Martin Amis is Alive and Well and Living in London Fields

All writers die twice — except for Martin Amis.

Martin Amis, 1949-2023

Gore Vidal described his approach to criticism as standing between two gongs with a mallet in hand, striking each in a raging crescendo. I must say, I haven’t the faintest idea what he’s talking about, but I do find the image a perfect depiction of how I approached Martin Amis’s body of work. In 2018, I planted my hindlegs equidistant between the gongs with Time’s Arrow—that prosebed of diabolically dewy flowers—and began swinging between the book ends of his corpus with my own mallet: a red ballpoint pen. Though that novel urged me backward, I read The Information next, having to first raise my hand, you see, to gain the necessary momentum to swing at his debut, The Rachel Papers. The unexpected punch of that book—so much more youthful and unconscionably promising than anything I’d read by a contemporary—was followed by a ricochet of near chronological neatness: Dead Babies (nascently abandoned, I admit), Other People and Success, at which point I found the gong on my right had suddenly shimmied a few feet outside my wingspan with Inside Story, deckled out of the blue in 2020. I lunged eagerly and elicited its tremulous, unrecognizable melody—that alien resonance of what we could not yet know were closing chords—and my arm fell hypnotically backwards, my hand opening in the shape of a snout, toward the distant barking of his Yellow Dog. 

I don’t know what kind of racket I made, but the music of Inside Story always stuck with me—written as it was for me. “We all have more or less shameful fantasies about our best-loved writers,” said Amis. “We meet them in our heads—and everything works out fine.” Inside Story shows Amis making good on this maxim—the reader gets to meet Martin in his head and the two get along Amisly. But the novel, a semi-fictional memoir, really, is the conclusive evidence¹ of another Amisism: a great writer is a great host. Joyce moons you out in the boonies as you sip his sulfurously mulled wine, Amis explains, while Nabokov gives you the best seat by the fire and a vintage red after dinner. Though, this particular squaring off of Joyce against Nabokov is second only to Amis’s matching them up on the tennis court, a real howler: 

“Although of course Joyce and Nabokov never met in competition, it seems to me that Nabokov was the more ‘complete’ player… Losing early in the French (say), Joyce would be off playing exhibitions in Casablanca with various arthritic legends, and working on his inside-out between-the-legs forehand dink; whereas Nabokov and his entourage would quit the rusty dust of Roland Garros for somewhere like Hull or Nalisea, to prepare for Wimbledon on our spurned and sodden grass.”

In Inside Story, Amis never gets around to laying out the tennis whites on the guest bed, but enters his own host analogy instead. Indomitably charitable—as opposed to, say, “eloquently aloof,” as his spurned biographer Richard Bradford once yearningly described him from a rigorous distance—he invites the young reader, a burgeoning writer in need of some counsel, into his Brooklyn brownstone to smack their lips at his dinner table, a daydream I’d been enjoying long before Amis seemingly read my mind and the minds of his next generation of fans. His swan song was not for the critics who, in their contemporaneity, predictably missed this most unexpected of chess moves in the corner of the board—it was written directly to the readers and writers of the future instead who would be analyzing the grand master’s game long afterwards. Martin had some writing advice, and like his father Kingsley before him, he wanted to pass down the craft before departing. A wise castling indeed.