This novel is not as bad as I expected it to be. It’s bad, certainly; but not that bad. I’d say ‘it’s not as bad as Yellow Dog‘, but that would be redundant. Nothing could be as bad as Yellow Dog. Having Amis personally come to my house to administer a lava enema would hardly be as bad as that novel.
Old Martin Amis’s version of Young Martin Amis (here called ‘Keith Nearing’) spends a summer in 1970 in an Italian chateau (’chateau-a’? Italian was never my strong suit) with his girlfriend, the ordinary Lily, and their mutual friend the enormous-breasted Scheherazade, plus various other posh-nob comers and goers. Now, in the Amisdrome there are only two sorts of men: on the one hand the massive wankers, and on the other a much smaller selection of massive wankers whose massive wankerishness is restrained under a tinfoil-thin veneer of what an eighteenth-century writer would call ‘breeding’, but which Amis thinks of in terms of education, wit, courtesy and so on. Keith Nearing is one of the latter. And actually, to qualify myself; Amis also includes a male character called Whittaker who’s not a massive wanker at all, although that’s because he is gay, do you see? Amis perhaps thinks this is a signal of his Right-On-ness. In fact I suspect it speaks to a blimpish belief that gays are not proper men, don’t you know. But never mind that for a moment.
I haven't read Amis's latest work, but Roberts is usually spot-on, and his assessment of Kingsley's boy's recent output is deadly accurate. As a whole, the review is one of the best recent takedowns of Amis (I'd rank it with Chris Morris's piece a few years ago in The Guardian ).
Personally, I have a sort of sentimental attachment to Amis, mostly fueled by my affection for Money, which I read at a tender age when my Anglophilia was in full bloom. Unlike some of his fellow enfants terribles of the 80s on both sides of the Atlantic (Will Self, Bret Easton Ellis, Jay McInerney) Amis never grew as a writer and nor did he ever develop the knack for deliberate self-parody and taking the piss out of himself by mocking his own position as an aging literary brat packer.
In the words of Damon Albarn, "The Likely Lads are pickin' up the uglies."
I don't think I share your admiration for Easton Ellis's ability to age gracefully. Maybe it's a cultural thing, because as a Brit I see Amis as more successful at "taking the piss" as you put it than Ellis and certainly more successful than the notoriously humourless McInerney.
ReplyDeleteJonathan--I'm willing to go so far as to say that, because I pay more attention to Ellis's press clippings I'm more likely to understand the nuances of his takes on his own personal excesses and the literary media's reaction (obsession, once upon a time) with them. That said, even though Ellis's best work was certainly done in his 20s, he's still able to juxtapose an obnoxious authorial persona with genuinely moving prose. By way of disclosure, that last long, long paragraph in Lunar Park can still choke me up if it sneaks up on me in the right set and setting. Amis, on the other hand, has done little but irritate me since sometime about halfway through Night Train.
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