Martin Amis

File:MartinAmis2.jpg

Photo of Martin Amis by Robert Birnbaum

Martin Amis (born August 25, 1949) is an English novelist. His best known novels include Money (1984), London Fields (1989), Time's Arrow (1991), The Information (1995) and House of Meetings (2006).

Influenced by Saul Bellow and Vladimir Nabokov, as well as by his father, Sir Kingsley Amis, Amis's distinctive style has itself influenced a generation of writers, including Will Self and Zadie Smith [1] [2]. 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." [3]

His recent work has explored contemporary moral and geopolitical issues, including the Holocaust, Communist Russia, and 9/11 and Islamism, though his writing on the latter has been widely criticised for its ignorance: Amis has never been to a Muslim country and does not appear to have ever talked to any Muslims.

Early life

Amis's paternal grandfather was a mustard clerk from Clapham, and his maternal grandfather a shoe millionaire. [4] His parents, Hilly and Kingsley, divorced when he was twelve. Much later, Martin lived in a house with Kingsley, Hilly, and Hilly's third husband, Alistair Boyd, Lord Kilmarnock.[5][6] 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'. " [7]

Born in Cardiff, South Wales, 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 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, he graduated from Exeter College, Oxford with a 'formal' 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 lifelong friend Christopher Hitchens, 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 [8].

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, and later wrote a roman a clef about its filming.

Dead Babies (1975), 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.

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

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Eight books by Martin Amis: (Top row, left to right) Experience, London Fields, Dead Babies, The Information (Second row, left to right) Money, Other People, Time's Arrow, Heavy Water

His best-known novels, and the ones most respected by critics, are Money, London Fields, Time's Arrow, and The Information.

Money (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." The book follows him as he flies back and forth across the Atlantic in pursuit of personal and professional success, and describes a series of comic episodes with darker undertones. The vivid and stylised use of language and black humour was a critical success and the book remains Amis's most highly regarded work.

London Fields, 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, 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, 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, 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, 21-year-old Lucy Partington, became a victim of Fred West [9].

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, 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.

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 2007, 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), three volumes of collected journalism and criticism (The Moronic Inferno, Visiting Mrs. Nabokov and The War Against Cliché), and Invasion of the Space Invaders .

He lives and writes in London and Uruguay and is married to the writer Isabel Fonseca, his second wife.

He stoked up controversy in October when he described Islamic fundamentalists as "boring bastards", saying, "When I come back to Britain I see a pretty good multicultural society. The only element that is not fitting in is Islam." His views on Islamism later earned him the sobriquet Blitcon in the New Statesman (his former employer), argued to be wrongly applied [10].

In 2007 it was announced that Amis had been appointed to as professor of creative writing at the University of Manchester [11].

Bibliography

Novels

• The Rachel Papers (1973), filmed in 1989
• Dead Babies (1975), filmed in 2000
• 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)
• House of Meetings (2006)
• The Pregnant Widow (2007)

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

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 Cliché: 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)
• The Martin Amis Discussion Board
• [12] Martin Amis - Author Page ([13] Guardian Books)
• [14] Two Audio Interviews with Martin Amis: 1985 (23 min 22 s) and 1990 (32 min 4 s) RealAudio
• [15] Martin Amis, The New York Times: Reviews of Martin Amis's earlier books; articles about and by Martin Amis
• [16] 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.
• [17] CareerMove - A complete short story by Amis.
• [18] Hendon Mob Poker Tournament Results

• Template:Contemporary writers
• Martin Amis at the Internet Book List

• [19] Transcript of online web discussion (2002)
• Martin Amis interviewed by Ginny Dougary (2006)
• [20]Martin Amis interviewed by Tony Jones on Lateline (1/11/2006)
• Goading the Enemy an interview with Amis by Silvia Spring for Newsweek International regarding terrorism. (11/6/2006)
• [21] Martin Amis on Question Time
• [22] Tom Chatfield writes on Amis's House of Meetings for Prospect Magazine
• [http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk Martin goes Lucky Jim. Peter Millar. (18/2/2007).