Amis pere, S/D, C/D

When Kingsley is going at it with the verbal elegance he can't be beat. When he's sulking over one of his relationship problems it can be hilarious... or it can be unbearably one-note. When he's being as fair-minded as he can be he's edifying. And when one of his books is mislabeled as "angry-young-man"... well, it's business as usual in publishing.

To me, it was a bit dated and also wordy.

Now, Selected Shorts once read an actual letter from Amis to his wife about the father in law that had me in stitches, but I have to wonder if it was the writing or the skill of the actor reading...

As for Martin, I like his early, baggy novels best - Money is his best book for me. His funniest, warmest and the one where you can feel him stretch himself in his writing. Times Arrow seemed like a very dry technical exercise. The last few - with the exceptions of Experience and the book of criticism - have all been redundant and empty. I feel he has lost his subject as a writer of fiction. Give him himself or another artist to write about and he is brilliant, but make him imagine a story...then you may be in trouble.

That was a great thread, as I have said before.

(Maybe you confused me with some other streaker.)

Admittedly, this wouldn't be 'backing' someone by my lights. But I thought it was by yours.

That really was a good thread.

I have read "Ending Up," and did find it quite tender. That's a good way to put it, though I'dnever thought quite that word about Kingsley before.

Time's Arrow is very much not one of a kind, in that the whole idea was ripped off completely from Philip K. Dick's Counter-Clock World. The use of the Holocaust was an inspired addition, though.

Well then, my revised opinion on fils: stick to parading your assholism, Mr. Clever, it's your only trick that really works.

Skidmore says here that KA 'wrote beautifully'. I find that incredible.

I am reading The Old Devils. I wish here to draw attention to just one issue. KA, I believe, used to call women 'females'. OK - women are females. It's perhaps symptomatic, but it's not the most offensive word you could use. And if a character in one of his novels uses it, or thinks with it too, then OK - he's allowed a character who thinks like him, surely.

But in this novel it feels like *every* male character, or several of them at any rate, use this word for women, in thought and speech. Well, are they all of the same generation? Maybe that explains it? Not really, cos the son of one of them, aged about 30, also uses it - 'will there be any females at this party aged under 150?', etc.

That seems to me not good enough. It's not so much that the original term is offensive, but that the overuse of it suggests an incredibly slack, lazy, tired, desperate failure of characterization and language.

I think you're right. However, it is also true that his first (and best) book, 'Lucky Jim', is comic genius. And 'The Alteration' is a great alternative history novel.

He did write another old-buggers novel, 'Ending Up', which was rather darker and misanthropic, as opposed to misogynistic (from memory), which I remember being a lot better (and shorter) than 'The Old Devils'.

The Old Devils, like most of Amis, is patchy. All the same, I think there is enough in it that is good, even remarkably good, to justify its reputation as one of his better novels. I needed to reread it, some years after first reading and loathing it, to think so.

Pinefox I think the criticisms you make in the other thread are fair, at least up to a point. They've been identified to a greater or lesser extent as weaknesses even by people who like the novel.

The difficulty of distinguishing between similar characters, remembering who is married to who and so on, is a problem. All I can say in Amis's defence is that, with enough concentration the characters are, in fact, well enough differentiated. But he leaves the reader with too much work to do. (Anthony Powell mentioned somewhere that he needed to take notes and read the novel three times to work all this stuff out: but he still thought very highly of the novel).

Then there is the problem of style. At times it is prolix and meandering, barely connected lists of dependent clauses leading to the suspicion that the booze has taken a heavy toll. I've seen arguments put in its defence -- Amis's late style, a surprisingly Modernist development, the struggle to find precise expression for complex thoughts or feelings left unedited for good artistic reasons. (I've even seen comparisons made with Henry James, by someone who made this seem less ridiculous than I'd have thought possible.) I can swallow a modest amount of this - some of the more convoluted sentences improve on careful re-reading and so on: but there are passages that are just too clumsy to be defensible. Nevertheless, the ratio of the good to the clumsy is high, and a lot of the good stuff is superb.

The (I agree) striking similarity of dialogue is, I think, easier to defend. Amis is writing about a narrow social set who have spent their lives in one another's company in a provincial town. Its based on real people, and Amis was an insider. One of the things the novel is about is the extent to which these characters manufacture and cling to a semi-fake homogeneity. They pretend to almost identical views on politics, social issues, jazz, Wales, competing to outdo one another in displaying the approved orthodoxies of the sect: and like most such social subgroups they all speak in the same way. This may not be a perfect defence but it goes a long way.

As for "females": when I was at school and at university (in Scotland) it was perfectly normal to refer to women and girls as "females". The word was most frequently used by women who had gone to private, all-girl schools and perhaps originated there. No negative connotations were implied. At the time I assumed it was a fashion particular to my age group, but later I came across it elsewhere: for example in the novels of Muriel Spark - including "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie", set in the 30s, which suggests that Spark didn't think the habit was peculiar to her own generation. It isn't a big stretch for me to imagine it might be idiomatic among Amis's set in Swansea, or among their kids.

i want this. supposed to be fab. all his booze essays in one volume:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41%2BwKQeMesL._SS500_.jpg

introduction by christopher hitchens, though : /

i was expecting to have already posted to this thread saying how much i dislike amis pere, which is an opinion i have kind of recanted on, lately.

his son can still go blow goats though

his son is a hreat writer

great. sorry, i was blowing a goat and typing at the same time.

I used to think his son was a great writer--I got into him with London Fields, Money and The Information, when I was young and had writerly hopes myself... His newest one sounds like a load of old balls, though, and while House of Meetings was pretty good, Yellow Dog is a lot of crap to forgive. No longer obsessively buying everything he writes has also released me from the obligation of having to get his creepy-sounding middle-aged-man-waxing-enthusiastic-about-California's-porn-industry book.

his creepy-sounding middle-aged-man-waxing-enthusiastic-about-California's-porn-industry book.

title?

^ one of few subjects i would happily read amis minor on

article he wrote about porn a while back was kind of terrible admittedly

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41Q1HHJEPKL._SS500_.jpg

Well, that killed the conversation stone-dead.

the "text" is probably the article that appeared in talk magazine in the US. definitely not "waxing enthusiastic" about the porn industry. classic if only for the lead sentence "Pussies are bullshit." like Amis I was horrified by the abusive/degrading flavor of mainstream hetero porn these days, apparently it's all about facial cum shots and rough buttfucking. After reading Mart's article I ran this by a film critic friend of mine who "monitors" porno (haha) and he concurred: "oh yeah man ass is the new pussy."

well, yes, in 1996

FrankieMachine, I've only just seen your post about KA. On the stylistic question, I agree: there is indeed a comparison with James available. I think of HJ as a stylist, but he was also a meandering writer, not at all a stylist in the more compressed sense that Joyce perhaps made the C20's main idea of 'style'. And what HJ was doing - writing about thoughts and feelings and their nuances - was indeed what KA is often, perhaps clumsily, trying to do in that novel. But I think we agree that sometimes it's plain laziness or clumsiness.

i just read "one fat englishman" by the king, made me LOL several times. sometimes that's enough.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/apr/24/amis-hitchens-world?INTCMP=SRCH

The last two paragraphs are lovely.

it's nice that he gets to see what's in his obit before he dies, i guess

(guess I posted this to wrong thread - glad it wasn't in vain anyway!)

read I Want It Now, almost one of his very best.