Martin Amis (1949–2023) died in May as both the preeminent satiric novelist of his generation and also a perpetual whipping boy. Never did he produce the book that united the critics in praise, sold explosively, and swept all the awards (or indeed any award—the most prestigious honor any of his books ever received was the Somerset Maugham Award for the best novel written by someone under thirty-five, which he got for his 1973 rookie effort, The Rachel Papers). The Booker Prize, so often granted to the creatively inert but politically correct, never came his way; only once (for his Holocaust-in-reverse novel Time’s Arrow) was he even shortlisted.
Amis was sometimes described as the angriest of writers. This is wrong. His humor was incandescent with delight. But he may have been the leading cause of anger in competing writers. Men and women were equally outraged. Swaggering, cocksure, aggressive, he was a notably masculine writer in an age when manliness was becoming reviled. His jokes had targets, and not the approved ones. Who else would dare to say, “If I had a serious brain injury I might well write a children’s book”? He bedded glamorous women and was not only dubbed a “rock star” of the page but also compared to Mick Jagger in looks. Yet he had an imposing, donnish mastery of literature and history. It was as if the loudest, funniest bloke down at the pub were also the most erudite lecturer. Men, especially young men, ached to write like him; realizing they couldn’t, they resolved instead to drag him down to their level. “It seemed like everyone who could hold a pen was having a go,” Amis once told me, in 2010, reflecting on the reception of Yellow Dog, his funny but imperfect 2003 novel. He did not beg forgiveness; instead he lorded his talent over his foes. “Envy never comes to the party dressed as envy,” he added at the time. “It comes as ‘high standards,’ or something else.” That Amis had achieved a novel as good as The Rachel Papers at age twenty-three suggested to many that he had somehow cheated. Surely his father Kingsley had eased his path, by . . . er, giving him a set of keys? Passing along the recipe? “Like taking over the family pub,” Amis would say, mocking this theory of literary inheritance. In all of history, there are only a handful of examples of child following parent to mammoth literary success. Yet Amis had set out a goal and, infuriatingly, proceeded directly to it.
He did not beg forgiveness; instead he lorded his talent over his foes.
Female writers attempted to disqualify him for writing both misogynist characters and female characters who had richly earned that enmity. His uproarious 1989 apocalyptic noir fantasia London Fields was not shortlisted for the Booker because, although the three male jurors wanted to honor it so, the other two jurors, both women, launched emotional attacks on its author’s alleged failings. One of them uncorked a ten-minute prepared speech calling it “morally and formally flawed” and “irredeemably sexist,” according to the juror David Lodge, and the other said with an impressive lack of irony that a great book “must be ideologically correct.” At the dawn of an era in which humor would be judged on whether it advanced approved dogmas and bromides and was invariably rewarded with the accolade “subversive” for slavish adherence, Amis stuck to what was funny.
Personally, he was ideologically correct: his politics were boringly progressive on almost all matters. When in pundit mode, he would denounce Reagan, Thatcher, capitalism, capital punishment, etc. He believed in “gynocracy—chicks rule,” as he once told me. The exact nature of the literary world’s opposition kept changing. In 1995, Amis-hatred seeped out of sulking white-wine parties and into the tabloids, in a triple-fake scandal cooked up out of two completely normal writerly activities (switching agents in the interest of securing the maximum possible advance, then earning that £500,000 advance for his novel The Information) and one medical emergency: beset by excruciating dental pain, he had surgery to replace his teeth. The papers cast this utterly necessary treatment as some sort of diva move—who needs working teeth?—but he made clear in his memoir Experience what he was dealing with: “Each time the uppers met the lowers they experienced a kind of electrical repulsion that made my head jolt. And sometimes, as I chewed, the whole top rank would shiver and shift, and give a resilient twang.” When he wrote with growing alarm about the scourge of Islamist terror after September 11, the critiques morphed into accusations that he had become his father: Kingsley was a staunch Labourite turned crotchety fan of Mrs. Thatcher. Opposing mass-murdering religious fanaticism had somehow become coded as right-wing. When it became fashionable, or necessary, for literary geldings to boast of their far-reaching misogyny-detecting equipment, Andrew Billen of The Times of London had this to offer: last year, he read 2010’s The Pregnant Widow, a novelized gloss on Amis’s twenties. “By page 100, where I gave up, Amis was still going on about some girl’s amazing breasts. It turned out the women who called him misogynistic were right and I, who thought he was satirising misogyny, was wrong.” Try to imagine a woman writer being criticized—and dubbed misandrist!—for expounding with comic hyperbole on her own youthful heterosexual lust, and your imagination will fail. The charge of misandry indeed scarcely even exists, despite its daily accumulation.
Amis succumbed to the same illness that felled his friend Christopher Hitchens: esophageal cancer. The two made an odd pair: Hitchens, shamelessly charming, was as lovable as a St. Bernard; the room would light up when he bounded in. Amis was as icy as a Siamese cat, spoke haltingly to interviewers, scowled. The Times of London, on the occasion of his death, saw fit to note that he was considered “arrogant,” “a view that was reinforced by his haughty, supercilious expression in photographs.” Like Hitchens, Amis allowed his own vices to do what no other force could do: shut him up. His smoking was mythic. The biography of his father by Zachary Leader notes that Martin was given cigarettes for Christmas when he was nine. In The Information, whose title refers to the certainty of dying, he wrote,
Richard had imagined giving up smoking; and he naturally assumed that man knew no hotter hell. Nowadays he had long quit thinking about quitting . . . he felt the desire to smoke a cigarette even when he was smoking a cigarette.
Unlike Hitchens, who used the occasion of his lethal prognosis to launch a media tour and scratch out a small book about dying, Amis said nothing publicly about his terminal illness. Apparently he said very little privately either. His friend Ian McEwan said later that Amis had been
remarkable about dying. He didn’t want to talk about symptoms or death; he was engaged in the world right up till the end. He’d read all of Edith Wharton a few months back. He read the world’s press every day. He was reading Robert Tombs’s book The English and Their History, so we had exchanges about that. So his mental acuity in the midst of such terrible suffering was extraordinary. He had no talent for self-pity.
His fans were many and devoted. Boris Johnson immediately tweeted out that Amis had been the greatest British satirist since Evelyn Waugh. I think the former prime minister’s comment understates the majesty of Amis’s comic gift. Waugh was dryly amusing. Amis was . . . wetly hilarious? Unpredictable, unclubbable, untameable, incomparable. It would be unfair to measure Amis against “the father,” as he would obliquely refer to Kingsley, because the younger man was so much more daring. The author of Lucky Jim was, like the jazz he so admired, exciting for his time. His prose was often funny but could also be stolid. Amis fils wrote like an acrobat-imp, defying gravity, dancing on the ceiling, juggling chainsaws. He once noted that his father (who could barely stomach Martin’s work and read very little of it) admonished him to write more sentences like “He finished his drink and left.” “I don’t want to write that sentence,” Martin protested, and in the shelfful of books he left, he almost never did. He balanced the British flair for dizzying understatement against American gargantuism. “His voice stands out discordantly from the rest like a boom box at a harpsichord recital,” a New York Times profiler observed in 1990.
He balanced the British flair for dizzying understatement against American gargantuism.
London Fields and its 1984 predecessor Money are two of the funniest novels ever written. Not far off are the ones about fraternal hatred (Success), young misfits (Dead Babies), and envy and aging (The Information). Upon his death, a New York Times columnist tried to frame him as a stalwart of progressivism, but his fiction almost never ventured there. His hunting ground was all things filthy, moronic, base, absurd: the “great convulsion of stupidity happening in the world” as he once put it, sounding very Waughlike. You will struggle to find a character representing any kind of case for the supposed healing power of liberalism. He simply sprayed acid in every direction. “Every novel worth reading is funny and serious,” he once said. “Anyone who’s any good is going to be funny. It’s the nature of life. Life is funny.” Critics would scoff that he was “all voice.” Well, yes. And what a voice. “Only Martin wrote like Martin Amis,” said his longtime friend Salman Rushdie.
At his best, Amis could build a tower of absurdity out of a single word. From London Fields:
Little did they know that the place they were about to burgle—the shop, and the flat above it—had already been burgled the week before: yes, and the week before that. And the week before that. It was all burgled out. Indeed, burgling, when viewed in Darwinian terms, was clearly approaching a crisis. Burglars were finding that almost everywhere had been burgled. Burglars were forever bumping into one another, stepping on the toes of other burglars. There were burglar jams on rooftops and stairways, on groaning fire-escapes. Burglars were being burgled by fellow burglars, and were doing the same thing back. Burgled goods jigged from flat to flat. Returning from burgling, burglars would discover that they themselves had just been burgled, sometimes by the very burglar that they themselves had just burgled! How would this crisis in burgling be resolved? It would be resolved when enough burglars found burgling a waste of time, and stopped doing it. Then, for a while, burgling would become worth doing again. But burglars had plenty of time to waste—it was all they had plenty of, and there was nothing else to do with it—so they just went on burgling.
Money, perhaps his best-remembered novel, is a caustic portrait of a hapless young screenwriter attempting to write a picture for a Hollywood god inspired by Amis’s experience writing the 1980 sci-fi debacle Saturn 3 for an imperious Kirk Douglas. The voice of the obese, alcoholic, self-loathing antihero John Self is so funny that the book barely requires a storyline. Self considers walking in Los Angeles (“the only way to get across the road is to be born there”), the subway in New York (“No matter how hard I concentrate I always end up clambering out of a manhole in Duke Ellington Boulevard with a dustbin-lid on my head”), and the conundrum facing the party animal (“do you want to feel good at night or good in the morning? It’s the same with life. Do you want to feel good young or feel good old? One or the other, not both.”).
Those to whom the language of comedy is a foreign tongue were Amis’s loudest detractors. But it’s valid to say that Amis’s books were rickety in structure. A common obsession was a collision of reality and fancy that became a kind of tic. He would pop up as a character in his own novels. Just three years ago he published a typically big, funny, tricksy book, a novel that was “85 percent” true (he said) and was titled Inside Story. Like most of the other books he wrote in the last twenty years of his life, it had some knockout passages but didn’t fully cohere. As if to re-enrage his critics, he made the lead woman character (entirely fictional, he maintained) impossibly voluptuous and titillating. In interviews to promote the work he scoffed at the growing obsession among young editors with the idea that writers must stay in their own culturally designated lanes and not write about “the marginalized” from the heights of “privilege.” As if to invite the next avalanche of identity-politics fury, he said he was writing about the black experience of racism in America.
As if to invite the next avalanche of identity-politics fury, he said he was writing about the black experience of racism in America.
For most of his career, those who could put aside their envy confessed to awe. “Even among the grumpiest of Young Turks,” wrote the critic Nicholas Lezard in The Independent in 1995, “the sullen consensus is that, as far as contemporary British fiction writers go, there is no one to touch Martin Amis.” A single chapter might range from Rabelaisian list-making to a ringing paradox, slang invented on the spot, grotesque imagery, and confessions of the unspeakable described in the blandest possible language. You never saw the joke coming: of a pub-bedecked stretch of London, he wrote, in The Information, “here the pavement, even the road, wore a coat of damp beer (in various manifestations) which sucked up your shoes as you walked past.” It takes a moment before the meaning of that parenthetical checks in: it refers to beer that has, er, passed through human bodies. A speciality was to tear a word out of its usual environs and make it fit in brilliantly elsewhere (“her voice was warmly emphysemic,” Amis wrote in the same novel). He could turn an aphorism: in London Fields, he wrote, “Traffic is a contest of human desire, a waiting game of human desire. You want to go there, I want to go here.” He said in one interview, “I’m not subtle; I like extremes. Someone once said of my work . . . that I deal with banalities delivered with tremendous force,” adding, “that’s fine by me.”
That Amis was so often described as a “Peck’s bad boy” or “enfant terrible” seems particularly absurd to those who knew him: unfailingly courteous, polite to a fault, he was anything but a British Norman Mailer. Unfair descriptions were his companion, though. If “contrarian” was the one-word dismissal of Hitchens, he said, for him it was “decline.” I told him in 2010, like a shady horseracing tout offering a hot tip, “You know, you might be in line for a knighthood pretty soon.” “Nah, they’d never give it to me,” he said, with his characteristic snarl. “You wouldn’t turn it down?” I said. “No, I wouldn’t turn it down,” he admitted. He died like an unfinished manuscript: untitled. Or so we all thought. Nearly a month later, the Crown revealed that Amis was indeed on the King’s Birthday Honours List of June 16. Word of his impending death had caused him to be knighted in advance, the day before he died in Florida, or perhaps the knighthood was simply backdated. No details of how it was all managed have been offered. I wonder if he was even conscious when the event occurred. Certainly he was not given much time to enjoy the title; its delay seemed like the final, petty slap of disrespect from the establishment. But as Amis noted, the writer’s personality is quickly forgotten. What matters is the work. When Yellow Dog was getting subjected to its ritualized stomping in 2003, he said,
Writers don’t realize how good they are because they are dead when the action begins: with the obituaries. And then the truth is revealed fifty years later by how many of your books are read. You feel the honour of being judged by something that is never wrong: time.
Let an honest reappraisal commence.
