Friday Fiction: Martin Amis -- A Bit of Britain

--by Hanje Richards
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Martin Amis was born in Oxford in 1949, the son of the writer Kingsley Amis. He was educated in schools in Britain, Spain, and the United States and graduated from Exeter College, Oxford, with First Class Honors in English. He wrote and published his first novel, The Rachel Papers (1973), while working as an editorial assistant at the Times Literary Supplement. The novel won a Somerset Maugham Award in 1974.
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Regarded by many critics as one of the most influential and innovative voices in contemporary British fiction, Amis is often grouped with the generation of British-based novelists that emerged during the 1980s and included Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan and Julian Barnes. His work has been heavily influenced by American fiction, especially the work of Philip Roth, John Updike, and Saul Bellow.
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Martin Amis lives in London. He became Professor of Creative Writing at Manchester University in 2007.
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Einstein’s Monsters - A collection of stories about a frightening world inhabited by people dehumanized by the daily threat of nuclear war and postwar survivors deformed by its results. This collection of stories is prefaced with an essay on the nuclear threat so trenchant and irrefutable that the book is worth reading for that alone.
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Heavy Water and Other Stories - In this wickedly delightful collection of stories, Martin Amis once again demonstrates why he is a modern master of the form. In "Career Move," screenwriters struggle for their art, while poets are the darlings of Hollywood. In "Straight Fiction," the love that dare not speak its name calls out to the hero when he encounters a forbidden object of desire – the opposite sex. And in "State of England," Mal, a former "minder to the superstars," discovers how to live in a country where "class and race and gender were supposedly gone."
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House of Meetings - In 1946, two brothers and a Jewish girl fall into alignment in pogrom-poised Moscow. The fraternal conflict then marinates in Norlag, a slave-labor camp above the Arctic Circle, where a tryst in the coveted "House of Meetings" will haunt all three lovers long after the brothers are released. And for the narrator, the sole survivor, the reverberations continue into the new century.
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The Information - Two forty-year-old novelists, Gwyn Barry (successful) and Richard Tull (not so) have been friends since they roomed together at university. Richard Tull was a promising writer with a seemingly bright future. However, his career flags and he finds himself depressed, writing book reviews for a small literary paper and running a vanity press. To his chagrin, Gwyn Barry – whose literary skills Tull holds in low esteem – has written a phenomenally successful novel and won a lucrative and respected literary prize. Barry begins to enjoy a rarefied life while Tull toils away with his unsuccessful pursuits.
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Tull, increasingly envious, begins to manufacture ways of bringing Barry down. These begin relatively innocently, but later things become much more serious as Tull makes contact with violent men he later finds he cannot control.
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London Fields - Amis' murder story for the end of the millennium is set in the pubs and streets of West London. The victim is Nicola Six, a "black hole of sex and self-loathing" intent on orchestrating her own extinction. The murderer may be Keith Talent, a violent lowlife whose only passions are pornography and darts. Or is the killer the rich, honorable, and dimly romantic Guy Clinch?

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Money: A Suicide Note - tells the story of, and is narrated by, John Self, a successful director of commercials who is invited to New York by Fielding Goodney, a film producer, in order to shoot his first film. Self is an archetypal hedonist and slob; he is usually drunk, is an avid consumer of pornography and prostitutes, eats too much and, above all, spends too much, encouraged by Goodney.
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Night Train - Homicide Detective Mike Hoolihan has seen it all. A fifteen-year veteran of the force, she's gone from walking a beat, to robbery, to homicide. But one case – this case – has gotten under her skin.
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When Jennifer Rockwell, darling of the community and daughter of a respected career cop – now top brass – takes her own life, no one is prepared to believe it – especially her father, Colonel Tom. Hoolihan, longtime colleague and friend of Colonel Tom, is ready to "put the case down." Suicide. Closed. Until Colonel Tom asks her to do the one thing any grieving father would ask: take a second look.
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Rachel Papers - In his uproarious first novel, Martin Amis gives us one of the most noxiously believable – and curiously touching – adolescents ever to sniffle and lust his way through the pages of contemporary fiction. On the brink of twenty, Charles Highway preps desultorily for Oxford, cheerfully loathes his father, and meticulously plots the seduction of a girl named Rachel – a girl who sorely tests the mettle of his cynicism when he finds himself falling in love with her.
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Visiting Mrs. Nabokov and Other Excursions - Fuelled by innumerable cigarettes, Martin Amis provides dazzling portraits of contemporaries and mentors alike – Larkin and Rushdie; Greene and Pritchett; Ballard and Burgess and Nicholson Baker; John Updike – warts and all.
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Vigorously zipping across to Washington, he exposes the double-think of nuke-speak; in New Orleans, the Republican Convention gets a going over. And then there's sport: he visits the world of darts and its disastrous attempt to clean itself up; dirty tricks in the world of chess; and some brisk but vicious poker with Al Alvarez and David Mamet. Other excursions: sex without Madonna, expulsion from school, a Stones gig that should have been gagged, on set with Robocop, and on court with Gabriela Sabatini.
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War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews, 1971-2000 - In this virtuosic, career-spanning collection, Amis takes on James Joyce and Elvis Presley, Nabokov and English football, Jane Austen and "Penthouse Forum," William Burroughs and Hillary Clinton. But above all, Amis is concerned with literature, and with the deadly clichés – not only of the pen, but of the mind and the heart.

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In The War Against Cliché, Amis serves up fresh assessments of the classics and plucks neglected masterpieces off their dusty shelves. He tilts with Cervantes, Dickens and Milton, celebrates Bellow, Updike and Elmore Leonard, and deflates some of the most bloated reputations of the past three decades. On every page, Amis writes with jaw-dropping felicity, wit, and a subversive brilliance that sheds new light on everything he touches.
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Yellow Dog - When “dream husband” Xan Meo is vengefully assaulted in the garden of a London pub, he suffers head injury and personality change. Like a spiritual convert, the familial paragon becomes an anti-husband, an anti-father. He submits to an alien moral system – one among many to be found in these pages. We are introduced to the inverted worlds of the “yellow” journalist, Clint Smoker; the high priest of hardmen, Joseph Andrews; and the porno tycoon, Cora Susan.
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Meanwhile, we explore the entanglements of Henry England: his incapacitated wife, Pamela; his Chinese mistress, He Zhezun; his fifteen-year-old daughter, Victoria, the victim of a filmed “intrusion” that rivets the world – because she is the future Queen of England, and her father, Henry IX, is its King. The connections between these characters provide the pattern and drive of Yellow Dog.

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Sound interesting? Check them out at the Copper Queen Library!