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Martin Amis (born in Oxford, August 25, 1949) is an English novelist and son of Sir
Kingsley Amis.
His first novel
The Rachel Papers (winner of the Somerset Maugham Award in 1974), is about the adventures of a bright, egotistical teenager (presumably not unlike Amis himself) and his relationship with the eponymous girlfriend in the year before going to University. It is the most traditional of his novels, and still the favourite of some, though it has since been made into a rather unsuccessful film.
Dead Babies, more flippant in tone, has a typically Sixties plot, with a house full of characters who abuse various substances and are eventually massacred by a psychopath. A number of Amis's characteristics show up here for the first time: mordant black humour, obsession with the zeitgeist, authorial intervention, a character subjected to sadistically humorous misfortunes and humiliations, and a defiant casualness ("my attitude has been, I don't know much about science, but I know what I like"). A film adaptation was made in 2000 which was also unsuccessful.
His most famous novels are
Money, Time's Arrow and London Fields. The unparalleled size of the advance demanded and obtained by Amis for The Information attracted what Amis described as "an Eisteddfod of hostility
" from writers and critics; ironically, the main characters in The Information are rival authors who are jealous of various aspects of each other's lives. He has written a memoir, largely about his relationship with his famous author father, called Experience. In 2002, Amis published Koba the Dread, a book about the crimes of Stalinism and the intellectual left. The book provoked a literary controversy for his supposedly naïve and dilettante approach to the material, and for its attack on his longtime friend Christopher Hitchens, who rebuked his charges in a stinging review in
The Atlantic.
In 2003,
Yellow Dog was denounced in intemperate terms as worthless by Tibor Fischer, generating a further hubbub in the media.
Martin Amis has released a collection of his short stories, under the title
Heavy Water, and a collection of journalism entitled The War On Cliche.
He lives and writes in London and Uruguay.
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NewsMartin Amis & Chris Hitchens: Vicious Racism Concealed by a British Accent
The American right wing, desperate for articulate hate mongers, is importing UK polemicists to stir the base up against the Muslim/Arab "enemy."
Published: Sat, 24 May 2008 08:00:01 GMT - Source: Alternet.Org - Read the article
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