The one indispensable answer to an environment bristling with people and things one thought were bad was to go on finding out new ways in which one could think they were bad.
—Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim

The trendy Amis, of course, is Martin, whose latest book, Einstein’s Monsters, is described on the dust jacket as “Martin Amis’s impassioned fictionalized protest against nuclear weapons. . . . The subject is depressing, almost unthinkable. But Amis makes of these stories a life-affirming lament.” Such laments, taken in tandem with the equally stylish America-bashing of The Moronic Inferno, a recent collection of occasional essays, helped to make of Martin Amis a coming young man of English letters.

Martin’s father used to be a coming young man of letters himself. When Kingsley Amis, an obscure poet and lecturer at a dreary South Wales university, published Lucky Jim, his first novel, in 1954, critics were quick to recognize in him a comic novelist on the order of the pre-Brideshead Evelyn Waugh. But Amis père spent the next three decades doing every unfashionable thing imaginable. He tried his hand at various types of genre fiction: ghost stories, spy stories, detective stories. He wrote a column for Penthouse called “Kingsley on Drink.” He even wrote a James Bond novel.

The only thing Kingsley Amis never got around to doing was tinkering with his style.

The only thing Kingsley Amis never got around to doing was tinkering with his style,