Martin Amis, era-defining British novelist, dies aged 73

May 20, 2023 4:06 PM

The celebrated author of Money and London Fields, whose works defined the 80s and 90s literary scene, died of oesophageal cancer on Friday at his home in Florida.
posted by Ahmad Khani (55 comments total)

RIP. Some fine novels.
posted by doctornemo at 4:16 PM on May 20, 2023 [3 favorites]

That’s one I wasn’t expecting. Feels like the end of something.
posted by Artw at 4:30 PM on May 20, 2023 [5 favorites]

Yeah, same. That was a moment in the early 2000s.
posted by Ahmad Khani at 4:40 PM on May 20, 2023 [5 favorites]

Shit. Time to go re-read his dad's book on drinking and also do some of that.
posted by aspersioncast at 4:42 PM on May 20, 2023 [2 favorites]

I read London Fields in uni, and was so blown away, that I never read another of his. What could compare to that first moment of discovery?
posted by Capt. Renault at 4:43 PM on May 20, 2023 [1 favorite]

Time's Arrow may not be his best novel, but it was entertaining to me. I also enjoyed The Information.
posted by briank at 4:43 PM on May 20, 2023 [1 favorite]

MARTIN AMIS’S COMIC MUSIC: The great British novelist, who has died at seventy-three, had a true literary vitality that was high-spirited and farcical.
posted by Ahmad Khani at 4:51 PM on May 20, 2023 [1 favorite]

A merciless author for a hopeless age.

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posted by whuppy at 4:52 PM on May 20, 2023 [7 favorites]

“Drop me down anywhere in America and I’ll tell you where I am: in America.” Perhaps you need to be a slight stranger to this country to formulate American ubiquity in this way—as comic tautology, as wry Q.E.D. Quite often, in the last twenty years, I’ve found myself driving along some strip development in Massachusetts or New York State, or Indiana or Nevada for that matter, and as the repetitive commercial furniture passes by—the Hampton Inn, the kindergarten pink-and-orange of Dunkin’ Donuts, Chick-fil-A’s chirpy red rooster—I’m suddenly seized by panic, because for a second I don’t know where I am. The placeless wallpaper keeps unfurling. And then Martin Amis’s sentence from his great early book of journalism, “The Moronic Inferno” (1986), appears in my mind, as both balm and further terror: well, wherever exactly I am, I’m certainly “in America.” So at least I laugh.
posted by Ahmad Khani at 4:52 PM on May 20, 2023 [18 favorites]

From Wikipedia:

Amis was interviewed by The Times Magazine in 2006, the day after the 2006 transatlantic aircraft plot came to light, about community relations in Britain and the "threat" from Muslims, where he was quoted as saying: "What can we do to raise the price of them doing this? There's a definite urge – don't you have it? – to say, 'The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.' What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation – further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they're from the Middle East or from Pakistan... Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children...It's a huge dereliction on their part".[61]

posted by Fizz at 4:54 PM on May 20, 2023 [8 favorites]

I really don't know Martin Amis or his work, but I came across his name after I read Hannibal. I really liked Silence of the Lambs and Red Dragon, and both Manhunter and Silence are excellent moves, so I was pretty horrified at how awful Hannibal was in comparison. So after reading it, naturally, I turned to the internet to see if other people also thought it was bad, so I could find comfort in reading some hot takes on that absolute dreck.

Anyway, this is what Martin Amis said about Hannibal, and I have never forgotten it:

“Harris has become a serial murderer of English sentences, and ‘Hannibal’ is a necropolis of prose.”

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posted by phunniemee at 4:54 PM on May 20, 2023 [13 favorites]

Yeah, we know about the Islamophobia… is what it is and sadly often comes with the territory
posted by Ahmad Khani at 5:01 PM on May 20, 2023

start getting tough with their children...It's a huge dereliction on their part

It's striking to me that it read almost ambiguously to me at first. I thought,

'here's a perceptive anti-capital guy who must see the futility of piling misery on a long trail of colonial misery right?...but who is he referring to as derelict? British politicians?'

So he was recommending that the way to STOP terrorism is to add sanctions until inter-generational trauma is even more the norm?

What a shame.
posted by Reasonably Everything Happens at 5:09 PM on May 20, 2023 [1 favorite]

The irony.

It’s really gone to the dogs, hasn’t it?
posted by Ahmad Khani at 5:22 PM on May 20, 2023 [2 favorites]

Amis was accused of Islamophobia following a 2006 interview with Ginny Dougary in which he said “there’s a definite urge … to say, ‘the Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order’”. Talking to the Guardian in 2020 he said he “certainly regretted having said what I said; already by mid-afternoon on that day I ceased to believe in what I said”.

For some reason, I always read his words in Chris Morris's voice. RIP.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 5:24 PM on May 20, 2023 [3 favorites]

"Novelists tend to go off at 70, and I'm in a funk about it, I've got myself into a real paranoid funk about it, how the talent dies before the body." --Martin Amis
posted by chavenet at 5:44 PM on May 20, 2023 [2 favorites]

Smoking might not be as cool as he and Hitchens made it look.
posted by Keith Talent at 5:48 PM on May 20, 2023 [9 favorites]

Isn’t it?
posted by Ahmad Khani at 5:56 PM on May 20, 2023

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I guess now we know the point where his time-reversed internal narrator starts their backwards story.
posted by rmd1023 at 5:57 PM on May 20, 2023 [2 favorites]

“Oh Christ, the exhaustion of not knowing anything. It's so tiring and hard on the nerves. It really takes it out of you, not knowing anything. You're given comedy and miss all the jokes. Every hour you get weaker. “
posted by Ahmad Khani at 6:11 PM on May 20, 2023 [1 favorite]

Perhaps of interest to moviegoers
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 6:15 PM on May 20, 2023 [1 favorite]

Speaking of Chris Morris, his 2007 column about Martin Amis is just devastating.

Now Amis should be allowed to wonder aloud about anything. He can suggest Muslims should 'experience painful discrimination until they get tough with their children' if he likes. Thought experiments are fine. But if he bundles his thoughts on Islam together and iterates them one after the other as he did when I saw him, he displays not unguarded musing but the forging of an incoherent creed of hate. It goes roughly like this: 9/11 was horrific, its driving ideology was totalitarian, the totalitarians were Muslims, all Muslims follow a book they believe to be the immutable word of God, I don't believe that, therefore all Muslims are idiots, and basically bastards. Idiot bastards moping around the Middle East in a paranoid funk just cos they lost their empire, and what a rubbish empire it was, too, by the way. Now, what is your balanced view of these primitive wife-beating idiotic bastards?

Like Hamza, Amis could only make his nonsense stand up with mock erudition, vitriol and decontextualised quotes from the Koran. To risk a familiar example, it won't do for Amis (or Hamza) to state flatly that the Koran exhorts Muslims to kill Jews without even asking whether this means all Jews or some particular group of Jews with whom the Muslims were fighting in the seventh century, or indeed, whether there are other verses that modify the message by deploring killing of any kind, or describing how 'people of the book [Christians and Jews] shall have nothing to fear or regret'.

I claim no great knowledge on this subject - level-three SATs perhaps - but Amis couldn't pass the test for morning playgroup. If my Shetland pony looks like a high-horse it's only because Amis is trotting round the paddock on a chihuahua.

posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 6:36 PM on May 20, 2023 [30 favorites]

A merciless author for a hopeless age.

Or… a hopeless author for a merciless age.
posted by GenjiandProust at 6:38 PM on May 20, 2023 [5 favorites]

i was wildly into amis, devouring Money and London Fields and Time’s Arrow as a teenager, but his anti islam rhetoric in later years has made me pause before revisiting them. now that’s he’s gone however i want to give the books another chance
posted by dis_integration at 6:41 PM on May 20, 2023 [2 favorites]

He was a misogynist, and I never thought it was funny or acceptable. His dad, Kingsley Amis, was, too, but had the excuse of being born in 1922. I read some of his early work, but he always seemed mean.

I can't bear to re-read Kingsley Amis' Lucky Jim, in case it's not as hilarious as I remember it.
posted by theora55 at 6:51 PM on May 20, 2023 [8 favorites]

I'll agree that what I read from him never struck me as funny or any variation or synonym of humor. I think that's what never connected with me.

Mean, that's what he came of as. Exactly.
posted by djseafood at 7:00 PM on May 20, 2023 [3 favorites]

London Fields was one book when I read it as a teenager, a different book when I reread it while living in North London, and it changed again when I reread it at the same age as the characters.
posted by betweenthebars at 7:50 PM on May 20, 2023 [3 favorites]

An authority on Space Invaders.
posted by Phanx at 8:13 PM on May 20, 2023 [5 favorites]

Yeah, I had his Invasion of the Space Invaders when I was a kid. No idea who he was at the time
posted by scruss at 8:38 PM on May 20, 2023

I love London Fields. I've read it multiple times. I also enjoyed The Rachel Papers and Time's Arrow.

They finally made a London Fields movie and apparently it's shite.
posted by kirkaracha at 10:09 PM on May 20, 2023 [2 favorites]

I did a course where his space invaders book was on the required reading list. Would recommend any such course to others.
posted by rongorongo at 1:07 AM on May 21, 2023

Maybe not the nicest person but one of the greats whose work will endure.
posted by night_train at 2:49 AM on May 21, 2023 [3 favorites]

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posted by thivaia at 4:44 AM on May 21, 2023

I *might* have read a Martin Amis novel back in the early 2000s, but I had a couple of friends who were Very Into Amis, and it quickly grew tiresome.

That being said, his short story "The Janitor on Mars" was a hoot!
posted by JohnFromGR at 5:13 AM on May 21, 2023 [1 favorite]

“plots really matter only in thrillers”,

Plots are difficult.

He was, like Vidal, a better essayist than novelist.

He was also too much in the orbit of his literary heroes.

To my mind, at least.
posted by BWA at 6:40 AM on May 21, 2023 [2 favorites]

That being said, his short story "The Janitor on Mars" was a hoot!

Yes, I liked the Janitor on Mars. And also Career Move, where poets are treated like rock stars while writers of trashy screenplays are struggling artists.

I basically idolised Amis when I was a teenager so I am a little saddened by his death, though I stopped being a fan some time ago. I like his examinations of failure and status-envy, i.e. Success, and The Information. But I re-read London Fields and The Rachel Papers recently and they left very little impression on me, apart from the misogyny of the latter, if I'm remembering correctly. This is interesting from The Times (paywalled), which caveats its description of the book as a masterpiece with the following:

Is The Rachel Papers misogynist? Yes, it has a visceral contempt for women...
No man would write this book today, at least not for publication. Even at the time, Amis’s sneery references to the working class, the lower-middle class, Pakistanis and “negroes” must have transmitted alarm signals... I recall my mother’s verdict on The Rachel Papers: the exceptional debut of a brilliant but vile young man. But wasn’t its real target Charles, I protested. Was he not a supremely satirical invention? Were she alive today, she’d quote Inside Story back to me: “Novels produced by people in their early twenties are more or less bound to be loosely autobiographical.” Oh dear.

I'm not sure my own youthful disdain for working-class people wasn't a result of reading Amis. In London Fields he has working-class character Keith Talent describing a football game in the style of a clichéd newspaper match report and says "that's just how he saw it", as if the character had no internal thought-processes of his own. There's no way this is a genuine observation, it's clearly just a contemptuous fantasy imagined by Amis. He also makes clear his opinion by having Talent's infant child going backwards when it first learns to crawl, and the simplistic way Talent's thoughts are described.

Still, I suppose my affection for Amis, irrational or not, hasn't been completely expunged. I found another interesting quote in this Guardian article about his friendship with Christopher Hitchens:

There was no professional envy between Amis and Hitch, but there was, on Amis’s part, emotional jealousy. Amis recalls the painful time that Hitchens went off with a new BFF, Alexander Cockburn... Amis was as crushed as if he’d been stood up by a date. “I wouldn’t deny for a second that physical attraction is a part of male friendships..." [Amis said].

On another note, this would seem to be a good time to seek out Saturn 3. RIP Martin.
posted by mokey at 7:21 AM on May 21, 2023 [5 favorites]

I found another interesting quote in this Guardian article about his friendship with Christopher Hitchens

Or, as Variety calls him, "his best friend, the writer Christopher Hutchins."
posted by BWA at 10:57 AM on May 21, 2023 [2 favorites]

For me it's a huge loss. Amis was the writer who turned me into a reader and helped me understand the world of unreliable narrators, which blew me away.

I devoured everything he wrote and other than PJ O'Rourke (another smoker taken too soon) was the only author I went to see in person. He acknowledged his books were difficult reads and seemed genuinely pleased to meet fans. I recall him responding to an audience question about his personal favorites by saying he was hopelessly homosexual and had many literary love affairs with British men.

Just sad, I guess. I tried to get others to fan out as I did, but was never successful.
posted by yes I said yes I will Yes at 11:30 AM on May 21, 2023 [5 favorites]

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posted by Lynsey at 12:30 PM on May 21, 2023

so I’ve never read any of his novels, but I’ve just read what he said should happen to people who look like me and, um, am learning a lot about what the people who comment here actually value.
posted by rishabguha at 3:37 PM on May 21, 2023 [7 favorites]

• Shame! He was an excellent writer!
posted by Katjusa Roquette at 3:46 PM on May 21, 2023

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posted by detachd at 6:03 PM on May 21, 2023

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posted by riruro at 6:04 PM on May 21, 2023

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posted by Omon Ra at 6:27 PM on May 21, 2023

Darts, Keith. Darts. 🎯
posted by Dr. Wu at 6:48 PM on May 21, 2023 [4 favorites]

He was something the US doesn’t have: someone who is both a bigot of the highest order, and talented.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 4:47 AM on May 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

As has been said upthread, this feels like a 'moment'... and yet, I have not read any of his novels. When he started spouting off all that Islamophobic stuff it really put me off ever picking up anything by him and I never have since.
posted by unicorn chaser at 5:25 AM on May 22, 2023

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posted by adekllny at 7:23 AM on May 22, 2023

In The Moronic Inferno he has this bit about Gore Vidal that has stayed with me (although, looking it up, I have been misquoting it for years): "The books are too long. Life is too short." I think I feel the same way about revisiting Amis' work. As much as I loved the books for a while, once you know someone has fallen for that ignorant chest-beating, the big masculine clash of civilizations nonsense, We Must Now Show Ourselves To Be Tough Guys, it's hard to ever read them the same. I tried a few pages of Yellow Dog and just couldn't, and I don't know if the writing was weaker, or if the reading was just tainted by knowledge, but just now I looked up on my shelves and see it isn't there, I must have gotten rid of it after trying. In a way it's really not fair. I think about how much I loved The Information, and the idea that that book is now behind a closed door, feels outrageous and wrong.
posted by mittens at 7:28 AM on May 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

I had completely forgotten the Islamophobic stuff to be honest. I remember it being pretty embarrassing at the time, and chalked it down to how 9-11 made fools of even smart people. I can understand if that was your only encounter, why you wouldn’t be interested in seeking out more.

I have not forgotten Money, however, which has stayed seared in my mind since I read it 25 years ago. One of the truly great novels (for me, at that moment in time). I don’t know if it still stands up, I’d be surprised if it didn’t.

I’ve read everything he’d written up to and including Night Train, after that I read nothing (apart from House of Meetings). I’ll try and read Inside Story though I expect it’ll hit hard. Whatever his views, whatever his occasional indifferent/crass/offensive late work, he had a voice that defined at least part of a generation, and now it’s stilled.
posted by Hartster at 9:16 AM on May 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

"What we eventually run up against are the forces of humourlessness, and let me assure you that the humourless as a bunch don't just not know what's funny, they don't know what's serious. They have no common sense, either, and shouldn't be trusted with anything."

.
posted by HandfulOfDust at 11:06 AM on May 22, 2023 [3 favorites]

Amis walked back the islamophobia later on:

"I was not "advocating" anything. I was conversationally describing an urge - an urge that soon wore off. And I hereby declare that "harassing the Muslim community in Britain" would be neither moral nor efficacious."

"Well, there was an unpleasant flurry [at that time], and I certainly regretted having said what I said; already by mid-afternoon on that day I ceased to believe in what I said. Collective punishment is obviously ruled out by definition – it was the sort of thing you say towards the end of a long interview without really having time to clear it with yourself. But that never felt like a great convulsion in my life. One death threat and a lot of chat. It wasn’t much of a cancellation".

I found Amis' essay on Philip Larkin, "Don Juan in Hull" (1993), regarding the posthumous review of complicated literary figures, quite interesting, as a way to ponder the issue.
posted by Omon Ra at 12:46 PM on May 22, 2023 [3 favorites]

I know that I read a Martin Amis book in college for a contemporary British literature class, but I honestly can't remember which one. I think it must have been Time's Arrow based on the time period, but I feel certain that I would have remembered reading a reverse-chronology novel about a doctor during the Holocaust, and I can't remember a single detail about the book itself except that I must not have cared for it (or perhaps that I didn't get very far into it). What I do remember is that the professor in that class was more interested in discussing his friendships with contemporary British authors, including Amis, than their work, most of the class time was dedicated to his reminiscences of their encounters, and that he threatened to fail me because I was insufficiently in rapt attendance for this unpublished memoir. I don't know if that's a fair reflection of Amis and his ilk's general posture, but it definitely left an impression on me about the whole set.
posted by Errant at 2:04 PM on May 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

My guess would be that your impression is entirely valid, TBH.
posted by Artw at 3:55 PM on May 22, 2023

The NYT obit.
posted by theora55 at 4:43 PM on May 22, 2023