Tell us what you really think Martin
Thirty years of celebration and wit are gathered in these essays, says Claire Lowdon.
The Rub of Time: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump and Other Pieces, 1986-2016 Martin Amis Cape, $40
‘‘There’s something humiliating about reading younger writers,’’ Martin Amis told the Financial Times in 2007. ‘‘You’re more likely to be on to something if you’re reading VS Pritchett, Saul Bellow ... But any young squirt, you’re not going to read except out of sociological curiosity.’’
In 2001, when his bracing essay collection The War Against Cliche appeared, Amis was 51. Now he’s nearly 70, and the critical essays in his new anthology, The Rub of Time, deal exclusively with writers who are either dead or in their 80s.
On the evidence of this collection, Amis himself could do with some deemphasising. All right, there is the piece on Jeremy Corbyn in which he mocks the Labour leader’s lack of formal education. In a feature called You Ask the Questions, he tells one reader to ‘‘f--- off’’ when challenged about ‘‘horrorism’’, the neologism he coined after 9/11. But the famous pugnacity is not the standout feature. By his own definition, Amis isn’t a rebel. ‘‘This is the way to spot a rebel,’’ he writes in a moving piece about Christopher Hitchens. ‘‘They give no deference or even civility to their supposed superiors... they also give no deference or even civility to their demonstrable inferiors.’’
Deference and civility are everywhere in these pages. The portrait that emerges is of someone sweetly filial, both literally and literarily. In the Hitchens essay, Amis twits his friend for ‘‘raucously hostile reviews’’ of books by Bellow, Updike and Roth. ‘‘I found myself muttering the piece of schoolmarm advice I had given Christopher in person, more than once: Don’t cheek your elders.’’
Or anyone else, it would seem. ‘‘Enjoying being insulting is a youthful corruption of power,’’ he wrote in The War Against Cliche .In The Rub of Time: ‘‘Insulting people in your middle age is undignified, and looks more and more demented as you head towards the twilight.’’ Instead we have Amis the celebrator, Amis the fanboy, even, in a charming piece on Jane Austen. And mostly, the literary essays will leave you educated, enlightened, entertained.
The criticism is leavened with assorted pieces of reportage, sports writing and political commentary. The reportage in particular is extremely good. Highlights include a tour of the porn industry and an account of losing big in Las Vegas. On sport, Amis is at his funniest, which is saying something: I defy anyone not called Tim to get to the end of the Henman-inspired essay, The Tims, without a helpless guffaw.
Martin Amis is a great writer and a great reader. I wish he’d stop playing it safe and tell us what he really thinks about what’s being written now.
– The Sunday Times