From: Mr. Blackwell
Category: Amis
Date: 7/6/99
Time: 8:57:43 PM
Remote Name: 129.219.247.97
http://www.mrblackwell.com/list/1998.htm Byte me!
[Poster's note: I found the following review of *Heavy Water* in Lexis-Nexis. It was written by Donald Colin. And it appeared in *The Daily Yomiuri* of Tokyo. From June 20, 1999. I swear I'm not making this up.]
Benefit-of-the-doubt time has long since run out for Martin Amis, who, some time after his encapsulation of 80's excess, *Money*, careered off the rails of fictional credibility. Somehow he has stayed fashionable, but artistically, it has been downhill all the way. Amis's experiments have been increasingly pointless journeys into a world of game-playing and private jokery.
This is the conclusion forced by *Heavy Water*, his first collection of short stories, spanning the years 1976-1998. They are all awkward beasts, and some of them (*The Janitor on Mars*, *Let Me Count the Times*) virtually unreadable. Amis's stories tend to be one-joke affairs that outgrow their entertainment value after about two pages. Sometimes it's the same joke---*Career Move* (1992), for example, imagines a world where the poets are the writerly elite and the screenplay writers the dregs. In *Straight Fiction* (1995), it is the homosexuals who are the normal people, and the heteros who are considered 'queer'. The conclusion has to be that he is a writer who misses the point of fiction, which should involve giving independent life to a story, not doodling away aimlessly with cardboard characters, highbrow literary references and ill-digested quantum physics.