His transatlantic heroes were Saul Bellow and Vladimir Nabokov, but he was most similar to Martin Amis, now 73 The American writer is Norman Mailer.
Both are comedic geniuses. Both emerged from their fledgling years as high-profile journalists, witnessing political events and writing books about youth cultural phenomena that seemed transversal to their talents (Mailer’s Graffiti, Amis’ video arcade); both have a weakness for bad commentary and a rich capacity for self-absorption. As novelists with big historical themes, both of them have entered the middle and late stage, with mixed results.
Throughout, both face the writing challenge of competing with their own celebrities.
What a magnificent prose, and what a peculiar personality behind it. Amis wrote a lengthy feature on the porn industry for Tina Brown’s Talk Magazine in 2001, only admitting until the end that he was terrified of seeing something gory on screen . His specialty was pulp, but he was always a bookworm, a literary critic at heart.
This contrast is the source of his humor. There is something inherently laughable about his work, though he rarely uses something as mundane as a joke. He loathes clichés (and proclaims that loathing) but loves all the qualities of vulgarity.
The early novels were svelte rampages of biting wit. As it turns out, these were just prep for the mid-Atlantic trilogy of the 1980s and ’90s: money, london fields and Information. Everyone will have their favorite – Courtney Love once told me her favorite was money – but mine is london fieldsKeith Talent, aka Keithcliffe: Amis brings a 19th century sensibility to a corner pub and teaches it to win at darts, somehow imbuing the whole affair with an air of nuclear fear.
His critique is insightful, poignant, rigorous, and every bit as enjoyable as fiction. His role model was the Canadian literary theorist Northrop Frye, and his role model was authority, not ambivalence. Like Richard Tour, Information, when he reviews a book, “it’s still reviewed”.But he basically brushed it off as he went on: “Is that how much you want prose: book sessions, interviews, gossip?” he asked experiencea memoir about gossip.
Over the past three decades he has written mostly about his icons (Bello and Nabokov, Iris Murdoch, Jane Austen, Philip Larkin) and some of his veteran colleagues (Updike, Roth, Ballard, DeLillo). “Fiction is comedy as life is comedy,” Amis concluded in a later essay on Bellow. Why he stopped writing fiction and switched to a non-comic book about Stalin remains a mystery — fear of koba — and why it has the word “laughter” in its subtitle.
Larkin is a vibrant soul and the source of plot twists (is he Martin’s biological father, somehow?) insider, after a series of books with little critical consensus, few expected Amis’ final masterpiece, to put it lightly. Here, the cunning trickster and chief critic takes an unexpectedly generous approach, imparting the wisdom of the art of fiction to an imaginary acolyte. Here, the cynical comedian turns passionate and mournful as he tells the story of the early and final days of his friendship with Christopher Hitchens and Bellow (previously only about his gentle parent).Once again, life is a comedy: author The Adventures of Ojimachewho had Alzheimer’s in his aging years, spent a lot of time watching Pirates of the Caribbean again and again. We see a young Hitchens involved in serial “hard dialectical” romances, sleeping decades later in a bed in a Texas tumor ward, his best friend pats him on the head, kisses him, and leaves him ” A skeleton cigarette”.
People are tempted to say, “We’re not going to see anyone they like again,” but that’s clichéd and all too obvious. It’s also easy to find flaws in the work of Amis and Hitchens, some of which are the size of entire books, but life is comic, and one way to be funny is to get things wrong. Regardless of his initial concerns about his famous father, Kingsley, Amis made the most of his legacy, relentlessly pursuing his love of literature to the end. He and Hitchens also make good use of the fame, well deserved it is in terms of their prose style. Sometimes the worst thing about a sentence is the period.
Christian Lorentzen is a writer and literary critic living in New York