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If endurance is the only true test of literary quality, then the jury is still out
Cambridge Companion to Martin Amis: Book underscores unresolved difficulty of placement in the literary canonMartin Amis at his London home in 1987. He published his first novel at age 24.
Photograph: Ulf Andersen/Getty ImagesThe first chapter of The Cambridge Companion to Martin Amis is about prose style. Not Middle East politics, literary lineage, celebrity or representations of the Holocaust .
No: Kevin Power, academic, novelist and regular contributor to The Irish Times, kicks off with Amis’s Style and Sentences, in which he draws together descriptions of Amis in terms familiar to any follower of his career: the “pre-eminent prose stylist of his generation”, who wielded “matchless linguistic power”. Such superlatives explain Amis’s reputation, but not the peculiar fascination he continues to exert.
The nature of Amis’s celebrity is part of the difficulty, making any biographical summary near-redundant to any reader of a broadsheet books section. He published his first novel at 24, emerging as a leading writer of his generation, both in novels and non-fiction.
It was not always to be so easy: for the last 25 years of his life, the approved opinion to have about Amis was to dislike him on familiar, soap-operatic grounds: the teeth, the unpardonable success, politics, money, Money, and being a pensionable enfant terrible. He was a tall poppy at 5ft 6in.
Betrayal by Luke Harding: A colourful, entertaining take on Trump, Russia and Ukraine In common with each preceding author-focused title in the Cambridge Companion series, this features essays on key aspects of its subject, contributed by writers of sound academic pedigree. None of the other titles, however, was unveiled with such a level of showbiz: on August 25th, Will Self was the keynote speaker at the book launch in London, attended by eight notable panellists at which a live edition of the My Martin Amis podcast was recorded. It’s difficult to imagine the same wattage of metropolitan glamour announcing an academic study guide for anyone else, compelling the reader to ask what this publication says about Amis’s lasting value and reputation. How might the florid ironist survive a discourse which values earnest concision above all? The book goes some way towards answering the very question its own existence poses.
Indeed, it is very much to the credit of the editor, Gavin Keulks, that no conclusion is imposed on the discussion. His thorough introduction reveals the unresolved difficulty of placing Amis in the canon: the breadth of literary comparisons ranges from FR Leavis to Madonna; the movements invoked span from Victorian realism to meta-modernism. For such a ubiquitous figure, Amis is bizarrely difficult to pin down.
Laudably, Keulks does not avoid the difficulties: Peter Morey’s combative essay on Amis and Islam is explicitly partisan in its defence of Islam following the World Trade Center attacks, and the intemperate response to which Amis contributed. The occasion to reappraise that period is welcome, given the overall implacability which characterised the commentary of the time.
More balance is given in the three chapters analysing Amis’s treatment of gender: for example, Magdalena Mączyńska never loses sight of textual/metatextual function even when reviewing the sticky business of Amis’s paucity of three-dimensional women and the repeated trope of the “unknown little thing”. The Companion will be most appealing to the Amis faithful when dealing with the fiction itself.
James Diedrick emphasises the formal ambition of the early novels, while essays on Money and the London trilogy persuasively argue in tandem with Power that Amis’s linguistic exuberance was inseparable from his diagnosis of Thatcherite Britain, rather than merely decorative display. Style, as Amis always maintained, judges.
Frequently there is a sense that a chapter could be profitably extended : one surprising omission in the treatments of the longer novels is any reference to the “baggy monster” form, frequently mentioned by Amis himself, and which may contribute to the understanding of his own sprawling narratives. Drawing on Emma Parker, Mączyńska argues that Amis’s critique of the patriarchy “is constrained by the gendered binary oppositions and hierarchical structures it maintains”.
But if, as Amis insists, style is intrinsic to perception, it follows that exercises in high style may be intentional monuments of subjectivity rather than failures of inclusivity. Power supports this in his contention that, “‘the stylist’ is a writer who has in an important sense made style the subject”. Style is solipsism; writing is a solitary vice.
Ultimately, Keulks himself provides the most convincing case for the fate of Amis’s reputation, concluding that he “resides comfortably in the belletrist, man of letters tradition”. As the gossip and lesser novels fade from memory, Amis’s essays and reviews will remain: many critics cite The War Against Cliché as a totem permanently stationed on the writing desk, and it may prove his most enduring. Amis frequently said that endurance is the only true test of literary quality.
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