[Site manager's note: The
Information, Night Train, Heavy Water, Experience, The War Against
Cliché, and Koba the Dread have
generated so many online reviews that I have created separate pages for these
novels; click the appropriate navigation button at right for access. Below are
listed the available online reviews of the other books].
New York Times reviews:
(registration and fee required):
 | The
Rachel Papers
''Just 20 years after 'Lucky Jim,' Kingsley Amis's famously funny novel about
life at a minor British university, his 24-year-old son Martin has made so
bold as to produce a novel himself; though--to say it right off--not really
one to give a novelist father the sweats.'' [Review by Grace Glueck, 26 May
1974]. |
 | Dead
Babies
''Why does 'Dead Babies'--with all its elegant verbal play, its nightmarish
scenes, and its sexual savagery--finally fail to stir much interest? Very
simply for the good old reason that there's never any tension in the story.
The babies are already dead at the beginning, and there's nothing for them to
get but deader.'' [Review by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt,16 January 1976]. |
 | Other
People
''I do not appreciate an obscure novel. The only clear signal such a book
transmits to me is that a writer was either too lazy or too cowardly to reveal
completely his mind or his heart. To me obscurity presumes the need for an
academic middleman, an eager translator who will explain all to the sluggard
reader and thereby become a collaborator in the act of creation.'' [Review by
Evan Hunter, 26 July 1981]. |
 | Money:
A Suicide Note
''The plot of 'Money' is in a basic, grand tradition. A guy gets totaled.
Maybe he survives - in comedy - but he's spectacularly brought down. What
makes this book special and important is that it revitalizes its tradition.
Its trans-Atlantic urban show-biz patter and smart literary patterns could
have been just a jaded fast-lane bummer, a depleting ride in John Self's
purple Fiasco -- 'a vintage-style coupe with oodles of dash and heft and
twang.' But instead the book's dash and heft and twang serve a deeper
energy, a reimagined naivete that urgently asks a basic, grand question:
what on earth are the rest of us supposed to make of the spectacle of a
fellow human getting totaled?'' [Review by Veronica Geng, 24 March
1985]. |
 | Einstein's
Monsters
''A word about Mr. Amis's style: it's rough,
new-seeming, laconic, lower-class,insolent, careless. You do not have to
wear a three-piece suit to write about the nuclear world, Mr. Amis suggests,
nor must you carry a sign to protest it. Just put your brain into gear and
pay attention. By doing that, Mr. Amis has created stories that please at
least as much as they horrify.'' [Review by Carolyn See, 17 May 17
1987]. |
 | Success
'' 'Success' is, finally, a distasteful book, full of
loathing that the author seems not fully to have understood or drawn through
the crucible of art.'' [Review by Jay Parini, 6 September 1987]. |
 | London
Fields
''Is world in for a rosier future, or are we just kidding ourselves? Martin
Amis, unregenerate, is determined to send us plummeting into darkness. With
evangelical ardor, he sets his sixth novel, 'London Fields,' in the grimmest
of times. The approach of a global catastrophe he simply calls 'the Crisis'
provides the background for a bitter tragicomedy of life in a world going
noisily to hell.'' [Review by Bette Pesetsky, 4 March 1990]. |
 | Time's
Arrow Or, The Nature of the Offense
''With such shocking passages, Mr. Amis creates a devastatingly specific
portrait of the Nazis' warped mentality: only in a completely upside-down,
backward world, he suggests, are their actions comprehensible.
Unfortunately, the bulk of the novel seems like an extended setup for this
emotional payoff -- pages and pages of sophomoric humor laid as groundwork
for one huge philosophical point.'' [Review by Michiko Kakutani, 22
October 1991]. |
 | Visiting
Mrs. Nabokov: And Other Excursions
''The articles in Martin Amis's latest collection of essays have the range
and appealing ragbag variety of work done on assignment. Indeed, as he
writes in the introduction, the only thing that unites these pieces is
'getting out of the house.''' [Review by Francine Prose, 27 February 1994]. |
 | Koba the
Dread.
"Koba the Dread, the title of Martin Amis's latest book, refers
to Joseph Stalin; "the Twenty Million," to that monster's many
victims, who perished in his purges, in his gulag, in famines and in his
campaign of forced collectivization. The "Laughter" Mr. Amis
refers to is a literary construct — dealing with the absurdities
perpetrated by Stalin, and the need to forget those surreal horrors — and
therein lie many of the problems of this self-conscious and sometimes
self-indulgent volume." [Review by Michiko Kakutani, 26 June 2002]. |
NOTE: For easy access to these and other
pieces on Amis in the New York Times, go to the
"More on Martin Amis"
archive.

Other Reviews:
 | "Gothic Guesswork."
Review of The Rachel Papers by Karl Miller, The New York Review of Books
(18 July 1974). |
 | "Death
by Request." Christina Koning reviews London Fields for Books
Unlimited, the Guardian/Observer web site (21 September1989). |
Additional
Reviews Resource:
 | Click
here to explore the Electric Library hyperlinks to reviews of Amis's works (30-day
free access period). |
|
| |

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author of
Understanding Martin Amis, 2nd edition (2004).
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