Martin Amis
stories, most are strong, Standing out above all others is "The Janitor from Mars", Features The Janitor From Mars wherein an abusive Martian robot communicates to a representative gathering of Earthlings precisely how little they matter in the grand scheme of things.
A masterclass in douchery from the most politically reprehensible and aesthetically ugly writer in the UK, Several years ago, perhaps many years ago, I decided Martin Amis's fiction was not worth reading because he was a snarky Brit who wasn't all that funny despite his barbed wit and talent for replicating the various accents of Britain's various social classes.
Then I came back to Amis a few years ago and read some novels I liked because they were full, rounded, comical but serious.
Now I've made the mistake of trying to read a collection of Amis's stories called Heavy Water that comprises tales written from thes into thes.
I suppose I wanted to see if I was wrong when I first wrote him off, Well, I wasn't. It's just that over time he has become a much better writer,
Back then Martin Amis wrote stories as if they were basically jokes, He'd develop a counterfactual conceitfor instance, that poems were treated like blockbusters by Hollywood mogulsand explore how weird that would be, Pretty weird. Or he would spin out a tale told by a janitor on Mars, eager to communicate with earth or earthlings, Or he would describe a world in which the gays dominated the scene and the heterosexuals the hets were forced to play the role of the gays mocked, dissed, what have you.
Lots of upside down and inside out stuff, Wouldn't it be funny if this, . . Wouldn't it be funny if that, . .
I won't belabor the point, One can see even in Amis's early stories the striking wit, gift with words and images, and pulsing cultural awareness that ultimately made him a significant writer.
But he wasn't really interesting he was the son of a betterknown writer who worked his way through his apprenticeship and kept going.
Good for him. Skip the early stuff and read what he's writing now, The stories in this collection vary wildly in terms of length, subject matter, characterization and literary device, Amis moves effortlessly across continents, depicting British and American culture convincingly and creating vivid and unique characters, The stories here have an experimental feel and as with all experiments, some work better than others,
Amis is strongest when portraying British working class people, with that classic British dry humor and wit, This is best illustrated in “State of England,” which also deftly handles race relations in modern, ethnically diverse London,
“What Happened to Me on My Holiday” is written in a made up dialect that is difficult to grasp at first but worth putting in the effort.
It turns out to be a surprisingly effective technique for portraying a young boys first experiences with death,
I struggled with “The Janitor on Mars,” an odd juxtaposition of intelligent if sadistic life on mars and pedophilia in an orphanage here on earth.
It was a long read, heavy on scientific jargon that became tiresome for me,
Most of these stories have been published elsewhere, three in The New Yorker, as well as in Esquire, Granta and other publications.
So clearly they enjoy some critical acclaim, A fun diversion from the ordinary but not for everyone,
I finally get why so many people like Martin Amis and so many dislike Martin Amis, He is such a skillful prose stylist that his stories can be as hard to put down as they are to finish because of his nasty characters and view of the world.
No, I do not like these stories very much but I admire the skill that went into writing them, Different people will prefer different stories, of course, but I favor the first and third where the author tries to get us to see the world differently by simple switches: in the first story screenwriters live the lives of poets and poets live the lives of screen writers.
In the third, being gay is normal and being straight is controversial, While these both seemed clever for a while, both stories continued long past the point where I got the point, I'm not sure either did much to change my thinking about either matter,
In sum: if you like Martin Amis, have fun, but I don't think I need to bother with him again, These nine stories span a period fromtoand are a good reflection of the range of Martin Amis's writing, which is always skillful and consistently seductivesometimes irritatingly so.
Amis lures his reader into an intense interest in his characters, and then, in some unsettling way, encourages us to patronize or disparage them.
It's an odd strategy, but it holds our attention, By making us uncomfortable about our own less admirable attitudes, he focuses us intently on his story line,
but the title story gets five, . . Exceptional in parts, some wickedly biting satire that leaves you feeling just unclean enough after you've finished, Sadly, a little bit too meh in others, . . A modest but enjoyable collection, marred by occasional overreliance on a concept or conceit, While I enjoyed most of the stories to some extent, there are some missed opportunities or failed experiments,
Two of the stories 'Career Move' and 'Straight Fiction' rely on the same concept: a counterworld of inverted values, In the first, poets are hot commodities and become fabulously wealthy, In the second, almost everybody is gay one assumes: the existence of lesbians is inferred but never touched upon and heterosexuals are a tolerated and pitied minority.
Neither story amounts to much, leading me to suspect that they were perhaps written out of an excess of authorial selfregard.
To
be blunt, they seem like ideas born out of an evening of drinking with friends: "Hey, you should write a story where being straight is a social handicap!" Anyway, Anthony Burgess did the whole "gay as normal" thing in The Wanting Seed, back in.
The last story 'What Happened to Me on Holiday' is very nearly unreadable, The stylistic conceit is a phonic rendering of the child narrator's heavilyaccented speech, All but the last paragraph of the story izz renda endiz phazhin firzome reezin, It never gets eezearsorry, 'easier' to read, and the point of the experiment and the story is lost, An awful and even infuriating reading experience,
Most of the stories are kind of plodding, middleoftheroad pieces, neither actively bad nor remarkably good, These typically start from a sound if uninspiring not to say clichéd concept: a man waits calmly for his impending execution a man in the middle of a divorce is struggling with being a good father a man is frustrated because his wife doesn't want to have sex, etc.
Not surprisingly, no great insights emerge from these humble beginnings, though they are decent reads,
When reading Amis, it's hard not to notice the politically and/or culturally conservative/reactionary elements, Only one story has a female protagonist, and the focus of the story is her son, This sexism will not surprise those who've read Amis before, Some of the descriptions of the clothes worn and food prepared by the gay narrator of 'Straight Fiction' seem to cross the line into rococo stereotype: at one point a character is preparing a main dish accented with pomegranate, passion fruit, papaya, pomelo, and Asian pear.
Finally, there were some moments in one of the stories when the presentation of a black character seemed uncomfortably close to the edge of racial stereotype.
So why read the book Two reasons,
First, I thought two of the stories 'The Coincidence of the Arts' and 'Heavy Water' were quite good, The first is effectively comedic, while the second is gently tragic, In these stories, initial concept, evocative writing, and narrative payoff are all aligned, Recommended reading, in other words,
Second, the usual Amis quota of sparkling prose is to be found throughout the book, even in the less impressive stories.
Some sample sentences illustrate the point:
"It was the kind of sentence that spent a lot of time in reverse gear before crunching itself into first.
"
"There was a lady, nearly Mothers age, who with clockwork vigor performed a highstepping musichall number about prostitution, disease, and penury.
"
"Rodney flattered, flirted, fumbled, failed, "
"He turned: a square lawn supporting two ancient trees, both warped and crushed by time into postures of lavatorial agony.
"
"Between them bobbed other heads of hair workgray streaks, pageboy, urchin, dyed caramel and, among the men, various tragedies of disappearance, variously borne, and always the guy with a single strand pasted across his dome, as if one sideburn had thrown a line to the other.
"
"Like a mirage of power and heat the touringcoaches throbbed on the quayside, "
On the whole, it's a middling collection featuring a couple of standouts, a couple of clunkers, and a lot of perfectly serviceable writing.
You could do a lot worse, but it won't make you forget e, g. Alice Munro or William Trevor, .
A masterclass in douchery from the most politically reprehensible and aesthetically ugly writer in the UK, Several years ago, perhaps many years ago, I decided Martin Amis's fiction was not worth reading because he was a snarky Brit who wasn't all that funny despite his barbed wit and talent for replicating the various accents of Britain's various social classes.
Then I came back to Amis a few years ago and read some novels I liked because they were full, rounded, comical but serious.
Now I've made the mistake of trying to read a collection of Amis's stories called Heavy Water that comprises tales written from thes into thes.
I suppose I wanted to see if I was wrong when I first wrote him off, Well, I wasn't. It's just that over time he has become a much better writer,
Back then Martin Amis wrote stories as if they were basically jokes, He'd develop a counterfactual conceitfor instance, that poems were treated like blockbusters by Hollywood mogulsand explore how weird that would be, Pretty weird. Or he would spin out a tale told by a janitor on Mars, eager to communicate with earth or earthlings, Or he would describe a world in which the gays dominated the scene and the heterosexuals the hets were forced to play the role of the gays mocked, dissed, what have you.
Lots of upside down and inside out stuff, Wouldn't it be funny if this, . . Wouldn't it be funny if that, . .
I won't belabor the point, One can see even in Amis's early stories the striking wit, gift with words and images, and pulsing cultural awareness that ultimately made him a significant writer.
But he wasn't really interesting he was the son of a betterknown writer who worked his way through his apprenticeship and kept going.
Good for him. Skip the early stuff and read what he's writing now, The stories in this collection vary wildly in terms of length, subject matter, characterization and literary device, Amis moves effortlessly across continents, depicting British and American culture convincingly and creating vivid and unique characters, The stories here have an experimental feel and as with all experiments, some work better than others,
Amis is strongest when portraying British working class people, with that classic British dry humor and wit, This is best illustrated in “State of England,” which also deftly handles race relations in modern, ethnically diverse London,
“What Happened to Me on My Holiday” is written in a made up dialect that is difficult to grasp at first but worth putting in the effort.
It turns out to be a surprisingly effective technique for portraying a young boys first experiences with death,
I struggled with “The Janitor on Mars,” an odd juxtaposition of intelligent if sadistic life on mars and pedophilia in an orphanage here on earth.
It was a long read, heavy on scientific jargon that became tiresome for me,
Most of these stories have been published elsewhere, three in The New Yorker, as well as in Esquire, Granta and other publications.
So clearly they enjoy some critical acclaim, A fun diversion from the ordinary but not for everyone,
I finally get why so many people like Martin Amis and so many dislike Martin Amis, He is such a skillful prose stylist that his stories can be as hard to put down as they are to finish because of his nasty characters and view of the world.
No, I do not like these stories very much but I admire the skill that went into writing them, Different people will prefer different stories, of course, but I favor the first and third where the author tries to get us to see the world differently by simple switches: in the first story screenwriters live the lives of poets and poets live the lives of screen writers.
In the third, being gay is normal and being straight is controversial, While these both seemed clever for a while, both stories continued long past the point where I got the point, I'm not sure either did much to change my thinking about either matter,
In sum: if you like Martin Amis, have fun, but I don't think I need to bother with him again, These nine stories span a period fromtoand are a good reflection of the range of Martin Amis's writing, which is always skillful and consistently seductivesometimes irritatingly so.
Amis lures his reader into an intense interest in his characters, and then, in some unsettling way, encourages us to patronize or disparage them.
It's an odd strategy, but it holds our attention, By making us uncomfortable about our own less admirable attitudes, he focuses us intently on his story line,
In "Coincidence of the Arts," the targets are the feckless painter Sir Rodney Peel and his black doorman, aspiring novelist Pharsin Courier, who turns to him for artistic encouragement.
When Peel embarks on a curious affair with a black waitress, it is sheer coincidence that she should happen to be Pharsin's wife.
The consequences reflect well on neither man, In "State of England," we smirk knowingly at Big Mal, a bullshitting East Ender trying to sort out his life at his small son's sports day, but we are nevertheless compelled to find out what will become of him.
Familiar stories about obsessive bad sex such as "Let Me Count the Times" have not stood the test of time, and Amis's tales of literary agents, aspiring novelists, and spoiled bestseller writers may only interest an inner coterie.
Still, when he is on form, Amis's work is as deeply alluring as it is amusing, Lisa Jardine, Amazon. co. uk
but the title story gets five, . . Exceptional in parts, some wickedly biting satire that leaves you feeling just unclean enough after you've finished, Sadly, a little bit too meh in others, . . A modest but enjoyable collection, marred by occasional overreliance on a concept or conceit, While I enjoyed most of the stories to some extent, there are some missed opportunities or failed experiments,
Two of the stories 'Career Move' and 'Straight Fiction' rely on the same concept: a counterworld of inverted values, In the first, poets are hot commodities and become fabulously wealthy, In the second, almost everybody is gay one assumes: the existence of lesbians is inferred but never touched upon and heterosexuals are a tolerated and pitied minority.
Neither story amounts to much, leading me to suspect that they were perhaps written out of an excess of authorial selfregard.
To
be blunt, they seem like ideas born out of an evening of drinking with friends: "Hey, you should write a story where being straight is a social handicap!" Anyway, Anthony Burgess did the whole "gay as normal" thing in The Wanting Seed, back in.
The last story 'What Happened to Me on Holiday' is very nearly unreadable, The stylistic conceit is a phonic rendering of the child narrator's heavilyaccented speech, All but the last paragraph of the story izz renda endiz phazhin firzome reezin, It never gets eezearsorry, 'easier' to read, and the point of the experiment and the story is lost, An awful and even infuriating reading experience,
Most of the stories are kind of plodding, middleoftheroad pieces, neither actively bad nor remarkably good, These typically start from a sound if uninspiring not to say clichéd concept: a man waits calmly for his impending execution a man in the middle of a divorce is struggling with being a good father a man is frustrated because his wife doesn't want to have sex, etc.
Not surprisingly, no great insights emerge from these humble beginnings, though they are decent reads,
When reading Amis, it's hard not to notice the politically and/or culturally conservative/reactionary elements, Only one story has a female protagonist, and the focus of the story is her son, This sexism will not surprise those who've read Amis before, Some of the descriptions of the clothes worn and food prepared by the gay narrator of 'Straight Fiction' seem to cross the line into rococo stereotype: at one point a character is preparing a main dish accented with pomegranate, passion fruit, papaya, pomelo, and Asian pear.
Finally, there were some moments in one of the stories when the presentation of a black character seemed uncomfortably close to the edge of racial stereotype.
So why read the book Two reasons,
First, I thought two of the stories 'The Coincidence of the Arts' and 'Heavy Water' were quite good, The first is effectively comedic, while the second is gently tragic, In these stories, initial concept, evocative writing, and narrative payoff are all aligned, Recommended reading, in other words,
Second, the usual Amis quota of sparkling prose is to be found throughout the book, even in the less impressive stories.
Some sample sentences illustrate the point:
"It was the kind of sentence that spent a lot of time in reverse gear before crunching itself into first.
"
"There was a lady, nearly Mothers age, who with clockwork vigor performed a highstepping musichall number about prostitution, disease, and penury.
"
"Rodney flattered, flirted, fumbled, failed, "
"He turned: a square lawn supporting two ancient trees, both warped and crushed by time into postures of lavatorial agony.
"
"Between them bobbed other heads of hair workgray streaks, pageboy, urchin, dyed caramel and, among the men, various tragedies of disappearance, variously borne, and always the guy with a single strand pasted across his dome, as if one sideburn had thrown a line to the other.
"
"Like a mirage of power and heat the touringcoaches throbbed on the quayside, "
On the whole, it's a middling collection featuring a couple of standouts, a couple of clunkers, and a lot of perfectly serviceable writing.
You could do a lot worse, but it won't make you forget e, g. Alice Munro or William Trevor, .