258-] English Literature
Martin Amis
British author
Facts
Born August 25,
1949 • Oxford • England
Died May 19,
2023 (aged 73) • Florida
Notable Works “Dead
Babies” • “Einstein’s Monsters” • “Experience” • “House of Meetings” • “Inside
Story” • “Koba the Dread” • “London Fields” • “Money” • “Night Train” • “Other
People” • “Success” • “The Information” • “The Pregnant Widow” • “The Rachel
Papers” • “The Rub of Time: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump. Essays
and Reportage, 1994-2016” • “The War Against Cliché” • “The Zone of Interest” •
“Time’s Arrow” • “Visiting Mrs. Nabokov, and Other
Martin Amis (born August 25, 1949, Oxford, Oxfordshire,
England—died May 19, 2023, Lake Worth, Florida, U.S.) was an English satirist
known for his virtuoso storytelling technique and his dark views of
contemporary English society.
As a youth, Amis, the son of the novelist Kingsley
Amis, thrived literarily on a permissive home atmosphere and a “passionate
street life.” He graduated from Exeter College, Oxford, in 1971 with
first-class honours in English and worked for several years as an editor on
such publications as the Times Literary Supplement and the New Statesman.
Amis’s first novel was The Rachel Papers (1973), the
tale of a young antihero preoccupied with his health, his sex life, and his
efforts to get into Oxford. His first major critical success was Money (1984),
a savagely comic satire of the conspicuous consumerism of the 1980s. London
Fields (1989; film 2015) is an ambitious work set in 1999 in which a number of
small-scale interpersonal relationships take place amid a society on the verge
of apocalyptic collapse. His other major work of this period is Time’s Arrow
(1991), which inverts traditional narrative order to describe the life of a
Nazi war criminal from death to birth. In Amis’s works, according to one
critic, “morality is nudged toward bankruptcy by ‘market forces.’ ” Other
novels of the first decades of his literary career included Dead Babies (1974),
Success (1978), Other People (1981), The Information (1995), and Night Train
(1997).
His short-story collection Einstein’s Monsters (1987)
finds stupidity and horror in a world filled with nuclear weapons. The
forced-labour camps under Soviet leader Joseph Stalin are the subject of both
the nonfiction Koba the Dread (2002) and the novel House of Meetings (2006). In
his novel The Pregnant Widow (2010), Amis examined the sexual revolution of the
1970s and its repercussions on a group of friends who lived through it. The pop
culture indictment Lionel Asbo: State of England (2012) chronicles the
vicissitudes of a fictional small-time criminal and his upstanding nephew after
the former wins the lottery and becomes a fixture in the tabloid press. The
Zone of Interest (2014) revisits the Holocaust themes explored in Time’s Arrow.
Told from the perspectives of two Nazis and a Jew, the novel examines the
horrors of Auschwitz by chronicling the quotidian romantic entanglements of the
former two alongside the grim duties imposed on the latter. The “novelized
autobiography” Inside Story (2020) centres on his relationships with the
writers Philip Larkin, Saul Bellow, and Christopher Hitchens.
Amis was one of the best-known public intellectuals
of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. He was a frequent guest on
television programs, and his decades-long friendship with Hitchens was arguably
the most prominent and productive literary relationship of his era. He related
his thoughts on his homeland in the television documentary Martin Amis’s
England (2014). Among his volumes of essays are The Moronic Inferno, and Other
Visits to America (1986), Visiting Mrs. Nabokov, and Other Excursions (1993),
The War Against Cliché (2001), and The Rub of Time: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens,
Travolta, Trump. Essays and Reportage, 1994-2016 (2017). Experience (2000), an
autobiography that often focuses on his father, was acclaimed for an emotional
depth and profundity that some reviewers had found lacking in his novels.
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