From: I. Zelnik
Category: Amis
Date: 8/26/99
Time: 7:28:25 PM
Remote Name: 129.219.247.97
*BY HIS IDOLS SHALL YE KNOW HIM* / BY IAN BELL / [REVIEW OF *VISITING MRS. NABOKOV*. FROM *THE HERALD* OF GLASGOW. OCTOBER 9, 1993.]
When Martin Amis mounted an ill-tempered attack on Andrew Motion's Larkin biography in *The New Yorker* recently, not a few people spotted a curious phenomenon: the son was fast becoming his father. Here was all the magisterial snottiness of Kingers, the carapace of condescension, and the virulence of one accustomed to taking just about everything personally. Weird.
That Motion's book did not deserve or justify the assault was neither here nor there. The younger Amis was not supposed to be this way. He was supposed to be slick, cool, vaguely left-wing, the godfather of the blank generation of English novelists---not a dyspeptic buffer tucking into the entrails of opponents as though they were steak and kidney pud.
The piece was revealing, for it showed Martin Amis to be the quintessential product of the eighties, that profoundly conservative decade. The veneer fell away. Beneath the vaseline-smooth glibness of prose regarded (and regarding itself) as absolutely the latest thing, there lay a true reactionary. The radicalism---all that fretting about nukes---and the glossy spreads in the men's magazines (by Amis or, better still, about him) seemed like cool contrivance. The writer of the apologia for Larkin had acquired dad's intellectual paunch.
So what? Well, Martin Amis continues to be influential, even if his influence is malign. Watch Will Self at work, or better still try reading his books: Amis cloned, Amis replicated---and hyped in precisely the style that made Amis what he is. To realise how bad things have become you need know only that Self was being announced as a leading young British novelist even before he had actually published a novel. Amis wrote the books first, at least, but that hardly matters: Self has the moves down pat; the fiction will take care of itself.
As a brand leader, Amis has certain responsibilities, and this volume must be regarded as fulfilling one of them. The great thing about collections of warmed-over journalism is that you get paid twice, once by the press and once by the publisher. Otherwise such books rarely justify their existence. If, however, you need to keep yourself in the public eye without much extra effort, they are ideal.
Amis does not do journalism, of course, he does essays. That is the difference between an artist and a hack, it seems. Hackneyed feature ideas---the Cannes film festival, the Frankfurt book fair, a film set, a darts championship---are raised to the level of art, one understands, when a novelist's eyes and ears are brought to bear on them.
It isn't true, of course. A bit about a freebie to St Lucia will remain a bit about a freebie to St Lucia even if Franz Kafka is providing the copy. Besides, putting Amis into environments with which, on the basis of his books, he is supposed to feel comfortable---snooker, cinema, poker, pop music---is precisely the wrong thing to do. To stretch him and surprise us it would be necessary to require him to write about something with which he was uncomfortable.
Naive, of course. Presumably magazines are honoured if Amis allows them to pay him to write about playing poker with his mates, or snooker with his close chum Julian Barnes. It must mean everything that everyone on the set of *Robocop 2* had read his novels. Who said "cutting edge"?
Some of this stuff is shameless, though. The famous Madonna non-interview is here, as is the famous Amis excuse for filing a piece most of us would have fought to forget rather than allowed to be reprinted. Having summoned the writer all the way to America, the singer then gave Amis the royal run-around and refused to see him. His explanation? A rumour that he was "too famous".
Famous afterwards, certainly. It is hard now to say who was more ridiculous: Amis or *The Observer*, the latter for allowing itself to become part of the hype for Madonna's *Sex* book (and paying 15,000 pounds for its one-night stand) or Amis for lending his "fame" to the project. Suffice it to say that the lady, no fool, got the snaps of her ivory butt in *The Observer* and her interview in *The Sunday Times*. Mercifully, Andrew Neil's piece was even worse than the one that lurks here.
*Visiting Mrs Nabokov* has neither shape nor sense. We flit (a word Amis would never use) from The Rolling Stones to John Updike, from the 1988 Republican convention to V.S. Pritchett. The core of the book ought to be the Great Writers, but again there are problems.
The first is that Amis writes as though he were the peer of Burgess, Updike, Ballard, and Greene. Not true, and no amount of reflected lustre will make it so.
We have long known that Amis worships Bellow and Nabokov, to name two, but an excess of devotion does not make you, in turn, an object of devotion. Hanging out with the big boys does not make you a big boy. Only books do that. After the risible *London Fields* and the---how shall we put this?---less than wholly original *Time's Arrow*, the claims of Amis are well below suspicion.
The second problem is that these literary heroes serve only to confirm that Amis is a deeply conservative sort of bloke. By his idols shall ye know him, and this list is a real giveaway. These are the people Amis wants to be: Grand Old Men of Letters whose contributions to the art of the novel were made years ago. At least, however, they made contributions.
In the course of his Updike piece Amis mentions "fancy journalism" as one of the "enemies of promise". Deeply ironic, that, though it is hard to imagine that he was forced at gun-point to the word processor after being paid to attend the Virginia Slims tennis tournament. He might also have added that you should only promise what you can deliver.