An excerpt from Alex Clark's feature on the novelist
Londoners love to hate
from the Sunday Times (London),
10 August, 2003, Features 15
When the novelist AS Byatt, piqued by what she saw as Martin Amis's excessive
demands for funds from his publisher, accused him of folie de grandeur, it was
hard to suppress a smile. She is, after all, the woman who criticised J.K.
Rowling for thinking small. She also claims to know George Eliot better than her own
daughters.
But her judgment of Amis's talents has caught on. Last week Tibor Fischer, whose
new novel Voyage to the End of the Room arrives in the bookshops on the
same day
as Amis's Yellow Dog, treated readers of The Daily Telegraph to
what might be
called a pre- publication review.
He didn't pussyfoot around. Yellow Dog, said Fischer, is terrible. Not
just
slightly disappointing, he continued, but a real stinker, as in
"not-knowing-where-to-look bad". He was worried, he confided, that someone would
look over his shoulder on the Tube and think he was enjoying himself. This is
not criticism by insinuation or thinly veiled sarcasm. It's a hatchet job.
In the dog days of summer these feuds provide a delicious fillip for
gossip-starved observers of the literary scene. And there could be no bigger
target than Amis, inheritor of the family shop and one-man rumour factory.
Poor Mart. You might think that after surviving the mockery of his extensive
dental work, or the traumatic appearance of a long-lost daughter, or the tabloid
vans parked outside his house when he jumped ship from one marriage to another,
or his fall-out with snooker-playing chum Julian Barnes when he jumped ship from
one agent to another (Barnes was the dumped agent's husband), he might have
thought he'd earned a little immunity. Then again, being an old hand at this
game, he might have realised that it doesn't quite work like that.
It didn't work like that, for example, when he published his memoir
Experience,
in which his anguished revelations about the death of his first cousin, Lucy
Partington, at the hands of Fred West, struck harsher critics as so much
unfounded vicarious suffering. What came next knocked it into a cocked hat.
Koba the Dread, Amis's meditation on Stalinism and its victims, drew
unwise
parallels between his baby daughter's night-time cries and the screams heard in
the gulag. It did not go down well. Amis himself was wounded and perplexed by
all the fuss. "It makes me realise how unpolitical I am," he remarked, which
made everyone else realise that he probably shouldn't have tried to write a book
about communism.
After that, a short comic novel must have seemed like a walk in the park, even
if it reputedly centres on a fictional king of England whose daughter is exposed
as a porn star, even if six years have elapsed since his last novel failed to
set the Thames on fire, and even if it seems at least plausible that Amis the
novelist peaked in 1984 with Money.
. . .
One reckons without the bile of fellow novelists
at one's peril. Who can forget, after all, the much publicised spat between Paul
Theroux and his former mucker V.S.
Naipaul? It cooked for a long time, but Theroux
eventually got even in a review of a Naipaul novel, which began "even though I
have suggested that personally Naipaul is a sourpuss, a cheapskate and a blamer,
I have the highest regard for his work."
Really?
It is the novelists of Fischer's salt who are especially dangerous; those who
feel that they were due just a few of the column inches enjoyed by Amis over the
years, or a bit of that monster advance, or maybe even just a couple of the
dates with glamorous women. They, too, might have wanted that recent outing to
play celebrity poker in Cardiff with the likes of Teddy Sheringham or to be
invited to share their newfound love of Pilates with the public at large.
Perversely, it is probably Amis's indifference to the envy of his peers that has
largely done for him. From the start he has signalled that his mind is on higher
things -- such as, for example, joining that group of
uber-writers, mostly
American and headed by Saul Bellow, who see themselves more as public moralists
than plain, unvarnished storytellers. This goes down like a lead parachute with
those whose living is made by doing exactly that.
And it doesn't help that Amis is one of the few genuine celebrities that the
British literary establishment has, his allure enhanced by the brazen
unshininess of those around him.
Writers are a dull bunch usually; that's why Will Self's rather mild narcotic
antics earned him the enfant terrible status and why the Amis road show - the
closest thing to rock'n'roll that the domestic novel will ever have - will go on
and on. Fischer's outburst probably hasn't done him much harm, and may have done
him some good with the publicity, but one rather gets the feeling that he's a
flea on an elephant's backside.
