Martin Amis' Experience
Dear Andy,
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StumbleUponYes, you are right about the jokes, and Amis is withering about people who don't have a sense of humor. For example, the novelist James Buchan--the "humourless worthy": "I don't know if Mr. Buchan is a parent, but I often wonder how the humourless raise their children. How does it get done without humour."
There's also "fuck off." "Fucking" is one thing: "P.S. Dad: I thought your poems were fucking good. Especially 'A.E.H.'. which I know by heart." "P.P.S. On [sic] retrospect I consider 'Middlemarch' to be fucking good--Jane Austen + passion = dimension." But "fuck off" is another: "My father and I had occasion to agree that 'fuck off' was very funny. One naturally admired it's brutality and brevity--but it was also terribly good." Naturally, there's "the best fuck off of all time." Martin Amis:
--What's so funny?
--I saw a bloody fool of a dog just now ...It was a genuine summer's day, concerted and cloudless. On his walk to the letterbox my father had passed a fullgrown Alsatian apparently asleep on the boiling breast of a parked car. He looked interestedly at the dog and the dog roused itself and stared back, as if to say: I'm lying on this car--all right? On his walk back from the letterbox he looked at the dog again, and the dog stared back, adding: It may be hot but I'm still lying on this car. Before opening the garden door he turned for a final glance.
--What did it do? I urged him, because he was laughing quietly and richly to himself.
It lifted its head from its paws and straightened its neck and went ... Kingsley did one of two things. Either he made the bark sound exactly like fuck off. Or he made fuck off sound exactly like the bark.
If laughter is vital, so are the disagreements. Father and son agree about "fuck off," about Shakespeare ("To say or imply that the man of this name is not our greatest writer marks a second-rate person at best."), and about the last 40 lines of Paradise Lost ("the greatest thing in non-dramatic poetry in English"). But they vehemently disagree about Nabokov, nuclear weapons (Kingsley, writing to a friend, calls Amis a "fucking fool" for supporting nuclear disarmament--he means that Martin should know better), and much else. There's also plenty of confrontation, such as this exchange from the chapter "Failures of Tolerance." Kingsley:
--I've finally worked out why I don't like Americans.
I waited.
--Because everyone there is either a Jew or a hick
--. . .What's it like being mildly anti-Semitic?
--It's all right.
--No. What's it feel like being mildly anti-Semitic. Describe it.
...
--What's it feel like? Well. Very mild, as you say. If I'm watching the end of some new arts programme I might notice the Jewish names in the credits and think, Ah, there's another one. Or: Oh I see. There's another one.
--And that's all
--More or less. You just notice them. You wouldn't want anyone to do anything about it. You'd be horrified by that.
Kingsley Amis wasn't an anti-Semite, though what he has to say about "Americans" is revolting. He was not another David Irving, though his enemies liked to portray him as if he were. He was prejudiced, and one his favorite vices was shocking people--in my experience, a familiar tactic of immensely clever, very funny, but essentially shy men who find silence deeply intimidating. Kingsley's remarks are unsettling, yet the important point here is that few things went unarticulated between these two men. Only at the end of Kingsley's life--when there are no more fuck-offs, when all that Kingsley can type are pages and pages of i's and o's and seagulls--does the conversation falter.
You quoted Amis on his father, Andy: "When he made you laugh he sometimes made you laugh--not continuously, but punctually--for the rest of your life." Experience makes that brilliantly clear, I agree, though I'm sure some reviewers will go about their tireless quest to prove the opposite. And there really isn't any answer to these blunt investigations, except, perhaps, "Fuck off."
Yours ever,
Inigo
This week, a discussion of Experience: A Memoir, by Martin Amis (click here to buy it and here to read an excerpt). Andrew O'Hagan is the author, most recently, of Our Fathers (click here to buy it). Inigo Thomas is master of Slate's "Omnivore" column. 
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Reader Response from The Fray:
Inigo Thomas accuses the journalists who snipe at Amis of making a "category mistake," judging him by standards that don't apply to writers. That's ironic, because I think the Book Club participants are guilty of an even bigger category error: Mistaking America for England. Both are mounting defenses against attacks that just don't happen here, as far as I can tell. No one in America cares much about Amis's teeth, "the jackal," or his large advances.
The corollary is that fewer people here, too, think Amis is a major writer. In fact, O'Hagan's claims that Amis deserves to be thrust past Roth and Updike into the pantheon that includes, say, Nabokov and Bellow sound genuinely odd at this late date, post-Information and -Night Train, quaintly nostalgic even, taking us back to--what? Maybe Amis's own essays of the mid-80s, in which he makes similar claims.
--Chris Shea
(To reply, click here.)
Inigo Thomas seems to have overlooked D.J. Taylor's best point in the New Statesman piece. He depicts Taylor as some sort of grump, harboring "resentment at a writer's ability to make money from books, plus the good friends and the writer's life." But Taylor says something that needs to be said about the author's social satire. It's a terrible swift sword, yes. But it's not altogether Swiftian. The problem is subject, or more aptly, target. Much of the venom flows down the social ladder; up, for the author, is harder. MA wants to be a moralist but can't help being a misanthrope. You can imagine him setting out to write A Modest Proposal, but along the way getting sidetracked in a hilarious pisstake on yobs.
--Richard C
(To reply, click here.)
(6/1)
Mr Thomas' query as to whether we Londoners really know what we're laughing at leads me to wonder whether it was this very trait which prompted the hostility met by The Information. Amis had delighted us for years with artful illustrations of vice yet when he dished up a comedy about failure, it evidently rubbed too close to the bone. We could distance ourselves from the vaudeville villainy of John Self and Keith Talent, but the mundane malignancy of Richard Tull in The Information struck too close to home. Amis has always written about ugliness, but here the ugliness seemed too much like our own. Suddenly we were expected to laugh at ourselves, and there we failed. Removed from the jealous merry-go-round orbiting Amis' 'obscene' advance, The Information is as good a book as he's ever written, certainly his most daring. After the contextual cleverness of Money, London Fields and Time's Arrow, here Amis thwarts our appetite for tart resolution with a wry series of imperfect cadences--like the painful schemes of its protagonist, the book itself audaciously folds, so the reader who came expecting Amis' trademark trickery is ultimately the victim of the trick himself.
As for why Experience restores Amis to favour: well, I suspect sadly we read it as Amis saying "I'm sorry, folks, I was wrong, the follies are all mine".
--Jim Murphy
(To reply, click here.)
Amis' rep in the UK as "Americanized" is misplaced. Night Train doesn't work as well as Money because--well, largely because Amis' humour spans the space between aspiration and desperation. Amis likes to glean the glitzier media & adcult locutions that stick out from gobs of mundane proletalk. Once Amis moves away from his middle C--his perfect pitch for the chatter at the higher end of the English social register and South-of-England yob-talk below--he tends to flounder with characterization. America is the ironic foil for the imitative dreckiness of modern British culture. Amis gets lots of yuks from the ways in which modern Britain strives for--and lamentably botches--American modernity. Part of the appeal of Money is Amis' merciless assault on the deep and irremediably drecky imitativeness of modern Brit culture, and the stubborn tics which betray its depressing, inveterate and distinctively local naff-dom Still, Amis can't chide America with much more than a more ideal version of itself. This, along with Amis' imperfect command of the American language makes his social commentary more generic and less lethal on this side of the pond.
--Steve
(To reply, click here.)
(6/5))