Profile of Martin Amis on Famous Like Me

Martin Amis (born August 25, 1949) is a British novelist. He is the author of some of Britain's best-known modern literature, particularly Money (1986) and London Fields (1989), and the creator of several of fiction's most memorable characters since Charles Dickens.

Influenced by Saul Bellow, Vladimir Nabokov, and James Joyce, as well as by his father Sir Kingsley Amis, he has inspired a generation of writers with his distinctive style, including Zadie Smith. The Guardian writes that "[a]ll his critics have noted what Kingsley Amis complained of as a 'terrible compulsive vividness in his style ... that constant demonstrating of his command of English'; and it's true that the Amis-ness of Amis will be recognisable in any piece before he reaches his first full stop."

Amis's raw material is what he sees as the absurdity of the 'postmodern' condition and the excesses of late-capitalist Western society with its grotesque caricatures. He is thus sometimes portrayed as the undisputed master of what the New York Times interprets as "the new unpleasantness."

Early life

Amis's paternal grandfather was a mustard clerk from Clapham, and his maternal grandfather a shoe millionaire. Both of his parents were twice divorced, divorcing each other when he was 12, and for a time, his father lived as a lodger with Amis's mother, Hilly, and her third husband. "Something out of early Updike, 'Couples' flirtations and a fair amount of drinking," he told the New York Times. "They were all 'at it'. "

Born in Cardiff, South Wales, he was the middle of three children, with an older brother, Philip, and a younger sister, Sally. He attended around 14 different schools during the 1950s and 60's, because of his father's success with his novel Lucky Jim, which involved overseas travel, including a year spent at Princeton, New Jersey, which was Amis's introduction to the United States.

He read comic books until his stepmother, the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, introduced him to Jane Austen, a writer he often names as his earliest influence. Despite teenage years spent in flowerly shirts and movement between several schools including Westminster School, he managed to graduate from Exeter College, Oxford with a first-class honours degree.

After Oxford, he found an entry-level job at The Times Literary Supplement, became literary editor of The New Statesman at the age of 27, and then a feature writer for The Observer.

Early writing

According to Martin, Kingsley Amis famously showed no interest in his son's work. "I can point out the exact place where he stopped and sent [Money] twirling through the air; that's where the character named Martin Amis comes in. 'Breaking the rules, buggering about with the reader, drawing attention to himself,' Kingsley complained.

His first novel The Rachel Papers won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1974. The most traditional of his novels, made into a somewhat unsuccessful film, it tells the story of a bright, egotistical teenager, which Amis acknowledges as autographical, and his relationship with the eponymous girlfriend in the year before going to university.

Dead Babies, more flippant in tone, has a typically Sixties plot, with a house full of characters who abuse various substances and are eventually massacred by a psychopath. A number of Amis's characteristics show up here for the first time: mordant black humour, obsession with the zeitgeist, authorial intervention, a character subjected to sadistically humorous misfortunes and humiliations, and a defiant casualness ("my attitude has been, I don't know much about science, but I know what I like"). A film adaptation was made in 2000 which was also unsuccessful.

Later career

His best-known novels, and the ones most respected by critics, are Money, London Fields, and Time's Arrow. Time's Arrow, the autobiography of a doctor who helped torture Jews during the Holocaust, which was shortlisted for the 1991 Booker Prize, drew notice both for its unusual technique — time runs backwards during the entire novel — as well as for its topic.

The unparalleled size of the advance demanded and obtained by Amis for The Information attracted what Amis described as "an Eisteddfod of hostility" from writers and critics after he left his agent of many years, Pat Kavanagh, in order to be represented by Andrew "The Jackal" Wylie. Kavanagh is married to Julian Barnes, with whom Amis had been friends for many years, but the incident caused a rift that is generally regarded to be the inspiration for The Information which features two rival authors. He has written a memoir, largely about his relationship with his famous author father, called Experience. In 2002, Amis published Koba the Dread, a book about the crimes of Stalinism and the intellectual left. The book provoked a literary controversy for his supposedly naïve and dilettante approach to the material, and for its attack on his longtime friend Christopher Hitchens, who rebuked his charges in a stinging review in The Atlantic.

In 2003, Yellow Dog was thoroughly denounced by Tibor Fischer, generating further hubbub in the media: "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". Whilst the book did not sell as well as expected, it did receive decent acclaim in the literary press.

In his autobiography, Experience, he writes movingly of being reunited with a long-lost daughter - the result of an affair in the 1970s. He did not see his daughter until she was 19.

One of his cousins, 21 year-old Lucy Partington, was a victim of Fred West.

Martin Amis has released a collection of his short stories, under the title Heavy Water, and a collection of journalism entitled The War Against Cliche.

He lives and writes in London and Uruguay and is married, for the second time, to the writer, Isabel Fonseca.

Bibliography

Novels

• The Rachel Papers (1973)
• Dead Babies (1975)
• Success (1978)
• Other People (1981)
• Money: A Suicide Note (1984)
• London Fields (1989)
• Time's Arrow: Or the Nature of the Offense (1991)
• The Information (1995)
• Night Train (1997) — (read the first chapter at the New York Times).
• Yellow Dog (2003)

Collections

• Einstein's Monsters (1987)
• Visiting Mrs Nabokov: And Other Excursions (1993)
• Two Stories (1994)
• God's Dice (1995)
• Heavy Water: And Other Stories (1998)
• State of England: And Other Stories (1998)
• Amis Omnibus (omnibus) (1999)
• The Fiction of Martin Amis (2000)
• Vintage Amis (2004)

Non fiction

• Invasion of the Space Invaders (1982)
• The Moronic Inferno: And Other Visits to America (1986)
• Experience (2000)
• The War Against Cliche: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (2001)
• Martin Amis, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million, Hyperion (2002), hardcover, 306 pages, ISBN 0786868767 (About Joseph Stalin and Russian History)

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