There's nothing like Money, or London Fields. And as they are, as you say, books that can have an almost physical effect on you when you first read them, then I think they have a fair chance of enduring.
It's true of course that everything he wrote is to some degree insufferable, and that his public persona was unbearable. In the light of the War Against Cliche, it's rather wonderful that the most memorable sentence written either by him or in connection with his writing is contained in Tibor Fischer's review of Yellow Dog.
It's also true that he wasn't good at some of the things fiction writers should be good at. Though not, I think, because he didn't notice or care about them. I don't think he ignored or downplayed plot, for example; you seem to prefer his writing when he didn't need to construct one (which is reasonable, as his either fell apart, or were so constrictive they ended up boring both him and the reader), but no one could say Money or London Fields were light on plot.
The catalogue of flaws isn't all there is, though. While the essays can be wonderful, and the tips and tricks to beat Space Invaders are useful, it's the eighties novels that are by any measure great. Maybe they would have been less good if the plots had been better. I'm almost sure they would have been less good if he'd known his limitations, and worked within them. There's a crackling electricity to some of his work that I'll never forget. An atmosphere of rancid, seedy masculinity, too; but one transmuted from the leaden awfulness of his father to something else. The other side of the coin to Bainbridge, maybe.
None of the authors who influenced him sound anything like him. There are things he did that I've never seen anyone else do, and that I don't think anyone else could have done. There are experiences he's given me that I couldn't have got from anyone else. Rest in peace.
Money might well endure as a record of that side of the 1980s, that's true. I actually thought Yellow Dog was rather better than the critics did and bought a first edition, but I never read it now... Fischer made a good point about the tension between humour and profundity, and that's largely why I think he won't be re-read very much. I no longer feel the original power of his work but I'm glad that you do. Thanks for such a thoughtful reply.
Amis prefigured this discussion in the foreword to The War Against Cliche, my pick for his work that is most likely to endure. He begins characteristically - specifically, the character of Charles Highway from The Rachel Papers - by admitting that he has been "complacently planning this volume in my mind" for some time, presumably even before he had that debut novel to his name. But of course he always had the name. Amis was never one to doubt his own claim to - if not greatness - then at least relevance.
The rest of the foreword is a strange mix. It's part nostalgic recollection for the days when people went around having strong opinions about C.P. Snow or Northrop Frye, part complaints about how these days (this is 2001), literary criticism is "almost entirely confined to the universities," where it "moves against talent by moving against the canon," or worse, metastasized on the Internet so that "everyone has become a literary critic." Those are fighting words in these parts!
(Substack comments don't allow italics, but it almost goes without mentioning that Amis applied them to that "everyone" in that earlier quotation. This was one of his stylistic trademarks / tics that readers like me spent years trying to shed the influence of. )
For as much as Amis revered Bellow and Nabokov, it's clear to me that he was equally devoted to a lower level of literary greatness. This is all projection of course, but as an wonderfully incisive critic himself, I think Amis must have known that his own novels were far narrower in their concerns and far lesser in their impact. He was an extremely confident writer, but one who in my view never was 100% committed to writing towering works on grand themes.
In this light, I found the late biographical novels like The Pregnant Widow and Inside Story to be actually quite poignant: all those long recountings of jokes "the Hitch" told at some boozy lunch fifty years ago can be forgiven if they're viewed as a Knausgaardian attempt to find meaning in the details of one human-sized life, rather than a service to posterity undertaken by a self-appointed member of a literary pantheon.
That leads me to slightly disagree with Henry and Nick. Though the Money/London Fields/Information trilogy check a lot of boxes related to Importance - contemporary acclaim, association with a time and place, length - I will remember them less than other Amis novels or essays (or even interviews).
Oh I agree that the criticism is his good work. His writing on Joyce is splendid too. But I can see that Money might endure because it caught one of the moods of that time. This is a lovely response thank you.
Henry, thank you for this - an assessment of Martin Amis's fiction I can relate to. I'm a common-as-muck reader who read Money back in the '80s, when the critics were praising it. Unfortunately, the book's merits were lost on me. A workmate of mine - a down-to-earth Londoner - also fell for the hype. She borrowed my copy and, having read it, dropped it on my desk saying, "What a piece of crap." Since then, I've read bits and piece of his other writing and have been similarly unimpressed.
You recommend his essays, so maybe I'll give those a go. I'm put off doing so, though, by some of his views which I've stumbled upon - for example, his dismissal of Raymond Chandler's books as "dated", and Cervantes's Don Quixote as being "unreadable". Well, I'm currently reading Don Quixote and finding it a lot easier to read and enjoy than anything I've read by Martin Amis.
Whatever your opinion of Amis this was written precipitately soon - at least from the perspective of those of us who don’t agree with you, and were actually mourning his passing. It’s in poor taste. Please have a little consideration for others. Waiting a month would have cost you nothing.
Having earlier heaped opprobrium on the captain of this ship, was happily surprised to learn that I stand with Henry O. as one of the five or six readers who thought "Yellow Dog" undeservedly savaged. To the task of assessing the life's work of any prolific artist, this perspective is useful:
“I hope to build a house with my films. Some of them are the cellar, some are the walls, and some are the windows. But I hope in time there will be a house.”
What has surprised me is that I never went back and don't feel any need to despite admiring it at the time. It is quite different from his other novels though.
Have not revisited, either. Recall a hard, sweaty read, but unable to look away. Huge exhale when it was over. At the time, took it as an extended, horror-show metaphor for what happens when one has queered the nest. Think critics felt punched in the face; I sure did, even as cheering on the guts of it.
I put up an apology for the timing of this post but your view seems to be that only the best writers can criticise other writers and that wouldn’t be a very workable system. Amis always said time was the only judge so we’ll see if I am right in years to come…
No I don't think the 'best writers' have a carte blanche to criticize others, but your article was merely distasteful. Will Amis stand the test of time? Well yes time will tell but many great writers fall out of fashion during their lifetime and that didn't happen to Amis so that's a good judge for the moment. Although his work towards the end of his life was fairly uneven in quality after Experience I'll grant you that
Strong disagree. The early novels, overlooked in all the obits - Rachel Papers, Dead Babies, Success - are as funny as Lucky Jim and as tightly plotted.
PS Like him or not, he was undeniably an exemplar of the craft to which this publication is purportedly dedicated: he put in the work, and honored his trade.
"Curiously, in both writing and cooking, you're a dead duck if you don't love the process. When you short-circuit or jump start the process in either, you end up with an imitation of your own or someone else's best effects. You will get away with it a few times, but the germs of shame will be there, and inevitably you will end up serving your dinner guests or your reading public mere filigree, plywood gingerbread, M.F.A. musings, housebroken honeycomb, in short, the thief of fire as a college cheerleader." – Jim Harrison
Lionizing, of course, but that’s what one does with genuine lions.
Everyone's entitled to their opinions, Mr. Oliver - however myopic - but your timing was breathtaking in tone-deafness. As was your piece - mean-spirited, self-satisfied, tabloid-thin; your conflating Mr. Amis's leaving his "publisher" (in fact it was his agent) with “cosmetic dental work” (McEwan sets the record straight on that canard) bespeaks a callowness unbecoming a serious person of letters. There are so many other aspects to your screed which italicize the extent to which you are woefully ill-equipped to pass judgement on one of our most original and thrilling voices, but why bother - except to ask: what pleasure can you have possibly derived from this?
Actually, your haste is irrelevant, as the time for a snarky, one-page write-off of a singular body of work is never.
He was one of the few writers I discovered at the beginning, and rode that delirious wave the distance. Yes, there are troughs - no works of any ambition can be entirely faultless - but the peaks of his comic set pieces read like nobody else. The ability, in fiction or non, to make one laugh out loud with words on the page cannot be overrated, or overstated.
One or two readers felt this was written too soon after his death but I agree with you. There's an awful lot of praise going around and it remains unfair and uncritical.
There's nothing like Money, or London Fields. And as they are, as you say, books that can have an almost physical effect on you when you first read them, then I think they have a fair chance of enduring.
It's true of course that everything he wrote is to some degree insufferable, and that his public persona was unbearable. In the light of the War Against Cliche, it's rather wonderful that the most memorable sentence written either by him or in connection with his writing is contained in Tibor Fischer's review of Yellow Dog.
It's also true that he wasn't good at some of the things fiction writers should be good at. Though not, I think, because he didn't notice or care about them. I don't think he ignored or downplayed plot, for example; you seem to prefer his writing when he didn't need to construct one (which is reasonable, as his either fell apart, or were so constrictive they ended up boring both him and the reader), but no one could say Money or London Fields were light on plot.
The catalogue of flaws isn't all there is, though. While the essays can be wonderful, and the tips and tricks to beat Space Invaders are useful, it's the eighties novels that are by any measure great. Maybe they would have been less good if the plots had been better. I'm almost sure they would have been less good if he'd known his limitations, and worked within them. There's a crackling electricity to some of his work that I'll never forget. An atmosphere of rancid, seedy masculinity, too; but one transmuted from the leaden awfulness of his father to something else. The other side of the coin to Bainbridge, maybe.
None of the authors who influenced him sound anything like him. There are things he did that I've never seen anyone else do, and that I don't think anyone else could have done. There are experiences he's given me that I couldn't have got from anyone else. Rest in peace.
Money might well endure as a record of that side of the 1980s, that's true. I actually thought Yellow Dog was rather better than the critics did and bought a first edition, but I never read it now... Fischer made a good point about the tension between humour and profundity, and that's largely why I think he won't be re-read very much. I no longer feel the original power of his work but I'm glad that you do. Thanks for such a thoughtful reply.
Amis prefigured this discussion in the foreword to The War Against Cliche, my pick for his work that is most likely to endure. He begins characteristically - specifically, the character of Charles Highway from The Rachel Papers - by admitting that he has been "complacently planning this volume in my mind" for some time, presumably even before he had that debut novel to his name. But of course he always had the name. Amis was never one to doubt his own claim to - if not greatness - then at least relevance.
The rest of the foreword is a strange mix. It's part nostalgic recollection for the days when people went around having strong opinions about C.P. Snow or Northrop Frye, part complaints about how these days (this is 2001), literary criticism is "almost entirely confined to the universities," where it "moves against talent by moving against the canon," or worse, metastasized on the Internet so that "everyone has become a literary critic." Those are fighting words in these parts!
(Substack comments don't allow italics, but it almost goes without mentioning that Amis applied them to that "everyone" in that earlier quotation. This was one of his stylistic trademarks / tics that readers like me spent years trying to shed the influence of. )
For as much as Amis revered Bellow and Nabokov, it's clear to me that he was equally devoted to a lower level of literary greatness. This is all projection of course, but as an wonderfully incisive critic himself, I think Amis must have known that his own novels were far narrower in their concerns and far lesser in their impact. He was an extremely confident writer, but one who in my view never was 100% committed to writing towering works on grand themes.
In this light, I found the late biographical novels like The Pregnant Widow and Inside Story to be actually quite poignant: all those long recountings of jokes "the Hitch" told at some boozy lunch fifty years ago can be forgiven if they're viewed as a Knausgaardian attempt to find meaning in the details of one human-sized life, rather than a service to posterity undertaken by a self-appointed member of a literary pantheon.
That leads me to slightly disagree with Henry and Nick. Though the Money/London Fields/Information trilogy check a lot of boxes related to Importance - contemporary acclaim, association with a time and place, length - I will remember them less than other Amis novels or essays (or even interviews).
Oh I agree that the criticism is his good work. His writing on Joyce is splendid too. But I can see that Money might endure because it caught one of the moods of that time. This is a lovely response thank you.
And he was capable of being very funny.
Hi John-Paul, can you point me to examples of his writing you find very funny?
Ian Leslie has a selection of quotes on his Substack The Ruffian
Thank you, Henry.
Henry, thank you for this - an assessment of Martin Amis's fiction I can relate to. I'm a common-as-muck reader who read Money back in the '80s, when the critics were praising it. Unfortunately, the book's merits were lost on me. A workmate of mine - a down-to-earth Londoner - also fell for the hype. She borrowed my copy and, having read it, dropped it on my desk saying, "What a piece of crap." Since then, I've read bits and piece of his other writing and have been similarly unimpressed.
You recommend his essays, so maybe I'll give those a go. I'm put off doing so, though, by some of his views which I've stumbled upon - for example, his dismissal of Raymond Chandler's books as "dated", and Cervantes's Don Quixote as being "unreadable". Well, I'm currently reading Don Quixote and finding it a lot easier to read and enjoy than anything I've read by Martin Amis.
Whatever your opinion of Amis this was written precipitately soon - at least from the perspective of those of us who don’t agree with you, and were actually mourning his passing. It’s in poor taste. Please have a little consideration for others. Waiting a month would have cost you nothing.
I’m sorry it offended you.another subscriber emailed me and I can see that waiting a few days would have been preferable.
that’s ok. and I appreciate the thoughtful response.
Having earlier heaped opprobrium on the captain of this ship, was happily surprised to learn that I stand with Henry O. as one of the five or six readers who thought "Yellow Dog" undeservedly savaged. To the task of assessing the life's work of any prolific artist, this perspective is useful:
“I hope to build a house with my films. Some of them are the cellar, some are the walls, and some are the windows. But I hope in time there will be a house.”
— Rainer Werner Fassbinder
What has surprised me is that I never went back and don't feel any need to despite admiring it at the time. It is quite different from his other novels though.
Have not revisited, either. Recall a hard, sweaty read, but unable to look away. Huge exhale when it was over. At the time, took it as an extended, horror-show metaphor for what happens when one has queered the nest. Think critics felt punched in the face; I sure did, even as cheering on the guts of it.
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/martin-amis-remembered-by-writers
The perennial “bad boy” of British letters, who lived to be the grand old man of bad boys,
as was his father (Kingsley Amis) before him. Some of his later novels, such as “The Zone
of Interest” [2014]; film version, dir. Jonathan Glazer [2023] were highly experimental, as
well as pretentious, while his non-fiction, esp. “Koba the Dread” [2002] was conventional
yet morally compelling, both as history and as prophecy. He had a loud mouth, but (like
Christopher Hitchens, who remained his dearest friend) the courage of his contradictions.
He veered between stupidity and sagacity, bigotry and profundity, without finding a mean
between political extremisms. He never met an opinion he didn’t love or hate, governed by
mercurial temper that never censored itself . He was clever, not deep; candid, yet careless.
His wit was sharp, but his intellect was facile. He played half-truths off against each other,
as if a series of zero-sum games were proof of dialectical rigor. He was naughty, not funny.
Amid a multitude of conflicting ideas, he refused to contain himself. Neither a rabble-rouser
nor Rabelaisian, he had no tact, but for that very reason, attained grace. Like father, like son.
Nothing like slagging a dead man off who wrote infinitely better than yourself and who, when alive, would have ripped you apart in a few sentences.
I put up an apology for the timing of this post but your view seems to be that only the best writers can criticise other writers and that wouldn’t be a very workable system. Amis always said time was the only judge so we’ll see if I am right in years to come…
No I don't think the 'best writers' have a carte blanche to criticize others, but your article was merely distasteful. Will Amis stand the test of time? Well yes time will tell but many great writers fall out of fashion during their lifetime and that didn't happen to Amis so that's a good judge for the moment. Although his work towards the end of his life was fairly uneven in quality after Experience I'll grant you that
Strong disagree. The early novels, overlooked in all the obits - Rachel Papers, Dead Babies, Success - are as funny as Lucky Jim and as tightly plotted.
PS Like him or not, he was undeniably an exemplar of the craft to which this publication is purportedly dedicated: he put in the work, and honored his trade.
"Curiously, in both writing and cooking, you're a dead duck if you don't love the process. When you short-circuit or jump start the process in either, you end up with an imitation of your own or someone else's best effects. You will get away with it a few times, but the germs of shame will be there, and inevitably you will end up serving your dinner guests or your reading public mere filigree, plywood gingerbread, M.F.A. musings, housebroken honeycomb, in short, the thief of fire as a college cheerleader." – Jim Harrison
Postscripts by Salman Rushdie, James Wood, Ian McEwan:
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/postscript/only-martin-amis-sounded-like-martin-amis
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/postscript/martin-amis's-comic-music
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/postscript/losing-a-brother-in-martin-amis
Lionizing, of course, but that’s what one does with genuine lions.
Everyone's entitled to their opinions, Mr. Oliver - however myopic - but your timing was breathtaking in tone-deafness. As was your piece - mean-spirited, self-satisfied, tabloid-thin; your conflating Mr. Amis's leaving his "publisher" (in fact it was his agent) with “cosmetic dental work” (McEwan sets the record straight on that canard) bespeaks a callowness unbecoming a serious person of letters. There are so many other aspects to your screed which italicize the extent to which you are woefully ill-equipped to pass judgement on one of our most original and thrilling voices, but why bother - except to ask: what pleasure can you have possibly derived from this?
Actually, your haste is irrelevant, as the time for a snarky, one-page write-off of a singular body of work is never.
Sayonara, common reader.
Amen to Nick O'Conner's astute take.
He was one of the few writers I discovered at the beginning, and rode that delirious wave the distance. Yes, there are troughs - no works of any ambition can be entirely faultless - but the peaks of his comic set pieces read like nobody else. The ability, in fiction or non, to make one laugh out loud with words on the page cannot be overrated, or overstated.
One or two readers felt this was written too soon after his death but I agree with you. There's an awful lot of praise going around and it remains unfair and uncritical.