Swaggering, satiric, urbane, corrosive, propulsive, hilarious, erudite, and malevolent: such was the prose of Martin Amis, a writer who had the presence and personality to back it all up. With pursed lips, an outsize forehead, and the kind of glare that could set newspaper and television interviewers back on their heels, Amis was ready-made for media celebrity. In a widely repeated formulation that probably revolted him, he was the “Mick Jagger of the book world.” There’s some truth in it. The Booker Prize eluded him, but you would be hard-pressed to name a bigger literary star to come out of Britain in the past half century. Since the early 1970s, Amis has been a recurring feature on best-seller lists and in review sections, at conferences, and in the media, with a steady stream of essays, criticism, profiles, and, most notably, novels that included The Rachel Papers, Success, Money, London Fields, Time’s Arrow, The Information, and Yellow Dog.
Amis died of cancer on Friday at age 73, 11 years after his best friend, Christopher Hitchens (a longtime columnist for this magazine), died of a similar disease. Although they tended to work in different genres (Amis largely literary, Hitchens largely political), the two made a pair: a Fitzgerald and Hemingway for the Age of Thatcher and beyond. Amis’s final book, 2020’s Inside Story, a novel/memoir mash-up, was fueled by goodbyes, with Hitchens at its center, along with other departed figures who left their mark on the author, such as his prose hero, Saul Bellow, and the poet Philip Larkin, a close friend of Amis’s father, Kingsley Amis, the celebrated novelist of Lucky Jim.
Inside Story was a distant echo of Amis’s 2000 memoir, Experience, but with a fractalized timeline, shifting perspectives, pseudonymous figures, and plentiful digressions, along with the usual uproarious jokes, sexual candor, and lacerating insights. Although Amis’s battles with cancer were not publicly known, it was difficult not to read Inside Story as a settling of accounts: the author’s own farewell.
Amis was born in Oxford, England, on August 25, 1949. His paternal grandfather was a clerk in the mustard business, but the literary family Martin grew up in knew no such ho-hum middle-class stability. Kingsley Amis and Hilly Bardwell, Martin’s mother, would have multiple marriages (Kingsley later married the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard) and Martin, the middle child of three, attended more than a dozen schools. In the academic year 1959–60, the family lived in Princeton, New Jersey, as Kingsley made his way from university town to university town. “America excited and frightened me,” Martin wrote of the experience decades later, “and has continued to do so.”
Amis, with that unmistakably British perspective and voice, wrote often about the United States in his fiction and essays, including the 1986 nonfiction collection The Moronic Inferno, whose title, borrowed from Bellow, feels even more prophetic now than it did then. At the time, Amis himself predicted as much: “It exactly describes a possible future, one in which the moronic inferno will cease to be a metaphor and will become a reality: the only reality,” he wrote in the book’s introduction. In his later years, living in Brooklyn, Amis was preoccupied with the bonfire-like conflagrations of American politics in the Trump era.
As an undergrad at Oxford, Amis, a voracious student, hoovered up the entirety of English literature, graduating with first-class honors from Exeter College. He later said that he fantasized in those days about E. B. White showing up, out of the blue, to offer him a job at The New Yorker. Instead, Amis found employment at the Times Literary Supplement; by the age of 27, he was literary editor of The New Statesman and soon after became a feature writer at The Observer. Given his family background and predilections, such precocity was perhaps only natural. It extended into the realm of fiction, as Amis began turning out novels, starting in 1973 with The Rachel Papers, an unabashedly raunchy and gleefully adolescent comedy about coming-of-age and sex during the era of polyester and platform shoes. The book achieved a further level of fame through scandal: another young writer, Jacob Epstein, liberally plagiarized it in a headline-generating case of brazen literary theft. (Epstein later apologized publicly for swiping passages from Amis and others.)
As the 1980s unfolded Amis was taking bigger swings. His London trilogy—Money, London Fields, and The Information—cemented his literary superstardom in a series of fat novels that allowed him to fix his basilisk glare on the excesses and privations of late capitalism. The New York Times lauded his “cement-hard observations of a seedy, queasy new Britain, part strip-joint, part Buckingham Palace.” Moving into the 21st century, the focus widened still: Hitler, Stalin, September 11. Geohistorical horribleness became the theme and with it an ever-enlarging ambition. The question of whether Amis’s talent, vast though it was, properly equipped him for this challenge remains open among some readers and critics, even those who admire him. As Giles Harvey put it in The New Yorker, attempting to fix Amis’s position in our time, “A new generation of readers may think of him primarily as an aging controversialist, the maker of certain inflammatory comments about Islam or euthanasia, rather than as the author of some of the most daring comic novels of the past several decades.”
Amis came to the fore with the imposing generational fraternity that consisted of him, Hitchens, Ian McEwan, James Fenton, Julian Barnes, and Salman Rushdie (whom Amis wrote about for Vanity Fair, in 1990): the bright young British things of the era, an intellectual boys’ club. Among them, Hitchens was Amis’s wingman, counselor, competitor, foil, cheerleader, and near twin. (“The Hitch” unerringly referred to Amis with an affectionate sobriquet: “Little Keith.”) Barnes was the one with whom Amis had a famous falling out in 1994, after Amis fired Barnes’s wife, the literary agent Pat Kavanagh, and took up with the powerhouse Andrew Wylie, who managed to secure a 500,000-pound advance for The Information. (“It was not my finest hour,” Amis later said.) Particularly in his home country, Amis was the target of envy and animus for an array of infractions—for his illustrious surname, for his indecorousness toward British letters, for his success in love (a Lothario reputation preceded his two marriages, the current of which is to the writer Isabel Fonseca), and, broadly speaking, for his success in success. The satirical Private Eye took aim, referring to Amis for years as “Smarty Anus,” the kind of jibe that could have come from Amis’s own pen.
Another member of the reading public who had difficulty with Amis was his own father, who never showed much outward enthusiasm for his son’s work, which, in truth, came to outshine his own. They tussled over politics, as the aging, dyspeptic Kingsley migrated ever rightward. The son made an emotional plea to another elder novelist, Saul Bellow, with whom he’d become close in the 1980s. “As long as you’re alive,” Amis wrote the Nobel laureate author, “I’ll never feel entirely fatherless.” As for Bellow’s own opinion of Amis’s work, when a journalist asked him if Amis had the kind of genius that could merit comparisons to Flaubert and Joyce, Bellow responded, “Yes, I do.”
