Martin Amis Once Again Faces the Critics by Brian Finney
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Los Angeles Review of Books Literary Lout: Martin Amis Once Again Faces the Critics by Brian Finney September 12th, 2012 - + HERE WE GO AGAIN: Amis has made a comeback! “Martin Amis’s funniest and most satisfying novel in years” (David Free); “[. .] instead of being just clever, Amis has written a book with heart” (Penelope Debelle). Alternatively Amis is in terminal decline: Lionel Asbo “reads like a pallid variation on ‘Money’” (Michiko Kakutani). “The verbal dazzle exhilaratingly evident in his best book, Money (1984), has by now dimmed into near nonexistence” (Peter Kemp). Or Amis is praised for his original stylistic flourishes while being lambasted for his narrative content: “serving up blanched stereotypes on the silver platter of his prose” (Ron Charles). So what are we to make of Amis’s latest (thirteenth) novel? I think back to the sheer originality of his first four novels — his precocious account of a young man’s last five hours before turning 20, The Rachel Papers (1973); his comically savage satire on the ageing hippy generation, Dead Babies (1975); his tautly constructed narrative about the rise of the yobs and fall of the privileged in England, Success (1978); and his innovative Martian narrative of a woman who is suffering from memory loss, Other People: A Mystery Story (1981). By 1980 the magnetic power of his unique style of writing even led one American novelist, Jacob Epstein, to plagiarize The Rachel Papers in his first novel, Wild Oats. With Money: A Suicide Note (1984) Amis went global, according to Will Self, perhaps Amis’s most clearly identifiable stylistic follower. Alternating chapters set in New York and London, the novel brilliantly and wittily exposes both what Amis called “the boutique squalor of Thatcher’s England” and a similar obsession of Reagan’s America with easy money, which led to the spectacular failure of Savings and Loans Associations in the 1980s. As the narrator and protagonist puts it, “they’ve got an actor, and we’ve got a chick.” Told by the ubiquitous John Self, a consumer who, Amis said, “is consumed by consumerism,” the novel shows London and New York as seen through the blinkered vision of a TV director of commercials brought up on a diet of television and pornography. Yet Amis induces some sympathy for this impoverished human being whose life consists of “fast food, sex shows, space games, slot machines, video nasties, nude mags, drink, pubs, fighting, television, handjobs.” Handjobs, according to Self, have the advantage of being cheap and readily available. Amis wittily follows this with Self’s unwitting comment: “In the end you’ve got to hand it to hand jobs. They’re deeply democratic.” Turning an adjective with negative connotations into a verb with complimentary connotations, Self ends by converting a shamefully secret act into a public political one (now I’m unconsciously echoing his alliteration). It is a brilliant example of how the earlier Amis manipulated language to serve his narrative purposes. In this novel Amis also comes his closest to employing postmodern narrative devices, by introducing a character called Martin Amis into the narrative whose explanations of postmodernism bore Self to death. Amis is widely seen to be in his prime during the publication of his major trilogy of novels, Money, London Fields (1989) and The Information (1995), though to these I would add his highly original narration of the life of a Nazi doctor told in reverse chronology, Time’s Arrow, Or, The Nature of the Offense (1991). The last two novels of the trilogy give increasing prominence to Amis’s growing moral stance — his conviction that late modernity was a period of radical decline. Since 1945 we have “turned paradise into a toilet,” he announced. He became obsessed with global issues, in particular the threat of nuclear catastrophe and environmental pollution. London Fields, set in the near future (1999), shows London suffering from the combined effects of nuclear fallout and ecological disaster, based, he has said, on his “general unease about the fate of the planet” and the “imminent prospect of planetary death.” The novel is told by an American narrator, Sam, who is dying of radiation poisoning, and who mistakenly thinks he is in control of his narrative. The novel’s three major characters consist of Nicola, who parallels the planet’s self destructive trajectory by suffering from the death of love, upper class Guy, the fall guy who still clings to outdated romantic feelings of love, and Keith, a reincarnation of John Self, whose working class libido is “all tabloid and factoid.” The novel’s failure to be selected for the Booker Prize’s short list due to its alleged sexism helped turn Amis into the rock star of English literature, increasing the sale of his books but leading many of the subsequent English reviews of his work to take the form of judgments about his personality and lifestyle. In 1995 Amis endured his own annus horribilis — separation from his first wife and children, a break with his British agent, Pat Kavanagh, who was married to Julian Barnes (who broke off his and Amis’s friendship), and acute toothache requiring massive surgery. His apparent preference for things American (another American girlfriend soon to become wife, his selection of a supposedly cut-throat American literary agent, and his resort to an American dental specialist for major reconstruction of his jaw and teeth) unleashed a frenzy of vituperation from a jingoistic and vituperative British press. Amis was undergoing a particularly severe form of mid-life crisis, the subject of the last of his triptych, The Information. That novel centers on two novelists, one middlebrow but highly successful, the other avant-garde and unrecognized. The latter plans to reverse the former’s success, but his plots are all undone by chance happenings, fuelling his mid- life crisis. The majority of British reviewers insisted on interpreting the novel as a roman à clef in which the two novelists were treated as thinly disguised stand-ins for Barnes and Amis. Yet the underlying vision of post- human modernity undermines such autobiographical readings. Both protagonists are placed in a recognizable Amisian universe where the earth is a “dying star,” the sun is in decline, and humans are becoming ever less significant. Both human life and literature are dying out. American reviewers, unlike their British counterparts, largely praised this “protean” novel (Bellow) as “a perfectly pitched expression of our late 20th-century dystopia” (Ward). After The Information things changed. Amis experimented with a number of fictional genres that didn’t lend themselves so readily to his comic, satiric genius — Night Train (1997), a short American detective novel in which the detective is female and the victim is a suicide; Yellow Dog (2003), a post- 9/11 novel more burlesque than comic, with three major strands featuring a writer who suffers a personality change after being beaten over the head, a yellow journalist preyed on by a predatory ex-porn star, and a royal family blackmailed with nude photos of the princess; House of Meetings (2006), a novel which, like Night Train, eschews comedy and concerns two Russian brothers in love with the same woman who spend eight years in a gulag; and The Pregnant Widow (2010), a return to the comic novel about the sexual revolution, set in an Italian castle in 1970, in which life insists on becoming fiction, 20-year-olds turn into literary caricatures, and sexual love into pornography. All four of these novels were greeted with the same cacophony of responses that have accompanied the publication of Lionel Asbo. To take The Pregnant Widow as an example, on the one hand reviewers accused Amis of succumbing to his penchant for moralizing: “the editorializing mind [. .] has been allowed to grow up and strangle its author-host” (Geordie Williamson); “comedy slides over into the passenger seat, sociology takes the wheel” (Sam Anderson). On the other hand the novel was greeted as a “return to form” (Edmund White), “close to a masterpiece” (Justin Cartwright), and worthy of winning the Booker prize (Philip Hensher). So the polarity of opinions about Lionel Asbo is nothing new. Reviewers generally seem unable to adopt a middle view when handed another novel by Martin Amis. ¤ Like many of his contemporaries Amis has never considered plot that important, which is hardly surprising for a writer for whom “realism is a footling consideration.” Still for those who haven’t yet read this book, I will attempt a brief synopsis. Lionel Asbo is a recognizable descendant of Amis’s previous fictional villains whose class origins and education have condemned them to self victimization. A larger-than-life small-time thug, he was served with an ASBO (an Anti-Social Behavior Order, initiated by Tony Blair in 1998) when he had barely turned three. As soon as he turned 18 he changed his last name to Asbo to perversely celebrate having been served with it at an earlier age than anyone else. He lives in a council flat in the fictional London Borough of Diston (a dystopia if ever you met one) “where calamity made its rounds like a postman,” Living with him is his “café crème” nephew, Desmond (Des) whom he took in after Des’s mother died when he was 12. To help him do his job (“the hairiest end of debt collection”) Lionel keeps two pit bulls on the balcony of their 33rd floor apartment whose meat he laces with Tabasco hot sauce and beer to make them additionally vicious. In Diston incest is almost a given. Still, when Des aged 15 is seduced by his 39-year-old grandmother credibility is stretched to the limit.