Martin Amis
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Martin Amis (born August 25, 1949) is a British novelist. He is the author of some of Britain's best-known modern literature, particularly Money (1984) and London Fields (1989).
Influenced by Saul Bellow, Vladimir Nabokov, and James Joyce, as well as by his father Sir Kingsley Amis, he has inspired a generation of writers with his distinctive style, including Will Self and Zadie Smith. The Guardian writes that "all his critics have noted what Kingsley Amis complained of as a 'terrible compulsive vividness in his 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." [link]
Amis's raw material is what he sees as the absurdity of the postmodern condition and the excesses of late-capitalist Western society with its grotesque caricatures.
Early life
Amis's paternal grandfather was a mustard clerk from Clapham, and his maternal grandfather a shoe millionaire. [link] Both of his parents were twice divorced, divorcing each other when he was 12, and for a time, his father lived as a lodger with Amis's mother, Hilly, and her third husband. "Something out of early Updike, 'Couples' flirtations and a fair amount of drinking," he told The New York Times. "They were all 'at it'. " [link]Born in Cardiff, South Wales, he was the middle of three children, with an older brother, Philip, and a younger sister, Sally. He attended a large number of different schools during the 1950s and 60s, because of his father's success with his novel Lucky Jim, which involved overseas travel, including a year spent in Princeton, New Jersey, which was Amis' introduction to the United States.
He 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 despite movement between several schools including a short spell at Westminster School, he graduated from Exeter College, Oxford with a first-class degree in English.
After Oxford, he found an entry-level job at The Times Literary Supplement, became literary editor of The New Statesman at the age of 27 where he met lifelong friend Christopher Hitchens, and then a feature writer for The Observer.
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 [link].His first novel The Rachel Papers won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1974. The most traditional of his novels, made into a 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.
Dead Babies, more flippant in tone, has a typically "sixties" plot, with a house full of characters who abuse 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 which was also unsuccessful.
Later career
His best-known novels, and the ones most respected by critics, are Money, London Fields, and Time's Arrow. Time's Arrow, the autobiography of a doctor who helped torture Jews during the Holocaust, which was shortlisted for the 1991 Booker Prize, drew notice both for its unusual technique — time runs backwards during the entire novel, down to the actual dialogue being spoken backwards — as well as for its topic.
The unparalleled size of the advance demanded and obtained by Amis for The Information attracted what Amis described as "an Eisteddfod of hostility" from writers and critics after he left his agent of many years, Pat Kavanagh, in order to be represented by the Harvard-educated Andrew "The Jackal" Wylie. Kavanagh is married to Julian Barnes, with whom Amis had been friends for many years, but the incident caused a rift that is generally regarded to be the inspiration for The Information which features two rival authors.
The memoir Experience is largely about his relationship with his famous author father, while he also writes movingly 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, 21 year-old Lucy Partington, became a victim of Fred West [link].
In 2002, Amis published Koba the Dread, a book about the crimes of Stalinism. The book provoked a literary controversy for its ostensibly naïve and dilettante 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.
In 2003, Yellow Dog was thoroughly denounced by Tibor Fischer, generating further hubbub 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". Although the book did not sell as well as expected, it did receive decent acclaim in the literary press.
Amis has released two collections of his short stories (Einstein's Monsters and Heavy Water), and several collections of journalism (The Moronic Inferno, Visiting Mrs. Nabokov and The War Against Cliché).
He lives and writes in London and Uruguay and is married to the writer Isabel Fonseca, his second wife.
Bibliography
Novels
- The Rachel Papers (1973), filmed in 1989
- Dead Babies (1975)
- Success (1978)
- Other People (1981)
- Money (1984)
- London Fields (1989)
- Time's Arrow: Or the Nature of the Offense (1991)
- The Information (1995)
- Night Train (1997)
- Yellow Dog (2003)
Collections
- Einstein's Monsters (1987)
- Two Stories (1994)
- God's Dice (1995)
- Heavy Water: And Other Stories (1998)
- State of England: And Other Stories (1998)
- Amis Omnibus (omnibus) (1999)
- The Fiction of Martin Amis (2000)
- Vintage Amis (2004)
- House of Meetings (2006)
Non fiction
- Invasion of the Space Invaders (1982)
- The Moronic Inferno: And Other Visits to America (1986)
- Visiting Mrs Nabokov: And Other Excursions (1993)
- Experience (2000)
- The War Against Cliche: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (2001)
- Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million (2002) (About Joseph Stalin and Russian History)
External links
- [The Martin Amis Web] (created by James Diedrick; now managed by Gavin Keulks)
- [link] Martin Amis - Author Page ( Guardian Books)
- [link] Two Audio Interviews with Martin Amis: 1985 (23 min 22 s) and 1990 (32 min 4 s) RealAudio
- [link] Martin Amis, The New York Times: Reviews of Martin Amis's earlier books; articles about and by Martin Amis
- [link] Authors in the front line: Martin Amis, The Sunday Times Magazine, February 06, 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.
- [link] CareerMove - A complete short story by Amis.
- [link] Hendon Mob Poker Tournament Results
- [Martin Amis] at [www.contemporarywriters.com]
- [Martin Amis] at the Internet Book List
- [link] Transcript of online web discussion (2002)
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