Here it is, all 500 pages, a book containing the essays and reviews written between the years 1971 and 2000 by the inimitable Martin Amis. Thus we have the literary artist as a younger man - in those years Martin was between the ages of 21 and 50.
Oh, the writers and subjects you will meet. There's all here, the dads (and some of the moms), that is, the established writers of the previous generation and beyond - V.S. Pritchett, Brian Aldiss, John Fowes, Philip Larkin, Malcolm Lowry, Gore Vidal and many more. Sidebar: other than a few passing references, there is absolutely no mention of Kingsley Amis.
Since Martin is all about colorful style and penetrating insight, I would like to share my enthusiasm for this book by linking my comments to direct quotes. I recognize my choices are a bit eclectic but, hey, I'm the one writing the review here.
The Philosopher's Pupil by Iris Murdoch
"Miss Murdoch's style was never elegant, but is was crisp and precise, capable of preserving her macabre and often beautiful perceptions. . . . Miss Murdoch believes in her characters - the good, the bad, the ugly - and it is a belief ignited by love. That love is palpable, inordinate, scarily intense. It is far too strong a force to tolerate the thwarting intercession of art." ---------- Methinks Martin has a bit of irony going here when he casts an author's love for her characters in opposition to the steely demands of art.
The Day of Creation by J. G. Ballard
"Ballard often seems to be on the very crest of modernity. But there is something antique about him too, something prelapsarian. For all its ambition and Freudian grandeur, The Day of Creation is an adventure story, as was Hello America. Further paradoxes include the fact that despite his acuity and wit, his deep ironies, Ballard remains an essentially humorless writer. Humor is available to the man, but it is denied access to the page." ---------- In another part of the essay Martin Amis notes that if a reader doesn't go along with Ballard's obsession (in this novel, obsessing over the river), the entire work can become very boring very quickly. After reading The Day of Creation myself, that was exactly my sentiment.
Abba Abba by Anthony Burgess
"Burgess cares about his prose and works hard on it. Every sentence is sure to contain some oddity or other - frequently as a result of will, you feel, rather than of inspiration or even of appropriateness. Burgess starts a sentence, puts another clause in, ends it just like that, without the courtesy of an and." ----------- In his assessing a writer's work, Martin delves into the details of how language is employed in all its various phases. Since an Anthony Burgess novel explores and expands language as much as it does the subject, that's the lion's share of the focus of Martin's review, including how a novelist will divide their own creative energies between character and motive on the one side and wit, ideas and language on the other.
Riding the Rap by Elmore Leonard
"We are in a kind of marijuana tense (Dawn saying), creamy, wandering, weak-verbed. Such sentences seem to open up a lag in time, through which Mr. Leonard easily slides, gaining entry to his players' hidden minds. He doesn't just show you what these people say and do. He shows you where they breath." ----------- Bull's eye, Martin! That's exactly my experience reading a Elmore Leonard novel - you instantly get in the head of his slimeball characters and live and breath with them. And the aftereffects are lasting, even occasionally staggering: an Elmore Leonard character sticks with you for more days and weeks than you might wish, if not consciously, than certainly unconsciously.
"He understands the post-modern world - the world of wised-up rabble and zero authenticity. His characters are equipped not with obligingly suggestive childhoods or case-histories, but with a cranial jukebox of situation comedies and talk shows and advertising jingles, their dreams and dreads all mediated and secondhand. Terrible and pitiable (and often downright endearing), they are simply junk souls: quarter-pounders with cheese." ---------- Again Martin hits the target. With Elmore Leonard, there isn't a refined artist or literary writer or sensitive aesthete within miles - at the opposite end of the literary spectrum from Henry James or Vladimir Nabokov.
Cities of the Red Night by William S. Burroughs
"To begin with, Cities of the Red Night reads like a new departure for William Burroughs: it has plot, it has characters, and you can just about tell what's going on. This is daring stuff indeed, coming from the zap-poet of drug-highs and sex-deaths, the militant Beat, the author of Naked Lunch and six further experiments in hallucinatory chaos." ----------- Martin acknowledges the ways in which authors scope out their literary turf - and with oh so much pizzazz, spice, bite, piquancy, sparkle and vigor. True, sometimes a vinegary vigor but each paragraph is worth the read and reread.
"The truth is that for all his sophistication Burroughs remains a primitive, extreme, almost psychotic artist. His work is in many respects impenetrably clandestine, and frighteningly personal." ---------- Tell it like it is, M.A.!. I can't imagine one author speaking with more admiration of another as Martin does here.
Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism by John Updike
"There is a trundling quality, increasingly indulged: too much trolly-car nostalgia and baseball-mitt Americana, too much ancestor worship, too piety. In his collected art criticism. Just Looking, Updike often seemed happier with the hack than with the genius." --------- Martin doesn't hesitate from taking a writer, even a great writer, to task. That's my own sense with John Updike - such a fantastic spinner of words and phrases, characters and moods, short tales and long novels, but standing behind it all there's frequently a man having more in common with Norman Rockwell than Jackson Pollock or Barnett Newman.
The Complete Short Stories by Franz Kafka
Kafka saw the artist's isolation as Christlike - an infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing, yet capable of wincing laughter." ----------------- Lovers of Kafka will enjoy Martin's review here touching on such Kafka tales as Before the Law and An Imperial Message. I enjoyed every single one of Martin's sentences on Kafka.
Whenever I need a little juice to fuel my own writing, I simply open this Martin collection and begin reading. Not long thereafter, I have the needed impetus to sit down at the old computer and begin writing my own review. Thanks, Martin!
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