260-] English Literature
Martin Amis
British author
2000s
The
2000s were Amis's least productive decade in terms of full-length fiction since
starting in the 1970s (two novels in ten years), while his non-fiction work saw
a dramatic increase in volume (three published works including a memoir, a
hybrid of semi-memoir and amateur political history, and another journalism
collection). In 2000, Amis published the memoir Experience, largely concerned
with the relationship between the author and his father, the novelist Kingsley
Amis. Amis describes his reunion with his daughter, Delilah Seale, resulting
from an affair in the 1970s, whom he did not see until she was 19. Amis also
discusses, at length, the murder of his cousin Lucy Partington by 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 devastating history of the crimes of
Stalin and the denial that they received from many writers and academics in the
West. The book precipitated a literary controversy for its approach to the
material and for its attack on Amis's long-time friend Christopher Hitchens.
Amis accused Hitchens – who was once a committed leftist – of sympathy for
Stalin and communism. Although Hitchens wrote a vituperative response to the
book in The Atlantic, his friendship with Amis emerged unchanged: in response
to a reporter's question, 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, Amis published Yellow Dog, his first novel in six years. The book
received mixed reviews, with some critics proclaiming the novel a return to
form, but its reception was mostly negative. The novelist Tibor Fischer
denounced it: "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." 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." Yellow Dog
"controversially made the 13-book longlist for the 2003 Booker Prize,
despite some scathing reviews", but failed to win the award. Following the
harsh reviews afforded to Yellow Dog, Amis relocated from London to the beach
resort of José Ignacio, Uruguay, with his family for two years, during which
time he worked on his next novel away from the glare and pressures of the
London literary scene.
In
September 2006, upon his return from Uruguay, Amis published his eleventh
novel. House of Meetings, a short work, continued the author's crusade against
the crimes of Stalinism and also focused some consideration on the state of
contemporary post-Soviet Russia. The novel centres on the relationship between
two brothers incarcerated in a prototypical Siberian gulag who, prior to their
deportation, had loved the same woman. House of Meetings saw some better
critical notices than Yellow Dog had received three years before, but there
were still some reviewers who felt that Amis's fiction work had considerably
declined in quality. Despite the praise for House of Meetings, once again Amis
was overlooked for the Booker Prize longlist. According to a piece in The
Independent, the novel "was originally to have been collected alongside
two short stories – one, a disturbing account of the life of a body-double in
the court of Saddam Hussein; the other, the imagined final moments of Muhammad
Atta, the leader of the 11 September attacks – but late in the process, Amis
decided to jettison both from the book." The same article asserts that
Amis had recently abandoned a novella, The Unknown Known (inspired by a phase
used by Donald Rumsfeld), in which Muslim terrorists unleash a horde of
compulsive rapists on Greeley, Colorado. Instead he continued to work on a
follow-up full novel that he had started working on in 2003:
The
novel I'm working on is blindingly autobiographical, but with an Islamic theme.
It's called A Pregnant Widow, because at the end of a revolution you don't have
a newborn child, you have a pregnant widow. And the pregnant widow in this
novel is feminism. Which is still in its second trimester. The child is nowhere
in sight yet. And I think it has several more convulsions to undergo before
we'll see the child.
The
new novel took some considerable time to write: in 2008, Amis made the
"terrible decision" to abandon his first version and a much-different
Pregnant Widow was not published until 2010. Instead, Amis's last published
work of the 2000s was the 2008 journalism collection The Second Plane, a
collection which compiled Amis's many writings on the events of 9/11 and the
subsequent major events and cultural issues resulting from the War on Terror.
The reception to The Second Plane was decidedly mixed, with some reviewers
finding its tone intelligent and well reasoned, while others believed it to be
overly stylised and lacking in authoritative knowledge of key areas under
consideration. The most common consensus was that the two short stories
included were the weakest point of the collection. The collection sold
relatively well but was not well received, particularly in the United States.
2010s
and 2020s
In
2010, after a period of writing, rewriting, editing, and revision dating back
to 2003, "by far the longest writing-time of all [his] books", Amis
published The Pregnant Widow, a long novel concerned with the sexual
revolution. Its title is based on a quote from Alexander Herzen: "The
death of the contemporary forms of social order ought to gladden rather than
trouble the soul. Yet what is frightening is that what the departing world
leaves behind it is not an heir but a pregnant widow. Between the death of the
one and the birth of the other, much water will flow by, a long night of chaos
and desolation will pass."
The
first public reading of the then just completed version of The Pregnant Widow
occurred on 11 May 2009 as part of the Norwich and Norfolk festival. At this
reading, according to the coverage of the event for the Writers' Centre Norwich
by Katy Carr, "the writing shows a return to comic form, as the narrator
muses on the indignities of facing the mirror as an ageing man, in a prelude to
a story set in Italy in 1970, looking at the effect of the sexual revolution on
personal relationships. The sexual revolution was the moment, as Amis sees it,
that love became divorced from sex. He said he started to write the novel
autobiographically, but then concluded that real life was too different from
fiction and difficult to drum into novel shape, so he had to rethink the
form."
The
story is set in a castle owned by a cheese tycoon in Campania, Italy, where
Keith Nearing, a 20-year-old English literature student; his girlfriend, Lily;
and her friend, Scheherazade, are on holiday during the hot summer of 1970, the
year that Amis says "something was changing in the world of men and
women". The narrator is Keith's superego, or conscience, in 2009. Keith's
sister, Violet, is based on Amis's own sister, Sally, described by Amis as one
of the revolution's most spectacular victims.
Published
in a whirl of publicity the likes of which Amis had not received for a novel
since the publication of The Information in 1995, The Pregnant Widow was met by
searing criticism, accusations of sexism, and guessing the real-world identity
of its characters. Despite a vast amount of coverage, some positive reviews,
and a general expectation that Amis's time for recognition had come, the novel
was overlooked for the 2010 Man Booker Prize longlist. In 2010, Martin Amis was
named GQ writer of the year.
In
2012 Amis published Lionel Asbo: State of England. The novel is centred on the
lives of Desmond Pepperdine and his uncle Lionel Asbo, a voracious lout and
persistent convict; for the benefit of his US readers, Amis explained the
origin of the latter's surname in an interview with NPR. It is set against the
fictional borough of Diston Town, a grotesque version of modern-day Britain
under the reign of celebrity culture, and follows the dramatic events in the
lives of both characters: Desmond's gradual erudition and maturing; and
Lionel's fantastic lottery win of almost £140 million. Much to the interest of
the press, Amis announced that the character of Lionel Asbo's eventual
girlfriend, the ambitious glamour model and poet "Threnody"
(quotation marks included), had been created to honour the British celebrity
Jordan, whom he had a few years earlier summed up as "two bags of silicone".
In an interview with Newsnight's Jeremy Paxman, Amis said the novel was
"not a frowning examination of England" but a comedy based on a
"fairytale world", adding that Lionel Asbo: State of England was not
an attack on the country, insisting he was "proud of being English"
and viewed the nation with affection. Reviews, once again, were mixed.
Amis's
2014 novel The Zone of Interest concerns the Holocaust, his second work of
fiction to tackle the subject after Time's Arrow. In it, Amis endeavoured to
imagine the social and domestic lives of the Nazi officers who ran the death
camps, and the effect their indifference to human suffering had on their
general psychology. It was shortlisted for the 2015 Walter Scott Prize for
historical fiction and a 2023 film, "loosely based" on the novel,
premiered to acclaim at the 2023 Cannes Film Festival, winning the Grand Prix.
In
December 2016, Amis announced two new projects. The first, a collection of
journalism, titled The Rub of Time: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump.
Essays and Reportage, 1986–2016, was published in October 2017. The second
project, a new untitled novel which Amis was working on, was an
autobiographical novel about three key literary figures in his life: the poet
Philip Larkin, American novelist Saul Bellow, and noted public intellectual
Christopher Hitchens. In an interview with livemint.com, Amis said of the
novel-in-progress, "I'm writing an autobiographical novel that I've been
trying to write for 15 years. It's not so much about me, it's about three other
writers – a poet, a novelist and an essayist ... and since I started trying to
write it, Larkin died in 1985, Bellow died in 2005, and Hitch died in 2011, and
that gives me a theme, death, and it gives me a bit more freedom, and fiction is
freedom. It's hard going but the one benefit is that I have the freedom to
invent things. I don't have them looking over my shoulder anymore." The
finished product, Inside Story – his first novel in six years – was published
in September 2020.
Other
work
Amis
released two collections of short stories (Einstein's Monsters and Heavy Water)
and five volumes of collected journalism and criticism (The Moronic Inferno,
Visiting Mrs Nabokov, The War Against Cliché, The Second Plane and The Rub of
Time). While he was writing Money, he wrote a guide to arcade video games of
the 1970s and 1980s, Invasion of the Space Invaders.
Amis
regularly appeared on television and radio discussion and debate programmes and
contributed book reviews and articles to newspapers. His wife Isabel Fonseca
released her debut novel Attachment in 2009 and two of Amis's children, his son
Louis and his daughter Fernanda, have also been published in Standpoint
magazine and The Guardian, respectively.
University
of Manchester
In
February 2007, Amis was appointed as a professor of creative writing at the
Manchester Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester, where he
started in September 2007. He ran postgraduate seminars, and participated in
four public events each year, including a two-week summer school.
Of
his position, Amis 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
predicted 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 was revealed that the salary paid to Amis
by the university was £80,000 a year in return for 28 contracted hours. The
Manchester Evening News broke the story saying that according to his contract
Amis was paid £3,000 an hour for 28 contracted hours a year teaching. The claim
was echoed in headlines in several national papers.
In
January 2011, it was announced that Amis would be stepping down from his
university position at the end of the current academic year. Of his time
teaching creative writing at the University of Manchester, Amis was quoted as
saying, " teaching creative writing at Manchester has been a joy" and
that he had "become very fond of my colleagues, especially John McAuliffe
and Ian McGuire". He added that he "loved doing all the reading and
the talking; and I very much took to the Mancunians. They are a witty and
tolerant contingent". Amis was succeeded in this position by the Irish
writer Colm Tóibín in September 2011.
From
October 2007 to July 2011, at the University of Manchester's Whitworth Hall and
Cosmo Rodewald Concert Hall, Amis regularly engaged in public discussions with
other experts on literature and various topics (21st-century literature,
terrorism, religion, Philip Larkin, science, Britishness, suicide, sex, ageing,
his 2010 novel The Pregnant Widow, violence, film, the short story, and
America).