Amis has gift for precision
Martin Amis’s fascination with English is what has made him one of the finest essayists in that language.
In his Author’s Note to The Rub of Time he acknowledges the “natural sin” of indocility and promiscuity that English has, and then gives us a showcase of over 20 years of critical essays and personal reportage presenting these fecund and obstreperous qualities in action.
It’s the resulting liveliness and virtuosity of his writing that makes every piece so charged. Amis is not argumentative, or a rhetorician like his late friend Christopher Hitchens (remembered here in one of the nicer essays). One doesn’t read an Amis essay to be convinced of anything, and when he does go down this road he rarely succeeds. In fact, one can come away from reading The Rub of Time feeling that he’s quite wrong about a lot of things and that he holds many of his loudest and most entrenched opinions on faith alone.
In short, we might say of him what he says (disparagingly) of British Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn, that he is “comfortably wedded to the things he already knows.” Not surprisingly, this leads to some repetition when it comes to matters he has grown obsessive about over the years. Why, for example, does he bring a critique of Islam into a report on a poker tournament in Las Vegas? Because Amis.
Instead of argument, the essays are driven by their penetrating precision of observation. Amis isn’t one for always catching the feeling motivating people or events, but he has a gift for seeing into things — even, or especially, when dealing with subtle mat- ters of style. Hence his fascination not only with authors but politicians and celebrities.
This power of observation may also be why Amis’s essays have a directness and descriptive strength that his fiction often lacks. Amis needs something “out there” to look at, to analyze and examine.
He has the kind of vision that fixes the object of his gaze on a spear of wit or mot juste and his judgments come with a verbal chewiness we have to mumble in our heads. The “murkily iterative menace of Faulkner,” for example, or the “mesmeric glazedness” of J.G. Ballard.
While his literary heroes — Philip Larkin, Vladimir Nabokov and Saul Bellow — are again well represented, The Rub of Time is more of an intellectual and cultural grab-bag than Amis’s previous collection of what were mostly book reviews, The War Against Cliché.
The results, whether talking about politics or Hollywood, Donald Trump or the porn business, are sketches of people and places that seem more authentic, in some cases, than their originals.