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Martin Louis Amis (born 25 August 1949) is an English novelist, essayist, professor, and short story writer, and the son of the novelist and poet Sir Kingsley Amis. His works include such novels as Money (1984), London Fields (1989) and The Information (1995). Amis's raw material is what he sees as the absurdity and caricatures of the postmodern condition. He has thus sometimes been portrayed as the undisputed master of what the New York Times has called "the new unpleasantness."
The Guardian writes that "all his critics have noted what Kingsley Amis complained of as a 'terrible compulsive vividness in his [Martin's] style ...
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Quotations
Bullets cannot be recalled. They cannot be uninvented. But they can be taken out of the gun.
"Introduction: Thinkability"
I know what his poetry will be about. What poetry is always about. The cruelty of the poet's mistress.
In my experience of fights and fighting, it is invariably the aggressor who keeps getting everything wrong.
Nowadays every business in America says how warm it is and how much it cares — loan companies, supermarkets, hamburger chains.
"Hugh Hefner" (1985)
On any longer view, man is only fitfully committed to the rational — to thinking, seeing, learning, knowing. Believing is what he's really proud of.
Our vulgar delight in American vulgarity.
"The New Evangelists" (1980)
Encyclopedia
Martin Louis Amis (born 25 August 1949) is an English novelist, essayist, professor, and short story writer, and the son of the novelist and poet Sir Kingsley Amis. His works include such novels as Money (1984), London Fields (1989) and The Information (1995). Amis's raw material is what he sees as the absurdity and caricatures of the postmodern condition. He has thus sometimes been portrayed as the undisputed master of what the New York Times has called "the new unpleasantness."
The Guardian writes that "all his critics have noted what Kingsley Amis complained of as a 'terrible compulsive vividness in his [Martin's] style ... that constant demonstrating of his command of English'; and it's true that the Amis-ness of Amis will be recognisable in any piece before he reaches his first full stop."
Early life
Amis's paternal grandfather was a mustard manufacturer's clerk from Clapham, and his maternal grandfather a shoe millionaire. His parents, Hilary Bardwell and Sir Kingsley Amis, divorced when he was twelve. Much later, Martin lived in a house with Kingsley, Hilly, and Hilly's third husband, Alistair Boyd, Lord Kilmarnock. Amis has described it as "[s]omething out of early Updike, 'Couples' flirtations and a fair amount of drinking," he told The New York Times. "They were all 'at it'."
Born in Oxford, England, Martin was the middle of three children, with an older brother, Philip, and a younger sister, Sally. He attended a number of different schools in the 1950s and 1960s including Swansea Grammar School. The acclaim that followed Kingsley's first novel Lucky Jim sent the Amises to Princeton, New Jersey, where Kingsley lectured. This was Amis's introduction to the United States.
Martin Amis read comic books until his stepmother, the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, introduced him to Jane Austen, a writer he often names as his earliest influence. After teenage years spent in flowery shirts and a short spell at Westminster School while living in Hampstead, he graduated from Exeter College, Oxford with a "Congratulatory" First in English — "the sort where you are called in for a viva and the examiners tell you how much they enjoyed reading your papers."
After Oxford, he found an entry-level job at The Times Literary Supplement, and at age 27 became literary editor of The New Statesman, where he met Christopher Hitchens, then a feature writer for The Observer, who remains a close friend.
Early writing
According to Martin, Kingsley Amis famously showed no interest in his son's work. "I can point out the exact place where he stopped and sent Money twirling through the air; that's where the character named Martin Amis comes in." "Breaking the rules, buggering about with the reader, drawing attention to himself," Kingsley complained.
His first novel The Rachel Papers (1973) won the Somerset Maugham Award. The most traditional of his novels, made into an unsuccessful cult film, it tells the story of a bright, egotistical teenager (which Amis acknowledges as autobiographical) and his relationship with the eponymous girlfriend in the year before going to university.
He also wrote the screenplay for the film Saturn 3, an experience which he was to draw on for his fifth novel Money.
Dead Babies (1975), more flippant in tone, has a typically "sixties" plot, with a house full of characters who use various substances. A number of Amis's characteristics show up here for the first time: mordant black humour, obsession with the zeitgeist, authorial intervention, a character subjected to sadistically humorous misfortunes and humiliations, and a defiant casualness ("my attitude has been, I don't know much about science, but I know what I like"). A film adaptation was made in 2000.
Success (1977) told the story of two foster-brothers, Gregory Riding and Terry Service, and their rising and falling fortunes. This was the first example of Amis's fondness for symbolically 'pairing' characters in his novels, which has been a recurrent feature in his fiction since (Martin Amis and Martina Twain in Money, Richard Tull and Gwyn Barry in The Information, and Jennifer Rockwell and Mike Hoolihan in Night Train).
Other People: A Mystery Story (1981), about a young woman coming out of a coma, was a transitional novel in that it was the first of Amis's to show authorial intervention in the narrative voice, and highly artificed language in the heroine's descriptions of everyday objects, which was said to be influenced by his contemporary Craig Raine's 'Martian' school of poetry.
Later career
Amis's best-known novels, and the ones most respected by critics, are Money, London Fields, Time's Arrow, and The Information.
Money (1984, subtitled A Suicide Note) is a first-person narrative by John Self, advertising man and would-be film director, who is "addicted to the twentieth century." "[A] satire of Thatcherite amorality and greed," the novel relates a series of black comedic episodes as Self as he flies back and forth across the Atlantic, in crass and seemingly chaotic pursuit of personal and professional success. Time included the novel in its list of 100 best English-language novels of 1923 to 2005.
London Fields (1989), Amis's longest work, describes the encounters between three main characters in London in 1999, as a climate disaster approaches. The characters had typically Amisian names and broad caricatured qualities: Keith Talent, the lower-class crook with a passion for darts; Nicola Six, a femme fatale who is determined to be murdered; and upper-middle-class Guy Clinch, 'the fool, the foil, the poor foal' who is destined to come between the other two. The book was reportedly omitted from the Booker Prize shortlist in its year of publication, 1989, because of panel members protesting against its alleged misogyny.
Time's Arrow (1991), the autobiography of a doctor who helped torture Jews during the Holocaust, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, drew notice both for its unusual technique — time runs backwards during the entire novel, down to the dialogue initially being spoken backwards — as well as for its topic.
The size of the advance (an alleged £500,000) demanded and obtained by Amis for The Information (1995) attracted what Amis described as "an Eisteddfod of hostility" from writers and critics after he left his agent of many years, the late Pat Kavanagh, in order to be represented by the Harvard-educated Andrew "The Jackal" Wylie. Kavanagh was married to Julian Barnes, with whom Amis had been friends for many years, but the incident caused a rift that, according to Amis in his autobiography Experience (1999), has not yet healed.
Night Train (1997) is a short novel in the stylised form of a US police procedural, narrated by the female, but mannish, Detective Mike Hoolihan, who has been called upon to investigate the suicide of her boss's daughter. Amis's American vernacular in the narrative was criticised by, among others, John Updike, although the novel found defenders elsewhere, notably in Janis Bellow, wife of Amis's sometime mentor Saul Bellow.
The memoir Experience is largely about his relationship with his father, Kingsley Amis, though he also writes of being reunited with long-lost daughter, Delilah Seale, the product of an affair in the 1970s, whom he did not see until she was 19, and the story of how one of his cousins, Lucy Partington, became a victim of Fred West when she was 21. The book was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography.
In 2002, Amis published Koba the Dread, a book about the crimes of Stalinism. The book provoked a literary controversy for its approach to the material, and for its attack on his longtime friend Christopher Hitchens, who rebuked his charges in a stinging review in The Atlantic. Asked recently if they were still friends, Amis responded "We never needed to make up. We had an adult exchange of views, mostly in print, and that was that (or, more exactly, that goes on being that). My friendship with the Hitch has always been perfectly cloudless. It is a love whose month is ever May."
In 2003, Yellow Dog, Amis's first novel in six years, was denounced by Tibor Fischer, whose comments were widely reported in the media: "Yellow Dog isn't bad as in not very good or slightly disappointing. It's not-knowing-where-to-look bad. I was reading my copy on the Tube and I was terrified someone would look over my shoulder . . . It's like your favourite uncle being caught in a school playground, masturbating". Elsewhere, the book received mixed reviews, with some critics proclaiming the novel a return to form, but most considered the book to be a great disappointment. Amis was unrepentant about the novel and its reaction, calling Yellow Dog "among my best three". He gave his own explanation for the novel's critical failure, "No one wants to read a difficult literary novel or deal with a prose style which reminds them how thick they are. There's a push towards egalitarianism, making writing more chummy and interactive, instead of a higher voice, and that's what I go to literature for."
In September 2006, Amis published House of Meetings, a short novel about two half-brothers who loved the same woman and who were incarcerated together in a Soviet gulag. In 2009, Amis will publish The Pregnant Widow which marks the beginning of a new four-book deal.
Amis has also released two collections of short stories (Einstein's Monsters and Heavy Water), four volumes of collected journalism and criticism (The Moronic Inferno, Visiting Mrs. Nabokov, The War Against Cliché and "'The Second Plane'"), and a guide to 1980s space-themed arcade video-game machines (Invasion of the Space Invaders).
Current life
Amis returned to Britain in September 2006 after living in Uruguay for two and a half years with his second wife, the writer Isabel Fonseca, and their two young daughters.
He said, "Some strange things have happened, it seems to me, in my absence. I didn't feel like I was getting more rightwing when I was in Uruguay, but when I got back I felt that I had moved quite a distance to the right while staying in the same place." He reports that he is disquieted by what he sees as increasingly undisguised hostility towards Israel and the United States.
Political opinions
Through the 1980s and 1990s, Amis was a strong critic of nuclear proliferation. His collection of five stories on this theme, Einstein's Monsters, began with a long essay entitled 'Unthinkability' in which he set out his views on the issue, writing: "nuclear weapons repel all thought, perhaps because they end all thought."
He wrote in "Nuclear City" in Esquire of 1987 (re-published in Visiting Mrs Nabokov) that: "when nuclear weapons become real to you, when they stop buzzing around your ears and actually move into your head, hardly an hour passes without some throb or flash, some heavy pulse of imagined supercatastrophe."
Amis expressed his opinions on terrorism in an extended essay published in The Observer on the eve of the fifth anniversary of 9/11 in which he criticized the economic development of all Arab countries because their "aggregate GDP... was less than the GDP of Spain", and they "lag[ged] behind the West, and the Far East, in every index of industrial and manufacturing output, job creation, technology, literacy, life-expectancy, human development, and intellectual vitality."
The Catholic-Marxist critic Terry Eagleton, in the 2007 introduction to his work Ideology, singled out and attacked Amis for a particular quote, taken the day after the 2006 transatlantic aircraft plot came to light, in an informal interview conducted by Ginny Dougary in The Times Magazine. Amis was quoted as saying: "There’s a definite urge – don’t you have it? – to say, ‘The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.’ What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation – further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan… Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children...It’s a huge dereliction on their part". Eagleton argued that this view is "[n]ot the ramblings of a British National Party thug, [...] but the reflections of Martin Amis, leading luminary of the English metropolitan literary world".
However, Amis has been especially careful to distinguish between Islam and radical Islamism, stating that:
A prominent British Muslim, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown wrote an op-ed piece on the subject condemning Amis and he responded with an open letter to The Independent which the newspaper printed in full. In it, he stated his views had been misrepresented by both Alibhai-Brown and Eagleton.
In an article in The Guardian, Amis subsequently wrote:
On terrorism, Martin Amis wrote that he suspected "there exists on our planet a kind of human being who will become a Muslim in order to pursue suicide-mass murder," and added: "I will never forget the look on the gatekeeper's face, at the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, when I suggested, perhaps rather airily, that he skip some calendric prohibition and let me in anyway. His expression, previously cordial and cold, became a mask; and the mask was saying that killing me, my wife, and my children was something for which he now had warrant."
In comments on the BBC in October 2006 Amis expressed his view that North Korea was the most dangerous of the two remaining members of the Axis Of Evil, but that Iran was our "natural enemy", suggesting that we should not feel bad about having "helped Iraq scrape a draw with Iran" in the Iran–Iraq War, because a "revolutionary and rampant Iran would have been a much more destabilising presence."
His views on radical Islamism earned him the contentious sobriquet Blitcon from the New Statesman (his former employer). This term, it has since been argued, was wrongly applied.
His political opinions have been attacked in some quarters, particularly in The Guardian. He has, however, received support from many other writers. In The Spectator, Philip Hensher noted:
In June 2008, Amis strongly endorsed the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama, stating that "The reason I hope for Obama is that he alone has the chance to reposition America's image in the world".
Current employment
In February 2007, Martin Amis was appointed as a Professor of Creative Writing at The Manchester Centre for New Writing in the University of Manchester, and started in September 2007. He runs postgraduate seminars, and participates in four public events each year, including a two week summer school.
Of his position, he said: "I may be acerbic in how I write but... I would find it very difficult to say cruel things to [students] in such a vulnerable position. I imagine I'll be surprisingly sweet and gentle with them." He predicts that the experience might inspire him to write a new book, while adding sardonically: "A campus novel written by an elderly novelist, that's what the world wants.". It has been revealed that the salary paid to Amis by the university is £80,000 a year. The Manchester Evening News broke the story claiming that according to his contract this meant he was paid £3000 an hour for 28 hours a year teaching. The claim was echoed in headlines in several national papers. However like any other member of academic staff his teaching contact hours constitute a minority of his commitments, a point confirmed in the original article by a reply from the University.
Martin Amis is scheduled to give a number of appearances at Manchester University's Whitworth Hall, public discussions with other experts on various topics during 2008 2009. The next of these, on the relationship between Literature and Britishness will take place on 12 Feb 2009 with Manchester writer Howard Jacobson.
Bibliography
Novels
Collections
- Einstein's Monsters (1987)
- Two Stories (1994)
- God's Dice (1995)
- Heavy Water and Other Stories (1998)
- Amis Omnibus (omnibus) (1999)
- The Fiction of Martin Amis (2000)
- Vintage Amis
Non fiction
External links
Comprehensive information and hubs
- (created by James Diedrick; now managed by Gavin Keulks)
- - Author Page ()
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- , The New York Times: Reviews of Martin Amis's earlier books; articles about and by Martin Amis*
Sample works and articles by Amis
- : Martin Amis, The Sunday Times Magazine, 6 February 2005 – On the streets of Colombia, young boys cripple or murder each other just for showing disrespect or for winning at a game of cards. Is the taste for violence opening up a wound that can never heal? Report: Martin Amis – In The Sunday Times Magazine's continuing series of articles, renowned writers bring a fresh perspective to the world's trouble spots. The international medical-aid organisation MSF has helped our correspondents reach some of these inhospitable areas.
- - A complete short story by Amis.
- - A satire on fundamentalism in this extract from an unpublished manuscript by Amis
Interviews
- of online web discussion (2002)
- an interview with Amis by Silvia Spring for Newsweek International regarding terrorism. (11/6/2006)
- by Michael Silverblatt on Bookworm
Reviews
Note: for reviews of individual works, please see its article.
Amis and "Islamism"
- (2006)
- This is the interview in which Amis gives the response that began the controversy.
- by Chris Morris
- : an article in the by Marjorie Perloff, 13 February 2008
Community
Media
Other
- — Profile on Martin and Kingsley Amis from New York Times Magazine (4/22/2007).
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