Martin Amis has built an entire career out of being the smartest smart-ass on the block. For the last quarter-century he has steadily honed his considerable skills and talents until he has become England’s coolest, highest-profile writer, and one of its most technically proficient.
He is fiercely intelligent, and the swiftness with which he digs his fangs into the jugular can hardly be matched. But his works are proof that intelligence and wit are not enough; even talent is not enough. Fiction that aspires to be really good must also possess a heart. Without that invaluable commodity an author can be brutish and nasty, but not tragic.
Amis has never been able to overcome an essential heartlessness, and so, gifted as he is, he has not reached the level of contemporaries like Pat Barker or Ian McEwan. An author must love even his most dreadful characters to bring them to life; Amis does not. Take, for example, his description of a club bouncer:
Fat Lol: he provided dramatic proof of the proposition that you are what you eat. Fat Lol was what he ate. More than this, Fat Lol was what he was eating. And he was eating, for his lunch, an English breakfast—Del’s All Day Special at £3.25. His mouth was a strip of undercooked bacon, his eyes a mush of egg yolk and tinned tomatoes. His nose was like the end of a lightly grilled pork sausage—then the baked beans of his complexion, the
