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Martin AmisMartin Amis
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Critical perspective
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Biography
Martin Amis was born in Oxford in 1949, the son of the writer Kingsley Amis. He was educated in schools in Britain, Spain and the USA, and graduated from Exeter College, Oxford, with First Class Honours in English. He wrote and published his first novel, The Rachel Papers (1973), while working as an editorial assistant at the Times Literary Supplement. The novel won a Somerset Maugham Award in 1974 and was followed by Dead Babies in 1975. He was Literary Editor of the New Statesman between 1977 and 1979, publishing his third novel, Success, in 1978.
Regarded by many critics as one of the most influential and innovative voices in contemporary British fiction, Amis is often grouped with the generation of British-based novelists that emerged during the 1980s and included Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan and Julian Barnes. His work has been heavily influenced by American fiction, especially the work of Philip Roth, John Updike and Saul Bellow. A loose trilogy of novels set in London begins with Money: A Suicide Note (1984), a satire of Thatcherite amorality and greed, continues with London Fields (1989), and concludes with The Information (1995), a tale of literary rivalry. Time's Arrow (1991), was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Fiction.
Other books include Night Train (1997), a pastiche of American detective fiction, an acclaimed volume of autobiography, Experience (2000) - winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize - and Koba the Dread, a non-fiction work about communism in the twentieth century (2002).
Amis is also the author of several collections of essays, including The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America (1986), Visiting Mrs Nabokov and Other Excursions (1993), and The War Against Cliché (2001), which includes essays and book reviews. His two collections of short stories are Einstein's Monsters (1987), and Heavy Water and Other Stories (1998).
His latest books are House of Meetings (2006), taking the form of a novella and two short stories, and The Second Plane (2008), a book of essays and short stories.
He is a regular contributor to numerous newspapers, magazines and journals, including the Sunday Times, The Observer, the Times Literary Supplement and the New York Times. He was awarded an honorary LittD by the University of East Anglia in 2000.
Martin Amis lives in London. He became Professor of Creative Writing at Manchester University in 2007.
Genres (in alphabetical order)
Autobiography, Criticism, Fiction, Non-fiction, Short stories
Bibliography
The Rachel Papers Cape, 1973
Dead Babies Cape, 1975
Success Cape, 1978
Other People: A Mystery Story Cape, 1981
Invasion of the Space Invaders Hutchinson, 1982
Money: A Suicide Note Cape, 1984
The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America Cape, 1986
Einstein's Monsters Cape, 1987
London Fields Cape, 1989
Time's Arrow Cape, 1991
Visiting Mrs Nabokov and Other Excursions Cape, 1993
The Information Flamingo, 1995
Night Train Cape, 1997
Heavy Water and Other Stories Cape, 1998
Experience Cape, 2000
The War Against Cliché Cape, 2001
Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million Cape, 2002
On Modern British Fiction (contributor: 'Against Dryness') Oxford University Press, 2002
Yellow Dog Cape, 2003
Vintage Amis Vintage, 2004
House of Meetings Cape, 2006
The Pregnant Widow Cape, 2008
The Second Plane: September 11, 2001-2007 Cape, 2008
Prizes and awards
1974 Somerset Maugham Award The Rachel Papers
1991 Booker Prize for Fiction (shortlist) Time's Arrow
2000 James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for biography) Experience
2003 British Book Awards Literary Fiction Award (shortlist) Yellow Dog
Critical Perspective
‘I don’t want to write a sentence that any guy could have written,’ says Martin Amis. It is this sense of a primary responsibility towards Style which so distinguishes Amis’s writing – and so divides his admirers and detractors. For some, the energy and extravagance of his work, his distinctive voice, are the hallmarks of a writer of particular importance. James Wood, for instance, argues that Amis’s ‘word-coining power’ and ‘verbal and formal ambition’ have been crucial forces for the revitalization of the novel in English since the 1970s. Amis is singular in his ready articulation of the language and mores of the moment, and in his conscious relation to movements in the contemporary European and, above all, American novel (Nabokov and Bellow are two major influences). He is, in his own way ‘addicted to the twentieth century’ (like his character John Self in Money: A Suicide Note, 1984), engrossed in the themes, riffs and rhythms of the millennial, apocalyptic metropolis. The force of his satirical and comic imagination is concentrated in prose of energy and wit: one can take phrases at random from his novels which illustrate the point – from London Fields (1989),‘Guy had grown up in the age of mediated atrocity; like everyone else, he was exhaustively accustomed to the sad arrangements, the pathetic postures of the dead’; Terry, the narrator of Success (1978), sees himself ‘as a connoisseuer of ennui, as sateity’s scholar’; in Time’s Arrow (1991), the same dexterity and precision is in the service of a different tone, as when the narrator notes that ‘something enveloped me, something that was all ready for my measurements, like a suit or a uniform, over and above what I wore, and lined with grief’.
For other readers, however, this verbal ingenuity is shallow, its author overly concerned with the glister of the sentence at the expense of the realised aesthetic whole. Jason Cowley describes Amis as ‘a turbocharged cartoonist’, trapped in ‘the monotonous sublime of caricature’. His aspirations to writing of a broad, normative moral significance or resonance – aspirations consistently explicit in the austere severity of his critical journalism and occasional writing (a substantial and impressive achievement, usefully collected in The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America, 1986, and The War Against Cliché, 2001) – remain, for such critics, under-realised in the fiction, despite the ready address to ‘Big Themes’ such as the Holocaust (Time’s Arrow); or nuclear catastrophe and apocalypse (Einstein’s Monsters, 1987; London Fields). The argument was at its fiercest around the publication of Time’s Arrow, a fictional autobiography, narrated in reverse, by the uncomprehending and repressed soul of the Nazi doctor Odilo Unverdorben. This dazzling, troubling work is a rhetorical and technical tour de force, but its very success in this regard – in its voicing of the unspeakable – opens the novel to accusations of opportunism and impropriety. Its subtitle ‘The Nature of the Offence’ indicates the serious intent; this is a search to locate meaning in the Holocaust and a quest for lost innocence, even for repair of the century’s trauma.
In a review of Saul Bellow’s work, Amis remarks admiringly that, ‘To evolve an exalted voice appropriate to the twentieth century has been the self-imposed challenge of his work’. It is clearly a challenge to which Amis also responds, and it is a tribute to the quality of his writing, and his determination over three decades, that the critical debate about his prose has largely replaced prurient attention given to controversies attending his person. For long the ‘Bad Boy’ of British Fiction, Amis was criticized for his persistent attention to sexual themes (pornography, sado-masochism and the sex trade are common features in his novels), and his eager documenting of the more vicious fatuities of contemporary living, an attention which, it was argued, shows too much relish for its ugly subject matter. His private life gained, for a novelist, unprecedented negative exposure. High-profile episodes such as the break with his agent over the size of an advance on one novel brought accusations of avarice and greed; marital discord was taken to confirm the identification between author and the more the unsavoury male figures of his novels. Above all, Amis spent many years in the shadow of comparisons to his father, Kingsley, a dominant figure in the post-war English novel, and by all accounts also a daunting paterfamilias. The turning point in his public reputation was arguably with the publication of Martin’s disarming memoir, Experience (2000), which was favourably received as a mature, generous and surprisingly moving account of a difficult, even at points tragic, family life, revealing something of the author’s humility and vulnerability.
As the title suggest, the work is about the painful process of the loss of innocence. An opening into ‘the geography of the writer’s mind’, the memoir centres on Amis’s changing relation to his father, but the narrative also weaves together Amis’s discovery that, as a young man, he had fathered a child of whom he knew nothing until her mother’s death; the story of his cousin, Lucy Partington, who was a victim of Fred West, the notorious serial killer; and moving, acute examinations of the break-up of his own first marriage and its impact on his children. Experience marks a radical shift in Amis’s writing, which alters significantly the perspective from which his oeuvre is to be perceived, acknowledging whilst reworking the known facts of the private life in order to explore the nature and determinants of one creative imagination.
Jibes about the ready access enjoyed by Amis fils to the literary world ignore the pressure of critical intelligence and broad reading which characterize his work. If he was ‘tied by a quirk of birth to the writing life’ (Cowley), Amis has, as the bibliography above indicates, now more than served his apprenticeship. The early career as a literary journalist soon gave way to recognition as a cult-ish novelist producing a series of funny, dark, perverse tales of youth in the city (The Rachel Papers, 1973; Dead Babies, 1975; Other People: A Mystery Story, 1981). This status shifted dramatically with the triptych of bravura novels of the late 1970s and 1980s – Success, Money: A Suicide Note, and London Fields – which captured the chaos and energy of the Thatcherite period, and cemented Amis’s reputation as a foremost chronicler of contemporary London. In the 1990s the work was more overtly political, explicitly engaging those ‘big themes’. There was also important experimentation with the short story genre, evidenced particularly in Heavy Water (1998), a collection characterized by the use of ‘doubles’ and ‘invented worlds’. Under the pressure of events through the decade, Amis entered the more reflective mode of Experience, and the political essay Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million (2002). The most recent writing, Yellow Dog (2003), marks a return to fiction, and to the themes of male violence, troubled sex and the apocalyptic, millennial city, but in many ways opens a new phase, of emboldened, uncomplicated satire - in this case, on the Royal Family and Tabloid newspapers, those uncomfortably coupled but symbiotic entities. It is difficult to predict the form or direction of ‘later Amis’, but Yellow Dog confirms the endurance and energy of our foremost stylist, and makes clear that the publication of an Amis novel remains an event in contemporary writing.
Dr Sean Matthews, 2004
Author statement
'In adolescence, everybody feels the impulse to write - poems, plays, stories. Writers are simply the people who stick with it. Of course, as you continue you are bolstered by craft and technique - and routine. But what we loosely call "inspiration" remains as mysterious as that first adolescent impulse.'
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