http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/05/books/martin-amis-the-biography-by-richard-bradford.html?ref=books
BOOKS OF THE TIMES
The Life Of a Writer, Reviewed
Martin Amis: The Biography, by Richard Bradford
By DWIGHT GARNER
Published: December 4, 2012
Becoming a grandfather, Martin Amis has said, is like getting a telegram from the mortuary. Having a biographer on your tail must be a similarly dire sort of bulletin. The attention is flattering. But the suggestion is that you are, to paraphrase the novelist Jim Harrison, rounding third base, and home plate is a hole in the ground.
Becoming a grandfather, Martin Amis has said, is like getting a telegram from the mortuary. Having a biographer on your tail must be a similarly dire sort of bulletin. The attention is flattering. But the suggestion is that you are, to paraphrase the novelist Jim Harrison, rounding third base, and home plate is a hole in the ground.
Enlarge This Image
Patricia Wall/The New York Times
MARTIN AMIS
The Biography
By Richard Bradford
Illustrated. 449 pages. Pegasus Books. $29.95.
Related
Times Topic: Martin Amis
Mr. Amis is only 63. His prose has lost none of its Frankenstein voltage, its crumpled moral feeling or its scorpions sting. But hes begun to brood. Novelists tend to go off at 70, hes said, and Im in a funk about it, Ive got myself into a real paranoid funk about it, how the talent dies before the body.
It cant help Mr. Amiss mood that his biographer, Richard Bradford, with whom he cooperated (though did not formally authorize), has delivered a book that is mortifying in its dullness and lack of instinctive feeling for its subject. Reading Martin Amis: The Biography is like watching a moose try to describe a leopard, using only its front hooves.
The problem, in part, is with Mr. Bradfords prose. Youre only a few pages into Martin Amis: The Biography before you begin confronting sentences like this one, in which words come together as if to commit ritual mass suicide: Becoming a full-time novelist has no predictable effect upon ones psyche but it is not too absurd to contend that since we elect to spend much of our conscious existence filtering perception and reality through an oblique variant upon language, a good deal of what we routinely apprehend and recollect is touched by our stock in trade of conceits and distortions.
The flaws, like the veins in a chunk of Stilton cheese, are pervasive. Mr. Bradford strains to make sometimes far-fetched links between Mr. Amiss life and fiction. He quotes Mr. Amis poorly, quite a hard thing to do. He makes declarative sentences of the sort you consistently quarrel with in your head.
Speaking of Mr. Amiss political essays in the wake of Sept. 11, for example, he declares: Not since Orwell has a literary writer made his presence felt so forcefully in the adjacent realms of politics, history and serious journalism. I scribbled in the margins: Naipaul? Vidal? Didion? Mailer? Even the photo selection in Martin Amis: The Biography is drab.
Mr. Bradford is correct, however, to identify Mr. Amis and his friends Christopher Hitchens, James Fenton, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, Clive James and Julian Barnes among them as the most fashionable literary set since the war. They, and Mr. Amis himself, are rarely dull to read about. This fact shores this books ruins.
The particulars of Mr. Amiss childhood, in a literary-bohemian household busy with (thanks to his father, the novelist Kingsley Amis) parties and extracurricular sexual activity, have been hashed over countless times. Mr. Amis himself, as a teenager, is described by a relative as sanguine beyond his years and tired of everything before he knew anything.
The detail that sticks with you about Mr. Amis as a young man is that, until he was 18, he showed little interest in reading or high culture. He crammed to get into Exeter College, Oxford, and, once there, never slowed down.
It is astonishing that within four years of his having first properly encountered literature per se, the author writes, Martin would be writing pieces for The TLS, The New Statesman and Observer that caused great trepidation among the most established writers with books out for review.
Once he left Oxford, we are told, Mr. Amis gave himself a year to write a novel. If that didnt pan out, he thought, he might go into academia. The novel he produced, The Rachel Papers (1973), put him on the map. His early novels did not make him wealthy, though, and he worked at places like The Times Literary Supplement and The New Statesman, where he became literary editor.
Still, no one thought he had it rough. In a game to come up with the most unlikely book title, the winner around this period was said to be: Martin Amis: My Struggle.
Mr. Amiss charm, talent, lineage and good looks attracted women, tabloid gossip columnists and vindictive envy in almost equal proportion. Mr. Bradford neatly chronicles Mr. Amiss multiple (and sometimes overlapping) girlfriends, many of whom are described with comments like the most captivating female of her generation.
Even here Mr. Bradfords prose seems canned, like the voice-over in a 1950s-era industrial film. This is his introduction to Mr. Amiss legendary wild years:
Before examining the literary and intellectual controversies that beset Martin during the 1970s it would perhaps be best to first offer a brief summary of his love life. The two narratives are intertwined and an appreciation of the former can only benefit from a preliminary account of the latter.
Mr. Amiss personal magnetism is best described by others. One friend nailed him this way: Hed stand there on the lawn, croquet mallet swung over his shoulder, rolled faq in mouth and very large drink in hand. He was small and ridiculously handsome. The rest of us would be keeling over with laughter at everything he said. God, he held court and everyone relished it.
His first marriage, to Antonia Phillips, ended in divorce in 1996; they had two sons. With his second wife, the writer Isabel Fonseca, he has two daughters. (Mr. Amis has another daughter, Delilah Jeary, whom he did not know about until she was nearly an adult.)
If its true, as Saul Bellow wrote in Herzog, that a scandal was after all a sort of service to the community, Mr. Amis has performed a profound duty for England by consistently giving its literary hordes biographical nuggets to rehash over pints of ale.
Hes been a one-man stay against dreariness. Commentators have ginned up scandals about Mr. Amiss expensive dental work, his firing of an agent, his divorce and so on, unto infinity. He now lives, quietly and somewhat improbably, in Brooklyn.
Mr. Bradford is a mostly reliable guide through his subjects best novels. Hes an ardent admirer of Mr. Amiss work, but wonders if he hasnt run too far away from the realist novel, as if to avoid comparisons with his father.
Thats possible. But Mr. Amis had other things in mind. As he wrote about Richard Tull, a central character in his novel The Information (1996): He didnt want to please the readers. He wanted to stretch them until they twanged.
Mr. Amis is only 63. His prose has lost none of its Frankenstein voltage, its crumpled moral feeling or its scorpions sting. But hes begun to brood. Novelists tend to go off at 70, hes said, and Im in a funk about it, Ive got myself into a real paranoid funk about it, how the talent dies before the body.
It cant help Mr. Amiss mood that his biographer, Richard Bradford, with whom he cooperated (though did not formally authorize), has delivered a book that is mortifying in its dullness and lack of instinctive feeling for its subject. Reading Martin Amis: The Biography is like watching a moose try to describe a leopard, using only its front hooves.
The problem, in part, is with Mr. Bradfords prose. Youre only a few pages into Martin Amis: The Biography before you begin confronting sentences like this one, in which words come together as if to commit ritual mass suicide: Becoming a full-time novelist has no predictable effect upon ones psyche but it is not too absurd to contend that since we elect to spend much of our conscious existence filtering perception and reality through an oblique variant upon language, a good deal of what we routinely apprehend and recollect is touched by our stock in trade of conceits and distortions.
The flaws, like the veins in a chunk of Stilton cheese, are pervasive. Mr. Bradford strains to make sometimes far-fetched links between Mr. Amiss life and fiction. He quotes Mr. Amis poorly, quite a hard thing to do. He makes declarative sentences of the sort you consistently quarrel with in your head.
Speaking of Mr. Amiss political essays in the wake of Sept. 11, for example, he declares: Not since Orwell has a literary writer made his presence felt so forcefully in the adjacent realms of politics, history and serious journalism. I scribbled in the margins: Naipaul? Vidal? Didion? Mailer? Even the photo selection in Martin Amis: The Biography is drab.
Mr. Bradford is correct, however, to identify Mr. Amis and his friends Christopher Hitchens, James Fenton, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, Clive James and Julian Barnes among them as the most fashionable literary set since the war. They, and Mr. Amis himself, are rarely dull to read about. This fact shores this books ruins.
The particulars of Mr. Amiss childhood, in a literary-bohemian household busy with (thanks to his father, the novelist Kingsley Amis) parties and extracurricular sexual activity, have been hashed over countless times. Mr. Amis himself, as a teenager, is described by a relative as sanguine beyond his years and tired of everything before he knew anything.
The detail that sticks with you about Mr. Amis as a young man is that, until he was 18, he showed little interest in reading or high culture. He crammed to get into Exeter College, Oxford, and, once there, never slowed down.
It is astonishing that within four years of his having first properly encountered literature per se, the author writes, Martin would be writing pieces for The TLS, The New Statesman and Observer that caused great trepidation among the most established writers with books out for review.
Once he left Oxford, we are told, Mr. Amis gave himself a year to write a novel. If that didnt pan out, he thought, he might go into academia. The novel he produced, The Rachel Papers (1973), put him on the map. His early novels did not make him wealthy, though, and he worked at places like The Times Literary Supplement and The New Statesman, where he became literary editor.
Still, no one thought he had it rough. In a game to come up with the most unlikely book title, the winner around this period was said to be: Martin Amis: My Struggle.
Mr. Amiss charm, talent, lineage and good looks attracted women, tabloid gossip columnists and vindictive envy in almost equal proportion. Mr. Bradford neatly chronicles Mr. Amiss multiple (and sometimes overlapping) girlfriends, many of whom are described with comments like the most captivating female of her generation.
Even here Mr. Bradfords prose seems canned, like the voice-over in a 1950s-era industrial film. This is his introduction to Mr. Amiss legendary wild years:
Before examining the literary and intellectual controversies that beset Martin during the 1970s it would perhaps be best to first offer a brief summary of his love life. The two narratives are intertwined and an appreciation of the former can only benefit from a preliminary account of the latter.
Mr. Amiss personal magnetism is best described by others. One friend nailed him this way: Hed stand there on the lawn, croquet mallet swung over his shoulder, rolled faq in mouth and very large drink in hand. He was small and ridiculously handsome. The rest of us would be keeling over with laughter at everything he said. God, he held court and everyone relished it.
His first marriage, to Antonia Phillips, ended in divorce in 1996; they had two sons. With his second wife, the writer Isabel Fonseca, he has two daughters. (Mr. Amis has another daughter, Delilah Jeary, whom he did not know about until she was nearly an adult.)
If its true, as Saul Bellow wrote in Herzog, that a scandal was after all a sort of service to the community, Mr. Amis has performed a profound duty for England by consistently giving its literary hordes biographical nuggets to rehash over pints of ale.
Hes been a one-man stay against dreariness. Commentators have ginned up scandals about Mr. Amiss expensive dental work, his firing of an agent, his divorce and so on, unto infinity. He now lives, quietly and somewhat improbably, in Brooklyn.
Mr. Bradford is a mostly reliable guide through his subjects best novels. Hes an ardent admirer of Mr. Amiss work, but wonders if he hasnt run too far away from the realist novel, as if to avoid comparisons with his father.
Thats possible. But Mr. Amis had other things in mind. As he wrote about Richard Tull, a central character in his novel The Information (1996): He didnt want to please the readers. He wanted to stretch them until they twanged.
