someone to write – to speak – in a voice that, to my innocently self-regarding sensibility, sounded so much like my own. Later, of course, I would come to realise just how pretentious the comparison was; yet, to this day, when I read Martin Amis, I don’t hear his voice in my head so much as I hear mine coming out of his.
Before you wheel away, retching, a placatory word. This isn’t some self-aggrandizing exercise in smarm dressed up as an obituary. It isn’t, even, an obituary. I’m too old and lazy – besides rather conspicuously lacking in the talent – to compete with the august hommes de lettres now rushing into print with appreciations of their late colleague (I think we can take it for granted that there won’t be many femmes). Besides, Matthew D’Ancona has already written, in the New European, pretty much the same things I should have done, even making the affective comparison with the death of David Bowie that came over me the instant I heard the news. The Amis Effect Redux, I suppose; but at least it saves me the trouble.
I came here, instead, to write a short list for a couple of friends who, implicitly or explicitly, asked me to recommend something of his for them to read. One is a lately-retired English teacher whose speciality used to be squeezing the distended spawn of well-heeled semiliterates through the needle’s eye of the GCE examinations. Appropriately enough, her literary tastes run to Thomas Hardy and Alice Walker. The other friend is also a teacher, one who struggles to impart the principles of economics to English schoolchildren (I gather that the traditional method, which involved us teaching them to one another on the playground or behind the lavatories, is no longer favoured). His bread is hard-earned and although he is spending it at the bookseller’s rather than on me, I am anxious that he should obtain full value. Having heard me mention that Amis’s own literary heroes were Bellow, Nabokov and Updike, he modestly averred that he had found the road-trip in Lolita ‘tedious’.
I was a bit shaken by this confession: one doesn’t, after all, read these people for the stories they tell – imagine reading Herzog or Pale Fire or the Rabbit novels for their plots – but for how they tell them and, beyond even that, the incomparable, unspeakable pleasure of just reading their words. When Nabokov, in one exquisite sentence, makes the sight of shit coming out of a horse beautiful, questions about where the horse is going and who is riding in the sleigh it draws after it become, temporarily at least, less germane than the words themselves, which one savours – you can retch now if you want – in isolation from the narrative in which they are functionally embedded. Nabokov’s prose is full of moments of this kind, epiphanies in which the world, under his minute scrutiny (the eye of the lepidopterist), seems on the brink of revealing the mysteries at its heart. ‘Spiritual’ is a word one hardly dares utter in connection with Nabokov, whose contempt for mumbo-jumbo of any kind was scathing; all the same, I think it is the right one to use to describe the meaning he extracts, the implied essences he distils from the translucence of a melting icicle or the bereft questing of a displaced caterpillar condemned to spend its last hours endlessly circling the rim of a picnic-table.
It’s easy to see how, if your expectations are largely primed by fiction in the plain style, by the habit of reading for the story (or, worse still, by your identity-politics), you could find Nabokov tedious, or worse. And Lolita is, of course, too notorious to be read at a first pass for anything but the story. Its infamous opening sentence, moreover, is just camouflage for the author’s intentions – his obsessions: but these are adumbrated almost immediately thereafter in that arguably even better-known sentence, perhaps the most quoted of the whole novel: ‘Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth.’ Again the lepidopteristic scrutiny, the painstaking dissection with the micro-forceps and teasing-needle – though we soon learn that it is not Lolita, the butterfly, who is really being dissected, but the perverted, self-deluded pouter who has devoured her.
But I was talking about Martin Amis. He isn’t like that. His novels move at a faster clip than his heroes’ – often, in fact, at a run. Not that he isn’t capable of the parenthetical discourse, the arch stylistic excursion, the vagrant rumination wilfully extended: London Fields and, particularly, The Information, are full of that sort of thing. But he doesn’t make too much of a habit of it, and besides, there’s always the humour: anarchic, sardonic, surreal in the English manner with a thick streak of the sixth form running down it – the vrai vice Anglais to snap you back to attention when your energy or intellect begin to flag. It isn’t to everybody’s taste, this humour: if you are a prig or a propagandist of any kind, a devotee of today’s obnoxious New Puritanism, say, or some kind of authoritarian revenge-fantasist, you won’t like it at all. You will be angered or offended, and I shall laugh all the harder for knowing how much it upsets you.
I’m rambling again? Okay, down to business. To the lady whose heart’s furniture has been, by her own report, traumatically rearranged more than once by Alice Walker, I offer the novels that, in a world that had the courage of its convictions, might have won their author a Nobel Prize: House of Meetings, The Zone of Interest and, of course, Time’s Arrow. The first two are, in my opinion, nowhere near his best, but all three offer the great, terrible subjects, the nightmare settings (a Soviet slave-labour camp above the Arctic Circle in one, Auschwitz in the other two), the doomed principals with their doomed principles, the lopsided auctorial rictus registering your propensity and mine for self-deception and the bottomlessness of our common capacity for evil.
The third, however, sits high on my personal chart of The Best of Amis: a preening virtuoso piece, a showy exercise in technical contrivance that, before you quite realise what is happening, has morphed into a harrowed first-person exposition of genocide-in-progress. When she’s done with that, she’s sure to need a pick-me-up; I recommend Mart at his most generic in Night Train, with its gender-sensitivity and – gasp – likeable female narrator-protagonist. I think my friend will enjoy that one, though of course it won’t be enough, in view of what she’ll have read or heard elsewhere, to offset its author’s reputation for good old-fashioned sexism.
That accusation has, of course, been thrown at Amis so many times that it now qualifies as one of those clichés he was eternally at war against. He never really rebutted it; some things are too silly to argue about even when the consequences to yourself are as unpleasant as the consequences of this were to him. His mild response was that, as an author, he treated his male characters far worse than his female ones. I think it will more than serve (being true), but you, especially if you’re a woman with the opinion that a lot of women seem to have about men nowadays, may not. Amis’s women are, not unreasonably, women as seen through a man’s eyes. They bear no resemblance to the wax dolls and marionettes that furnished the works of male authors for most of the last century (save, of course, for Nicola Six in London Fields – the fictional fictive, the stilettoed anima, the custom-made mantrap), but they’re still women as we – we men – see them. You don’t like that, ladies, do you? You’ve apprised us as much, times without number, though your behaviour towards us often tells a different story… Then again, modern writing by women tends, more often than not, to present men as nasty, coercive, thick or just useless: male characters in ‘quality' fiction by women tend to be objects of hilarity, terror or contempt. I note this without resentment: it is simply another manifestation of the eternal conflict of interest that obtains between the sexes, a struggle in which a peaceable truce is the best we can ever hope for, and even then, the terms must be constantly renegotiated as the world changes about us.
Perhaps I should be more defensive still with my friend the economics teacher, who will surely be on the lookout for other symptoms of privilege and patriarchy besides sexism. Having lately had cause to read an awareness pamphlet published for them by HM Government, I know that such vigilance is specifically enjoined on teachers within the British school system. All the same, I shan’t bother, because – come on – art and literature at the highest level define the bloody patriarchy and, the history of the world being what it is, cannot help but do so. Besides, he’s going to find them anyway, so let’s forget about the woke stuff for a bit and just steam in.
Thus: Money is the acknowledged masterpiece, the one that caused a sensation when published, made its author rich and famous and is now regarded as the literary distillation of life in the metropolitan West during the Eighties. If my friend is planning to read only one novel by Martin Amis, this should be the one. But if he’s willing to consider making a habit of him, as I have, I would advise saving the cream till later and starting, instead, with Lionel Asbo, which is as outrageous as Money but set in a world more recognizable to a Gen X-er than the yuppie inferno in which its predecessor was forged. Or he could try Success, which I think may be Amis’s most typical novel without necessarily being among his best.
After that, I’m afraid, my questing pedagogues are on their own. Perhaps they’ll work their way up, via some of the less successful works (Yellow Dog, The Pregnant Widow) to Other People, chronologically the first open revelation of Amis’s, ah, tender and sensitive side, but unsatisfying to me because the ending remains a puzzle no matter how many times I re-read it. Most people, though, would go straight for the biggies: Time’s Arrow, The Information, or my own favourite (preferred, though only by a hair, to Money), London Fields. Some of the nonfiction is also excellent, particularly Koba the Dread, Amis’s passionate indictment of Stalin, which led to his public feud with Christopher Hitchens (reportedly it never affected their private friendship), and The War against Cliché, a brilliant collection of critical essays and reflections. Finally and perhaps best of all, we come to his personal memoir, Experience. This deals, inter alia, with such persons and matters as the author’s father, a novelist nearly as celebrated in his time as his son is now; the stingy strangeness of Philip Larkin, who (young Martin speculates) might just have been his real father; middle-aged Martin’s discovery of a son he never knew he had; his relationships with other authors, in particular the elderly, dying Saul Bellow; and, most terrible of all, a portrait-biography of his well-loved cousin Lucy Partington, who disappeared without trace in December 1973 and whose dismembered remains were discovered in 1994 alongside those of the other victims of the mass-murderers Fred and Rose West. The Information is dedicated to her memory.
I haven’t yet talked about the novel I started with, The Rachel Papers. I love it, as the song says, for sentimental reasons, but it is very much of its time, culturally as well as in outlook. It’s the most blatantly autobiographical of all his novels, and one of its unexpected pleasures, nowadays, is that it contains numerous scenes played out between its twenty-year-old narrator-protagonist, an obvious stand-in for Amis himself, and his best friend, a hulking ‘city bumpkin’ who, with hindsight, is a dead ringer for Christopher Hitchens.
What of the turkeys? Are there turkeys? Sure there are. Amis once wrote a book about Space Invaders, a now-defunct arcade game. It’s for obsessives and I haven’t read it. Dead Babies, the difficult second novel, is to be avoided at all costs. I don’t care for The Information, either (its protagonist is an unsuccessful author; you can see how that might put me off), but it does contain some of his most brilliant comic writing, the kind that has you laughing so hard you can’t see to read. Of the short-story collections, Heavy Water is uneven, as short-story collections as a rule tend to be, and Einstein’s Monsters is (are?) breathtakingly good.
Is that all? It’s all I care to write. Like Bowie, Amis was someone I thought of as a kind of elder sibling, hero, avatar, even scapegoat: one of those icons to whom the term ‘role model’ scarcely applies because they embody not (or not just) our aspirations but some aspect of our true selves, or perhaps just an aspect of the kind of person we think we really are. There’s no need to get sentimental about this. Still, if one has chosen well, we find that, even after they have left us, these figures not only continue to live for us, but go on paying back, with interest, the representation of ourselves that we have invested in them. I chose well with Martin Amis.
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