Re: Balancing

1

The book of journalism pieces he wrote about America in the late 80s, The Moronic Inferno, was probably more than anything else the thing that allowed me to view my country objectively.


Posted by: Cryptic Ned | Link to this comment | 11-20-07 9:44 AM
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Because I somehow managed to read it at age 12 or 13, since it was hanging around the house of my effete rootless cosmopolitan parents.


Posted by: Cryptic Ned | Link to this comment | 11-20-07 9:53 AM
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I thought that Money was a very good novel. He seems personally unpleasant, but so did Kingsley Amis, Patricia Highsmith, and both Francises Bacon.


Posted by: lw | Link to this comment | 11-20-07 9:59 AM
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Time's Arrow is excellent, if gimmicky; London Fields and Money are both quite good; Night Train and (from all accounts) Yellow Dog are wonderfully, reputation-destroyingly bad; Koba the Dread advances the controversial notion that Stalin was a really shitty dude (speak truth to power, Martin!). At this point why does anyone pay attention to him other than to make fun of his teeth?

Proposed: That this body acknowledges that The Green Man is better than Lucky Jim.


Posted by: snarkout | Link to this comment | 11-20-07 10:01 AM
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reputation-destroyingly bad

you would think that, and yet he wrote them, and his reputation remains. It's one of the great puzzles of the age. I suspect that future archaeologists will see "Martin Amis' Literary Reputation" alongside the Great Wall of China, Cheops' Pyramid and other indestructible wonders of the ancient world.


Posted by: dsquared | Link to this comment | 11-20-07 10:33 AM
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Yea, I don't think that "he's too shitty a writer to get away with this" is gonna play. Amis fils is widely seen to have exceeded the powers of Amis pere; his high standing impugns the deference given elite artists, a more pernicious thing perhaps than that given legacy gits.


Posted by: Wrongshore | Link to this comment | 11-20-07 10:33 AM
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you would think that, and yet he wrote them, and his reputation remains.

Well, and we have Tom "Coeds are having sex!!!11" Wolfe, but is Amis still considered an important British writer, or is he more a literary celebrity at this point? Rushdie, e.g., seems to be more famous for being Rushdie than for writing anything worthwhile at this point.


Posted by: snarkout | Link to this comment | 11-20-07 10:38 AM
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I also liked The Moronic Inferno and his other book of literary journalism, Visiting Mrs. Nabokov, though all the Saul Bellow worship is kind of funny. The latter book has what I remember as I very amusing piece about going to a Rolling Stones concert and hating the whole experience. Whenever I think of it, I wish I had a copy on hand so I could read it again. Never read any of his novels, don't plan to. I suppose it's not surprising he's become more and more of a crank as the years go by, but still: crank.


Posted by: JL | Link to this comment | 11-20-07 10:52 AM
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Tom Wolfe discovered the first lipstick party on his own dick. When it was over, he expressed sly disapprobation.


Posted by: Wrongshore | Link to this comment | 11-20-07 10:53 AM
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I've got to go with Ned, snarkout and JL on this one: The Moronic Inferno's a genuinely great book, and nothing he says now will change that. I mean, the concept doesn't even make any sense. Imagine if he turned senile: would we reconsider his early body of work just because he hits the campaign trail for pancakes?

(Also, no one's mentioned Einstein's Monsters yet. It's also quite good.)


Posted by: SEK | Link to this comment | 11-20-07 11:22 AM
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Night Train was deeply awful. I loved London Fields when I first read it, but now I don't know. I feel like Amis has never gotten over being the cleverest boy in the first form.


Posted by: oudemia | Link to this comment | 11-20-07 11:24 AM
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6: Hopefully, "is seen to" is an acknowledged distance from "has."

Nothing I've seen from Amis the Younger can compare to "The Alteration."


Posted by: DAG | Link to this comment | 11-20-07 11:28 AM
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I read a few years ago a tiresome piece by Martin (I didn't really first get attention by being my father's son) Amis discussing Kingsley's inbred racism. "I asked him, what does it feel like to be mildly anti-Semitic?", he wrote.

Well, now he knows. Berk.


Posted by: OneFatEnglishman | Link to this comment | 11-20-07 11:52 AM
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I'm pretty fond of The Green Man, and found Lucky Jim as good as someone reading it five decades after it was controversial could find it, but I think part of that may be due to the television adaptation with, appropriately, Albert Finney.

As for Amis fils, I liked The Rachel Papers, Money, Success and London Fields quite a bit. I don't really have anything against him on the grounds of whatever he's written about the UK's unassimilated immigrant underclasses that I haven't read, but I suppose I could be biased to forgive human failings like avarice, pride and bigotry when they occur in writers I happen to like, in contrast with the blameless wusses of the Brooklyn School.

Also, I call for a moratorium on the criticism that "X has never gotten over the need to be the cleverest/smartest/craziest boy/girl/centipede in prep school/the freshman class/medieval Provence." It has been applied to too many people in the creative light industries to retain much power.


Posted by: Flippanter | Link to this comment | 11-20-07 12:12 PM
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Did someone say it to you, F? Well, feh to that, I think. I haven't really decided yet, and re-reading would be required, but I'm coming to the opinion that a sort of twee cleverness is what Amis' fiction has to recommend it. And it's superannuated.
I did, however, suggest London Fields to someone recently as a better book about anal sex than Bentley's The Surrender.


Posted by: oudemia | Link to this comment | 11-20-07 12:20 PM
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Oud, some of us are soldiers in the war against cliché, others conscientious objectors.


Posted by: Flippanter | Link to this comment | 11-20-07 12:31 PM
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14: Usually `not half as clever as they think they are' suffices.


Posted by: sou | Link to this comment | 11-20-07 12:33 PM
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Fine. I'll trade that in if we can all agree to use "eponymous" correctly.


Posted by: oudemia | Link to this comment | 11-20-07 12:38 PM
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Also, I call for a moratorium on the criticism that "X has never gotten over the need to be the cleverest/smartest/craziest boy/girl/centipede in prep school/the freshman class/medieval Provence." It has been applied to too many people in the creative light industries to retain much power.

And would apply to everyone on Unfogged and anyone writing on any site in the links list.


Posted by: Biohazard | Link to this comment | 11-20-07 12:44 PM
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18: take it up with sausagely


Posted by: soup biscuit | Link to this comment | 11-20-07 12:45 PM
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Kingsley -- racist though he may have been -- wrote the single most evocative paragraph about a hangover ever:

Dixon was alive again. Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible ejection. He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of the morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he'd somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten by secret police. He felt bad.

I may've quoted this here before, but damn it, it's worth repeating.


Posted by: SEK | Link to this comment | 11-20-07 12:46 PM
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Feh.

Time's Arrow was done earlier and better by Kurt Vonnegut, amongst others.

You cannot decouple Amis the writer from Amis the asshole: he is such a bad writer because he's such an asshole, because he's a pompous git who thinks he scored a home run when he started on third base, profoundly uncurious about the world outside of the London literati, who in his fiction and essays both strives to uphold the prejudices of his class. Same with Ian McEwan of course.

Both are thought to be "important" writers because they tackle important subjects and every now and again manage to turn a nice phrase, but in the end they will never ever stray from their middle class comfort zones.


Posted by: Martin Wisse | Link to this comment | 11-20-07 2:20 PM
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You cannot decouple Amis the writer from Amis the asshole

this has given me a whole new perspective on the matter; while I maintain that Amis is no better than a middle ranking to minor support character in the Barnes/Rushdie/Ishiguro milieu, as an asshole he is a genuinely major figure. In many ways I can forgive him some of his more dreadful books when I consider the vitality and talent that he has brought to the world of assholes.


Posted by: dsquared | Link to this comment | 11-20-07 2:43 PM
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You know what's awesome about Unfogged? Other people's envy tastes so much sweeter than mine.


Posted by: Flippanter | Link to this comment | 11-20-07 2:53 PM
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Envy of his success/popularity as a writer?

Oddly enough, for an internet community, there aren't any would-be novelists here, that I know of.


Posted by: Cryptic Ned | Link to this comment | 11-20-07 2:55 PM
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Oddly enough, for an internet community, there aren't any would-be novelists here, that I know of.

No, but plenty of aspiring short fiction writers, though.


Posted by: Knecht Ruprecht | Link to this comment | 11-20-07 3:28 PM
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What is a "hangover"?


Posted by: John Emerson | Link to this comment | 11-20-07 3:32 PM
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It's what happens if you sober up. Pay it no mind.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 11-20-07 4:06 PM
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29

Envy of his success/popularity as a writer?

no, as an asshole.


Posted by: dsquared | Link to this comment | 11-20-07 4:12 PM
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I'm amazed no one's mentioned The Information, strong contender for my favorite novel of all time. London Fields is good, too. I was really sorry to read of his utter assholity, even though I guess I kind of knew about it already.


Posted by: Brodysattva | Link to this comment | 11-20-07 5:59 PM
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29: I feel that The Man has held me down, forcing me to be a low-volume asshole when I really had the potential to be a prime-time contender.


Posted by: John Emerson | Link to this comment | 11-20-07 6:15 PM
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I relish the implicit assumption that some writer worth reading, somewhere, is not an asshole. It's like meeting a Flat Earther or a Bush voter.


Posted by: Flippanter | Link to this comment | 11-20-07 7:18 PM
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Francis King is well worth reading, and is one of the most delightful and generous people I've ever met.


Posted by: OneFatEnglishman | Link to this comment | 11-21-07 3:05 AM
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