From: stephenjones
Category: Amis
Date: 6/25/99
Time: 7:30:11 AM
Remote Name: 130.159.248.35
[Another old post this time I've got the guys name right though!]
THE OBSERVER REVIEW 23 MAY 1999
Heavy Water and Other Stories
Martin Amis
Martin Amis's style is so coolly and distinctively his own that, until the advent of the new confessionalism, it was imitated for more than a decade by every male writer below the age of 40. Now, of course, post-Hornby, ironic hyperbole is no longer the thing and it's only the defiantly postmodern Amis who impersonates Amis. This collection of short stories reminds us of the extravagant possibilities its author has consistently shaped in language
It also reaffirms an acute intelligence that, of late, has looked unfocused in novel form. The last book, "Night Train", was little more than an expanded short story, and perhaps this is the medium in which Amis is most at home (the journalism collections, I'd argue, prove otherwise).
Here, he gets to work out his formal preoccupations - the brilliant inversions in "Career Move" and "Straight Fiction", in which the cultural roles of poets an screenwriters, heterosexuals and homosexuals are respectively swapped; the phonetic biography of "What Happened to Me on My Holiday" - as well as explore his intellectual abstractions in concentrated detail.
There are two original stories - "The Coincidence of the Arts" and "The Janitor on Mars" - and the other seven were written for various publications between 1976 and 1997. The difference between the writing of the seventies, in which his prose is already precociously Amisian, and the mature stuff is largely one of subject matter.
You sense that Amis, for all his insatiable comic appetites, is no longer interested in the world. He has other things on his mind, like space, time, infinity, the universe. The low shies and bleeding suns of the apocalyptic, post-nuclear writer are conspicuously visible. If the weather report has been looking worryingly unsettled since "Einstein's Monsters", the long term forecast in the "Janitor on Mars" is terminally bleak.
The good news is that characteristically, there are sentences in these stories that nobody else could write. And when they get together in any numbers the effect is incomparably exhilarating.
ANDREW ANTHONY