ICON READERS’ GUIDES
The Fiction of Martin Amis
EDITED BY NICOLAS TREDELL
Consultant editor: Nicolas Tredell
A NOTE ON REFERENCES AND QUOTATIONS
Cross-references to the extracts in this Guide, and page references to Martin Amis’s fiction, are given in brackets in the main text of the Guide.
All other references are in the endnotes. The Amis texts used are UK hardback or paperback editions; full details can be found in the Bibliography (see p. 193).
In the extracts in this Guide, insertions by the editor are in square brackets and standard type. Definitions of words, where provided by the editor, are taken from the Concise Oxford Dictionary, unless otherwise stated in the endnotes. Insertions in square brackets and bold type in the extracts are by the authors of the extracts themselves.
In any quotation, unless otherwise stated, a row of three dots indicates an editorial ellipse within a sentence or paragraph, and a row of six dots (that is, two ellipses) indicates an editorial omission of a paragraph break, or of one or more paragraphs.
INTRODUCTION
MARTIN AMIS is a major writer of our time, and his best work is likely to endure, if the human race is not wiped out by that nuclear apocalypse which is one of the dark figures of his fiction. But his status has not been universally acknowledged. In that respect, of course, he is in good company: Dickens was much criticised in his day, and subsequently;1 and, as with Amis, Dickens’s personal life, especially the break-up of his marriage, became the subject of public attention and controversy.2 Few would deny Amis talent; there can be little doubt that he has a way with words; but the higher accolades of a residual humanist vocabulary which can be bestowed on novelists - the creation of ‘living characters’, humanity, maturity, seriousness, unity - have not always been vouchsafed him. Moreover, changes in social and ethical attitudes have laid him open to a new set of charges to which Dickens, at least in his own time, was largely immune:3 Amis is a middle-class white European male, and it can be argued that his fiction lacks awareness of the limits that condition may impose on his literary imagination. In particular, it can be said - and has been said, strongly and repeatedly - that his representations of women are sexist: this seems to have been the reason that one of his most powerful novels, London Fields (1989), was not shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Britain’s best-known literary award (see chapter seven of this Guide); and it is no surprise to find the first paragraph of this novel used as the specimen for dissection in a 1995 essay by Sara Mills entitled ‘Working with Sexism: what Can Feminist Text Analysis Do?’.4
Any literary evaluation of Amis is further complicated by his enmeshment in the internet of modern - or postmodern - publicity. To put it simply, Amis is a star. Authors have been stars before - Dickens again, or Byron, in the nineteenth century; Scott Fitzgerald or, posthumously, Sylvia Plath in the twentieth. But present-day media, with their unprecedented capacity for multiple reproduction and superfast dissemination, have given literary celebrities a new brilliance and reach. Amis has been photographed and interviewed many times - as Anthony Quinn remarked in 1995, ‘[t]he Amis interview has become, over the years, a little genre of its own’.5 He has made television appearances, and there is a website devoted to him (see Bibliography - p. 202 - for details). Intense media scrutiny has been directed upon his personal life, particularly his divorce in 1995 and his remarriage in 1998, his physique, especially his relative shortness of stature (he is five-foot six), the cost and nature of his dental treatment, and the size of publishers’ advances for his novels. Like most stars, of course, Amis is not merely a passive victim. From, and even before, the start of his literary career, he has himself used and encouraged the attentions of the media. But the publicity generated around his eighth novel, The Information (1995), seemed to spiral out of control; as he told Jonathan Wilson in 1995, ’”[f]or a while, it seemed as if I couldn’t go to the can without it being in the Evening Standard [a London newspaper]”’.6 The possible long-term effects of this media battering remain to be seen - it is the case that, by November 1999, Amis has published only one short and perhaps minor novel, Night Train (1997), and a volume of short stories, Heavy Water (1998), since The Information. But at the time, he was bullish about its impact: ‘“this stuff clearly doesn ‘t bother me - otherwise I’d be a wreck, curled up behind the sofa in the fetal position.“‘7
Talking to Jonathan Wilson, Amis attributes both his capacity to endure the media blitz and the violent reactions he has aroused to a significant source - his father. For any analysis of the fiction, literary career and reputation of Martin Amis is made even more complex by the fact that he is the son of a novelist who was himself famous and controversial - Kingsley Amis. James Diedrick, in his book Understanding Martin Amis (1995), contends that the theory of the ‘anxiety of influence’ developed by the American critic Harold Bloom is ‘central to an understanding of [Amis’s] fiction’.8 Bloom argues that writers - he focuses especially on poets, but the idea can be applied more broadly - are engaged in an Oedipal struggle with the male authors who have gone before them, and that only the ‘strong’ writer, by a kind of creative misreading and rewriting of his precursors, can forge a voice of his own. It seems likely that the ‘anxiety of influence’, the Oedipal struggle for one’s own style, would be made more complicated - to say the least - when one’s literary father is also one’s biological father; when father and son differ sharply in their literary preferences (‘Kingsley Amis: I hate [Nabokov] like poison. Martin Amis: I think he’s marvellous‘9); and when, as Martin Amis has himself pointed out, ’”[m]y father I and both have a corpus of work out there at the same time: that’s never happened before … no [father-son] pair has stuck with it quite the way we have”’.10 Moreover, in terms of literary reputation, being “Kingsley Amis’s son’ is, as Charles Michener pointed out in 1987, ‘a boon to the Amis bashers. The idea that “success” is something inherited and not earned abounds in [England,] this green and not always pleasant land’.11 But Martin Amis himself has also testified to the advantages of having a novelist father: by his own account, not only did it smooth his initial path to publication - ’”[i]t meant that your first novel would be published, out of mercenary curiosity if nothing else”’ - but it also helped him to bear the pressures of success - and notoriety: ’”[a] lot of the things about being a writer don’t bother me, like bad reviews, because it’s always been in the household”’.12 In Money (1984), the character called Martin Amis, a writer living in London - not wholly to be identified with his creator, but not completely distinct from him, either - presents, perhaps not without irony, the son’s assumption of the literary father’s mantle as a comfortable, almost homely transition rather than a potentially castrating struggle:’” [i] t’s just like taking over the family pub”’ (p. 88). The real Martin Amis had a more erratic childhood and adolescence than his fictional namesake’s ‘family pub’ image suggests. The second son of Kingsley and Hilary Bardwell Amis, Martin Louis Amis was born in Oxford on 25 August 1949; but his parents moved often and he attended over twelve schools in all.13 In 1961, his father taught at Princeton University, New Jersey, and he spent a year living in the USA. After his mother had divorced Kingsley Amis in 1961, when Martin was twelve, he lived in Spain with her for a year. Later in the 1960s, he acted in Alexander McKendrick’s film A High Wind in Jamaica (1965) in the West Indies - demonstrating his early interest in the modern medium of cinema. This involved a long absence without leave from the Battersea grammar school at which he was then supposed to be a pupil and the school expelled him.14 Finally, however, he applied himself to study, attending a series of ‘crammers’ - private schools offering inte
nsive teaching to get students into university - in London and Brighton - and won a place at Exeter College, Oxford. Studying very hard in his last two terms, he ‘got a formal First, coming third in that year’.15 He briefly took jobs at an art gallery and an advertising agency, and then became an editorial assistant at the Times Literary Supplement. Working at the TLS by day, he wrote his first novel in the evenings. Published in 1973, The Rachel Papers was well received by reviewers and won the Somerset Maugham award for the best first novel by a writer under thirty-five - as his father’s first novel, Lucky Jim, had done in 1954. In 1974 he was made fiction and poetry editor of the TLS. His second novel, Dead Babies, came out in 1975 and confirmed him as a writer to watch, even if his work provoked critical reservations. From 1977 to 1979, he became editor of the left-wing journal the New Statesman, and his third novel, Success, appeared in 1978. It once more aroused mixed responses but showed further evidence of an undeniable talent. By the time Other People: A Mystery Story was published in 1981, he was a full-time author, combining fiction with journalism for the Sunday newspaper The Observer, for which he worked as a ‘Special Writer’. In 1984, the year in which the substantial novel Money came out, he married an American philosophy teacher, Antonia Philips; they had two sons, Louis and Jacob, now fifteen and thirteen respectively. A collection of short stories relating to the threat of nuclear war, Einstein’s Monsters, appeared in 1987; London Fields was published in 1989 and quickly ran into the Booker Prize controversy mentioned above; and Time’s Arrow, on the theme of the Holocaust, came out in 1991. Between 1994 and 1995, he was often in the headlines: he was said to be seeking a half-million pound advance for his next novel; he changed his literary agent, Pat Kavanagh, for the reputedly shark-like American Andrew Wylie; as a result of this, his friendship with fellow writer Julian Barnes, Pat Kavanagh’s husband, came to an end; his marriage to Antonia Philips broke up as a result of his relationship with a beautiful American heiress and writer, Isabel Fonseca; he sought costly dental treatment for badly decaying teeth and gum disease; it was revealed that he had an illegitimate daughter, Delilah Seale, born to Lamorna Heath in 1975 and now an Oxford undergraduate; a police report confirmed that his cousin, Lucy Partington, had been one of the victims of the serial killer Frederick West; and, in October 1995, his father, Kingsley Amis, died. The publicity surrounding all these events inevitably affected the reception of his eighth novel, The Information, published in 1995 and dedicated to his sons and to Lucy Partington. His life did then settle down to some extent; in 1997, he had a daughter, Fernanda, with Isabel Fonseca; he also published the short novel Night Train in that year, and, in the following year, the collection Heavy Water and Other Stories. It was also in 1998 that he and Isabel married at a modest ceremony, though not without attracting some media attention: the level of press coverage is indicated by the heading of an article on the marriage in the Times: ‘Amis, author with £20,000 teeth, has £106 wedding’.16
This Icon Readers’ Guide is concerned with Amis’s work rather than his life, although inevitably an author’s life impinges upon his or her work in all kinds of ways. The following chapters take the novels and short story collections in order of publication, looking at each one in turn and tracing its reception from the first reviews to the most recent critical essays, with extracts from the most illuminating examples. As Amis has frequently commented on his own fiction in his interviews, these are also quoted wherever appropriate - though it should be remembered that an interview, while it may radiate the aura of authorial authority, is itself a rhetorical construction, and is likely to have been edited and reshaped by the interviewer, by editors, and, sometimes, by the subject himself.
The Guide offers the most wide-ranging examination of Amis’s fiction published so far. Chapters one to three look at Amis’s first three novels, The Rachel Papers, Dead Babies and Success, providing extracts from Amis’s important 1985 interview with John Haffenden, from James Diedrick’s well-informed study Understanding Martin Amis (1995), from Richard Brown’s sharp analysis of Amis’s representations of America and Americans, from David Hawkes’s insightful essay on Amis’s fiction, from Neil Powell’s thoughtful survey of Amis’s first three novels, and from perceptive reviews by Paul Ableman, Peter Ackroyd, Elaine Feinstein, John Mellors, Blake Morrison and Peter Prince. In chapter four, Mary Lamb’s perplexing descent into hell in Other People is thoroughly traced by Blake Morrison, helpfully illuminated by Amis himself, and intriguingly explored in depth by Brian Finney. The fifth chapter includes Eric Korn’s lively and percipient review of Money, Richard Brown’s remarks on Amis in the USA, Bernard Bergonzi’s observations on the fusion of American and English fiction in Amis’s fifth novel, Amis’s own extensive observations on Money to John Haffenden, Karl Miller’s fascinating interpretation of it in terms of the orphan and the double, Richard Todd’s exploration of its use of the intrusive author in relation to postmodern fiction, and Laura L. Doan’s powerful critique of what she sees as its sexist and class biases. Chapter six focuses on Amis’s first short story collection Einstein’s Monsters (1987), with David Profumo’s combined review and interview with Amis; Adam Mars-Jones’s account in Venus Envy (1990), which develops into a powerful general assault on Amis’s style; and Rachel Falconer’s detailed close reading, which demonstrates how the stories reward serious, sustained critical attention. The seventh chapter begins with the controversy over the exclusion of London Fields (1989) from the shortlist of the Booker Prize, Britain’s best-known literary award, supposedly on grounds of its sexism; the chapter then goes on to offer extracts from a range of subtle and complex analyses of the novel - Penny Smith reads it in relation to its millennial concerns, Brian Finney explores its dramatisation of the links between murder and the act of narrative, Frederick Holmes sees the characters as authors who try to gain control of their stories but find themselves scripted by the wider culture, and Peter Stokes brings together the novel’s concern with authorship and apocalypse. Chapter eight includes Amis’s own acknowledgement of his anxieties in writing about the Holocaust in Time’s Arrow, Roger Scruton’s surprising endorsement of the novel, Donald E. Morse’s judicious and sensitive analysis of its themes and techniques, Neil Easterbrook’s examination of how it implicates the reader and of Amis’s use of Robert Jay Lifton’s The Nazi Doctors (1986), and Richard Menke’s fascinating exploration of Time’s Arrow in terms of thermodynamic metaphors. The ninth chapter considers the publicity surrounding The Information and provides extracts from thoughtful reviews by Adam Mars-Jones and Julian Loose and the key portions of the valuable essay by John Nash, which brings together a sustained exploration of the themes of the novel in relation to the publicity surrounding it and the more general debate about the literary canon. Chapter ten concentrates first of all on Amis’s most recent novel, Night Train (1997), sampling the denunciations by John Updike and Anita Brookner, the strictures of Russell Celyn Jones and the sympathetic reaction of Natasha Walter, and the critically sophisticated reading by Adam Phillips. The chapter concludes by comparing and contrasting the responses of Russell Celyn Jones and Natasha Walter to Amis’s most recent collection, Heavy Water and Other Stories (1998) - responses in which they reverse the positions they took up in relation to Night Train and demonstrate the continued power of Amis’s fiction to provoke and divide.
To engage with the fiction of Martin Amis is an exciting experience. The essential criticism gathered in these pages captures that excitement but also goes beyond it to demonstrate that Amis’s texts richly reward sustained close reading and analysis. This Guide provides an indispensable context for the greater appreciation and understanding of a writer whose work is defining our time and staking a claim on posterity.
CHAPTER ONE
Postmodern Prurience: The Rachel Papers (1973)
IF rr was inevitable that a first novel by a son of Kingsley Amis would attract press attention, it was much less inevitable that the attention would be favourable. But reviews of The Rachel Papers wer
e largely enthusiastic, though not unreservedly so. A characteristic response is that of Peter Prince in the New Statesman, who acknowledges Amis’s ‘confidence’, ‘talent’ and ‘promise’ but judges him insufficiently detached from his unsavoury protagonist:
■ Martin Amis … shows great promise in his first novel, and this is all the more hopeful since in The Rachel Papers he is labouring under the disadvantage of having to build his story of romantic mishaps and youthful self-discovery around a peculiarly obnoxious hero…… [But] I can’t help thinking that Mr Amis may have been slightly premature in tackling this particular subject. I hope that doesn’t sound patronizing; indeed, Mr Amis in his early twenties shows confidence and talent enough to take on anything - except perhaps Charles Highway at 19 years of age. I just feel that a couple of years further away from that age-group might have usefully distanced the author from his subject-matter; at the moment he sometimes gives the impression of still being rather intimately bound up in its concerns, and I think it makes him at once both too indulgent and too harsh in his judgments. Too indulgent, because every now and then one senses from the author a furtive, rather wistful desire to believe that there is after all something of value in Charles Highway’s messy chatter, in all those dingy little aperçus [insights] and corny paradoxes and fifth-hand aphorisms. Too harsh, because Mr Amis, perhaps through fear of being thought sentimental, refuses to give us any indication that there may be - as in life there almost always is - something much finer in the human being lurking behind the smokescreen of Charles’s defensive old chat.17 □
Prince’s view that there is an insufficient distance between author and protagonist in The Rachel Papers is echoed by James Diedrick in his book Understanding Martin Amis (1995), as the extract later in this chapter demonstrates (p. 19). But it was not a view shared by Peter Ackroyd, reviewing Amis’s first novel in The Spectator. Ackroyd had no more liking than Prince for Charles Highway; but he judged that, with Charles, Amis had both successfully created, and effectively satirised, a ‘substantial’ character who was representative of ‘the younger generation’. In other words, Ackroyd, in contrast to Prince, felt that a properly critical distance between author and central character had been maintained:
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