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.
