Martin Amis, a writer known for his stylish novels, widely admired literary criticism and acerbic observations about British and American culture, died on Friday at 73.
Amis — the son of famed British writer Kingsley Amis — became one of the characteristic literary celebrities of his generation. He first broke onto the scene with darkly comedic novels about drugs, sex, finance and media, cutting against what he viewed as the British tendency toward airless, sanitized nostalgia. In middle age, he took on self-consciously grander themes: history, war, the specter of nuclear annihilation, environmentalism. His last book, “Inside Story,” was an autobiographical — and metafictional — reflection on his life, his friendships and some contemporary politics.
“I think there’s a lot of romanticism in my work,” he once told a reporter, “but it’s thwarted by distortion and perversity, false commercial images in TV, literature, porn. The fact is, my satire wouldn’t work if what I’m satirizing were not valued. Like Philip Larkin’s poetry, love is conspicuous by its absence.”
Amis was energetically prolific as novelist, essayist, critic and reporter. Here’s where to start:
The major novels
“Money: A Suicide Note” (1984). The first novel of what would become known as Amis’s London trilogy follows an ad man, John Self, as he crosses the Atlantic to make a movie. Amis himself described it as “essentially a plotless novel … a voice novel.” Here’s how Jonathan Yardley characterized it in his review for The Washington Post: “From first page to last it is one long drinking bout, interrupted only briefly by a period of relative sobriety; it contains incessant sexual activity, much of it onanistic; it has a generous supply of sordid language that would not pass muster in polite society; and it has an unkind word for just about every race, creed or nationality known to exist. … [I]t is so unremittingly, savagely hilarious that reading it is quite literally an exhausting experience, from which one emerges simultaneously gasping for air and pleading for more.”
“London Fields” (1989). “This is the story of a murder,” the narrator tells us on the first page of arguably Amis’s most widely admired novel. “It hasn’t happened yet. But it will. (It had better.)” The narrator is Samson Young, a chronically blocked American writer. But as with John Self in “Money,” the novel’s most memorable character is the seediest one — Keith Talent, a two-bit thief who aspires to be a champion darts thrower. Amis roasted 1980s New York in “Money” and captures late-20th-century London with the same jaded and very funny eye.
“The Information” (1995). This story of two writer frenemies, one of whom becomes a best-selling success, was overshadowed in the British tabloids at the time of publication by the rumored $800,000 Amis had been paid for it. The author later remarked to an interviewer about his demand for the generous advance: “These things stay with you. For years it was the number one thing people asked about, and it was not my finest hour.” But the book’s reputation has done just fine: In 2019, the Guardian ranked it his second-best novel (behind “Money”), writing: “The comedy is unsparing but affectionate and the existential angst more acute than ever.”
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2023-05-21 01:12:36Z
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