Martin Amis, Beloved of Bellow and Bard of England’s Boom

The death of the novelist Martin Amis at the age of 73 from esophageal cancer — which also felled his friend, Christopher Hitchens, at 62 in 2011 — marks the passing of an author whose hard work and ample play made him both a celebrity writer and a writer’s writer, equally at ease with tabloids and rough drafts, schooled in the slashing style of literary journalism and accomplished across genres. His work is mixed, but full of moxy. The major part of Martin Amis’s achievement is the London Trilogy — “Money,” “London Fields,” and “The Information” — that catch London going gonzo, flush with cash and cocaine. Amis was quintessentially English, with contemporaries like Sir Ian McEwan, Hitchens, Julian Barnes, and Sir Salman Rushdie. He was touched, though, by the American spirit of vernacular, voice-driven fiction. He revered Saul Bellow, king of the literary smart alecs. Amis was born into literary royalty. His father, Sir Kingsley, was a comedic writer of the highest order. His debut book was his best. “Lucky Jim” centers on a lecturer at an unnamed university somewhere in the Midlands, and is the gold standard for campus novels. Its protagonist is modeled on the professor and writer J.R.R. Tolkien, who lectured a young Kingsley at Oxford. That’s where Martin, like his father, graduated.Martin Amis’s finishing school as a writer was not the library, but the magazine office. He started at the Times Literary Supplement before becoming literary editor of the New Statesman at the callow age of 27. Like his father before him, Amis fils’s first novel, “The Rachel Papers,” won the Somerset Maugham award. It’s about a precocious young writer, the first of many self-avatars — think Philip Roth’s metafictional games — who appear in his fiction.Amis never snagged a Nobel or Booker prize, but he was never far from the literary conversation, or its gossipy penumbras. He secured an $800,000 advance for “The Information,” an earthquake at the time. “The Zone of Interest” tackled the Holocaust, a choice criticized as vainglorious by another writer, Cynthia Ozick. A film adaptation, from A24 films, just had its premiere at the Cannes film festival. It secured a six-minute standing ovation.At his best, Amis was a master stylist, lacing his father’s humor with sentences that fizz and crackle with the energy of London’s “Wolf of Wall Street” moment. He was also stylish, a man about town whose affairs and entanglements served as their own long-running plot, his life grist for the same mills that fed his writing. He quipped, “Money doesn’t mind if we say it’s evil, it goes from strength to strength. It’s a fiction, an addiction, and a tacit conspiracy.”His last book, “Inside Story,” was his most personal. A novel that reads like a memoir and lands like a confession, it features finely wrought sketches of his father, Bellow, the poet Philip Larkin, and, most indelibly, Hitchens. Amis called it “life-writing,” and it sticks to reality’s ribs. He writes affectionately of a trip to Israel with Bellow, and his encounter with the Jewish state’s “riptide of urgencies” and the “thrill and shiver” of the Holy Land. Amis soars when he considers Bellow, whom he termed a “seraph” and a “sacramental writer” who wanted to “transliterate the given world,” in the process becoming a “plagiarist of Creation.” He calls the author of “Herzog” a “regional superpower — like Israel.” Unusually among the Anglo-intelligentsia, he was clear-eyed about the Jewish state’s enemies, calling them “maximally rejectionist” and “Judaeocidal.” Bellow was his rabbi in politics as well as prose. This reviewer is rarely far from “The War Against Cliché,” a collection of essays and reviews. In it, Amis confesses, “My private life was middle-bohemian — very hippyish and hedonistic, if not candidly debauched; but I was very moral when it came to literary criticism.” Not only moral, but also serious in waging a “campaign against cliché” and standing up for “freshness, energy, and reverberation of voice.” When Amis does not find those qualities, he is unsparing. Andy Warhol’s voice is a “ruined slur,” his self-absorption “immovable.” A book by Secretary Clinton is “sanitized anti-poetry of soft jargon.” The environmentalist William “Bill” McKibben’s “false starts and rethinks are visible on the margin of every page.” The novelist V.S. Pritchett’s “punctuation is tangled, hectic, and Victorian.” A book by Iris Murdoch is simply “too long.”Amis’s life was too short, and he spent his final years at Brooklyn, though he died at Lake Worth, Florida. Like his contemporaries Mr. Rushdie and the editor Tina Brown, his was an English sensibility replanted in America. His essays on the American scene and politics are uneven, as if written with an accent. Books were his native ground. What Amis once said about Vladimir Nabokov and James Joyce applies to him: “They got the work done, with style.”

Martin Amis, Beloved of Bellow and Bard of England’s Boom

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