Martin Amis

Martin Amis does look very good, though. In an awfully old-fashioned way. He's a Dead White Male bewildered to be alive.

He needs to go back to his roots.

all his novels are rubbish.

that said, two/three years ago i *loved* experience and then liked the war against cliche. i need to reread them in the hope they're rubbish; if not he remains an excellent journalist and a terrible novelist.

Take away Money, and they're almost the same. But TF's collection of short stories (What's it called? Don't Read This If You're Stupid?) is worse than anything MA's done. Including his collections of short stories, if you can believe that.

i can't usually even finish a SENTENCE by amis

Shit, you're in trouble. That explains everything. I love Martin Amis's sentences. That's his talent. No-one writes better sentences. He just can't put them in the right order to make a great book (apart from Money).

cz whenever i read a rave review it always quotes one of two lame things: a sentence the reviewer really likes which i think is k-lousy, or an insight into pop or politics which the reviewer thinks is amazing and i think is either trite or just wrong

(amis has always had a complete tin ear for pop culture as far as i can tell, and is — in certain quarters — raved abt by ppl whose ear is actually worse) (he also hasn't the faintest idea when it comes to politics but i'm not really bothered by that as neither have loads of ppl i like lots)

i have tried to start several of his books but not got far before i put them down in puzzlement, really: when's the good stuff start?

(rachel papers i got furthest with)

1) Martin is good, but not as good as Kingsley.
2) Martin's good enough to be somebody, but he wouldn't be who he is if he weren't Kingsley's son.
3) Given what a badass Kingsley was, however, it's astonishing how good Martin actually is.

Yeah, but there's never just the one thing to anything. To add to you: "he wouldn't be who he is if he weren't Kingsley's son and didn't write so well". Or: "he wouldn't be who he is if he weren't Kingsley's son and didn't seem so unbothered by the whole palaver". Or: "he wouldn't be who he is if he weren't Kingsley's son and didn't look so cool".

I dunno, in most cases, and specifically this one, it's less interesting to say, "he wouldn't be that if he weren't..." than it is to say, "he could be this if he were..."

I like 'im; I just like dad more, and like a select set of fathers and sons, I find it almost impossible to isolate the former from the latter, even in idle consideration.

That was exactly the feeling I got when reading the two M.A. novels I've read (London Fields and The Information).

I didn't like 'The Rachel Papers', the lead character was too much of a shithead and not nearly as clever as Amis probably thought.

I liked his justification for Primo Levi's suicide in afterword to Time's Arrow, but that's still not enough to make me want to read the rest of it.

i saw newsnight review - that guy from causalty should be on every week.

Tibor Fischer is v good, although as his novels progressed he showed worrying signs of disappearing up his own arse.

(everyone else: apologies for intrusive advert)

I was quite the Amis fan as a nipper. I think it's undeniable that his prosody has been one of the more vivid aspects of postwar Eng-lit . Nevertheless I often find myself wondering: wouldn't he have been better if he'd decided to become the missing link between late Larkin and early Peter Reading? He has a great lyric gift for disgust, and that's mostly what keeps his novels alive. It's just when he starts floundering with characterisation, plot, moral significance, etc that things go awry. Maybe if he'd been content with writing riffs rather than getting in the ring with Mr Bellow, we might be happier with his writing.

That said, 'Money's is still the best English novel of the 80s.

JtN is OTM re: Money. It's foul but brilliant. I liked the excerpt of Yellow Dog that was in last Saturday's Guardian. That said, I enjoyed Tom Paulin talking about the book on The Late Review much, much more.

I reread the first 150 recently and enjoyed it. Might watch the adaptation and push on tonight. I think you're right about those problems with the voice, but it doesn't bother me hugely - Self is clearly a bit of a bodge as a character, and acts as a place to jam in Amis how-it-is, hold-your-attention observation and description a lot of the time, linking the comic or strange set pieces. But Amis hasn't really ever found such a good outlet for his energy - splitting the oik and writerly sides, as in London Fields, leaves him stiff in places, silly in others.

Is there some clever meta-thing that accounts for Self's inconsistencies? I'm dumb about that kind of stuff, get really bored with the 'but don't you see - he was killed by *the text*' side of Amis.

I've had my eye on 'War Against Cliché' for a while - it looks sharp, but on the other hand I've bought many a review compilation and never read it. It's a genre where enjoyment never really matches anticipation in my experience.

Woof - I enjoyed your cyst story elsewhere, it deserved more attention.

Haha ty Ismael. I was content to leave it as a jolly pick-me-up anecdote on a darkening thread.

I've stopped reading review compilations more or less. Used to love them. Think maybe the internet has sated my appetite for opinions.

It's all true about the voice, but surely not a PROBLEM - if seen as a logical problem then the book collapses utterly (this character couldn't possibly write like that); it's just a CONCEIT which is utterly artificial - you have to take it or leave it.

I think it works once you accept this. But I also admit that the book is unappealing or flawed in other ways beside this (eg MA's problem with plot, narrative, motivation - another thing he blithely dispenses with).

(+ it's true, as said so often before, that MA's criticism is better than most of his fiction)

(ps / ie FrankieMachine - I agree with what you say as description, just think you need to ignore it as 'problem'. I don't really think it needs a very complex theoretical explanation either, though MA does hint at this - idea that the author in the text is writing the character - in ways that are not very good or satisfactory, maybe best ignored)

So saw a chunk of it last night but got restless - that problem of watching an adaptation of something you've read a wodge of recently, just sitting there thinking 'oh yeah, this bit'.

Impressions - Kartheiser dead on, but Frost is wrong - too matey-likeable maybe, none of that rushing panic and collusive confession that's in the novel-Self voice. Not getting self-hatred from him.

Big difference in feel for me comes from lack of money: there's no real surface density - not enough clutter, signage, streets, people, noise, passing chaos. We're sort of left with a Play for Today about John Self, which isn't really Money's draw.

War Against Cliche is fantastic - one of his three most enjoyable books imo (the others being Money and Experience). The perfect balance of erudition and zings. The essay on Ulysses and the slow evisceration of Thomas Harris's Hannibal are particularly magnificent.

Sticking it to Thomas Harris takes some nerve, true.

He doesn't stick it to Harris, to be fair, he sticks it specifically to Hannibal. If it were just another dud thriller Amis presumably wouldn't care - he's angry because Hannibal is so cynically bad when the earlier Lecter books were very good (at least for genre fiction - Amis's qualification, not mine).

HANNIBAL is a very odd book, maybe even a very bad one (tho' it's a bit rich the author of NIGHT TRAIN slagging other ppl's genre fiction), but i don't think it's cynical - almost the reverse, in fact - it's painfully personal and 'sincere'.

Lynskey is pretty plausible re 3 best books (though I like one or two others also - and if you're going to include WvsC then why not The Moronic Inferno, much of which is stunning?) - but wrong about the Ulysses essay, which is very arrogantly bad.

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/tv_and_radio/article7112173.ece

this is interesting

amis is quite right that the novel has nothing to do with thatcherism/reaganism

http://www.newstatesman.com/television/2010/05/money-self-amis-novel

Rachel Cook otm. Couldn't make it past 15 minutes, just terrible. The book is all about spiritual/stylistic excess - which makes that crummy post-Spaced acting school of bumbling Brit-bathos precisely wrong for the adaptation.

the music for money is totally wrong. it opens with funkadelic of all things. for a drama set in the 80s. and it has fucking gang of four in it. very odd. all very credible but totally ill chosen. its pretty stagey, which i dont actually mind, but nick frost is a bit too ricky gervaisy.

what with the royal wedding and the riots, 'money' was an eerily prescient glimpse of 2011

i just got the letters of saul bellow and there's a pic of marty and saul on the beach w their wives and i have to admit, MA looks p gd w his shirt off, quite dashing, so for the first time ever i understood why ppl rated him so

posted this on ilg but it could do with a wider audience

http://www.themillions.com/2012/02/the-arcades-project-martin-amis-guide-to-classic-video-games.html

http://storms.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8345157d269e2014e860c3554970d-800wi

http://storms.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8345157d269e2015390b00063970b-800wi

WHY DOES MOOMIN AMIS HAVE 4 EARS

is the first image meant to be anything in particular?

is the first image meant to be anything in particular?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diary_of_a_Wimpy_Kid

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/05/books/martin-amis-the-biography-by-richard-bradford.html?adxnnl=1&ref=books&adxnnlx=1355141126-TFNGSRzDfWcZ4sjk4C+pGA&_r=0

this review of the new Amis bio is cracking me up

Reading “Martin Amis: The Biography” is like watching a moose try to describe a leopard, using only its front hooves.

The problem, in part, is with Mr. Bradford’s prose. You’re only a few pages into “Martin Amis: The Biography” before you begin confronting sentences like this one, in which words come together as if to commit ritual mass suicide: “Becoming a full-time novelist has no predictable effect upon one’s psyche but it is not too absurd to contend that since we elect to spend much of our conscious existence filtering perception and reality through an oblique variant upon language, a good deal of what we routinely apprehend and recollect is touched by our stock in trade of conceits and distortions.”

The flaws, like the veins in a chunk of Stilton cheese, are pervasive. Mr. Bradford strains to make sometimes far-fetched links between Mr. Amis’s life and fiction. He quotes Mr. Amis poorly, quite a hard thing to do. He makes declarative sentences of the sort you consistently quarrel with in your head.

Martin Amis: The Biography

just listening to this hack talking about Ballard on R4. And there was the bit were he says he + Deborah Orr were around his gaff, the poor bastard.

i heard he was tin-eared

nothing but

could you imagine Martin Amis and Deborah Orr turning up at your house, though? Just to indulge you all night long cos your such a ledge!

Kazuo Ishiguro winning the nobel is very good, mainly because it will absolutely lacerate our boy here.

Is there some feud between them? Or is it just that Amis seems like someone who angles and expects himself to be the next Englishman to get the prize?

Latter I expect.

Or rather, I don't think he ever expects to win a nobel prize, but is likely to be incredibly envious of any of his boomer british writer d00d peers getting one.

The Nobel almost always seem to give a lot of literary scenes around the world their due -- I think this was the turn of the very boring London literary scene. So Amis will never get it now.

just listening to this hack talking about Ballard on R4. And there was the bit were he says he + Deborah Orr were around his gaff, the poor bastard.

― calzino, Thursday, 5 October 2017 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The advocacy of Ballard by Amis has always been amusing to say the least. What is the reason for it?

Almost willing to entertain the idea that Ballard is terrible because of this - or that at least there is something wrong.

This blog piece addresses some of the connections between Ballard and Amis Senior and Junior:

http://www.ballardian.com/gerund-hunting-amis-vs-ballard

I only ever read The atrocity Exhibition, decades ago. And only know Ballard through film adaptations. But next to Amis, even Toby Young might start to seem likeable. well actually fuck no to that.

I think Ballard is probably over-rated as a stylist but I haven't much wanted to re-read him for the last 20 years

and he comes across as a bit of a nob in interview, quite trenchant and do-you-see?

I wanted to add - I think ppl like Aldiss and Ballard, who were in some ways quite conventional, middle class men, were flattered that a 'respectable' literary author like Kingsley Amis was taking an interest in their work at a time when Science Fiction had almost no literary or social cachet in Britain.

amis wrote an essay in the early 80s where he tore into ballard but later -- for whatever reason -- reversed his opinion and became a stan

(lol i really only remember this bcz of the petty feuds it caused among minor nme hacks at the time) (none of them me)

I guess Ballard seems more obviously didactic to me than Aldiss or Moorcock, or else I feel like he's trying too hard with his dystopias so that they end up reminding me of Adam and Joe taking the piss out of Chris Morris

lol iirc the Adam and Joe take-off of Morris was literally about a Dead Baby(ies)

there's the Amis connection

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZ2KJtiNZ0U

could go either way.

Went to see Out Of Blue yesterday. Knew almost nothing going in - certainly didn't know it was based on an Amis book! - just felt like a noir.

It's a truly terrible film. The most basic pop science mainstays - we are made of stardust, Schroedinger's Cat, paralell universes - get introduced like they're cutting edge insights beyond the reach of mortals, characters vomit exposition at the protagonist like NPCs in a video game, the investigation relies heavily on said protagonist just walking around random places picking up objects (also very video game-y). The film's grasp of what True America is like makes Three Billboards seem like a Charles Portiss novel. At one point the protagonist says "The Eels, they're a cool band" and an Eels song starts playing on the soundtrack.

My question: is the Amis novel anywhere this pitiful? I'm guessing the Eels thing at least has to be a new addition, but that aside?

oh there's also a wealthy war hero father and the film truly expects us to feel surprise when it turns out he's dodgy

It’s the only Martin Amis book I’ve read (many years ago) and I didn’t hate it but it made no impression on me at all really, which is pretty much how I feel about the film. A lot of the more annoying things are the filmmakers’ additions I think - I was sure the schrödinger’s cat thing must have come from the novel, assuming it was less of a cliché when it was published, but I was talking to my friend (who has read the book but not seen the film) and he told me that doesn’t come up at all. I’m also pretty sure they made it more plotty (I don’t remember mike’s backstory being much of a thing in the book) and the clumsy references to various noir are new (the book is pastiche but not terribly done iirc).

Overall I was disappointed cause I really liked Morley’s previous film

characters vomit exposition at the protagonist like NPCs in a video game

This I think is from the novel, istr mike being a bit like Amis attempting an oedipa maas type character.