Novelist renowned for his rock ’n’ roll sensibility

Martin Amis 1949-2023

British novelist Martin Amis, who brought a rock ’n’ roll sensibility to his stories and lifestyle, has died. aged 73 from cancer of the oesophagus.

Amis, the son of another British writer, Kingsley Amis, was a leading voice among a generation of writers that included his good friend the late Christopher Hitchens, Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie.

Among his best-known works were Money, a satire about consumerism in London, The Information and London Fields, along with his 2000 memoir, Experience. The 1984 novel Money became one of the books that summed up a generation.

“Money doesn’t mind if we say it’s evil, it goes from strength to strength. It’s a fiction, an addiction, and a tacit conspiracy,” he said, in the Novelists in Interview publication, a year after his book came out.

Depicting self-serving greed in Britain under Margaret Thatcher and the US under Ronald Reagan, Money: A Suicide Note, to give it its full title, is regarded as one of the most searing, insightful and bitingly funny English-language novels of the 20th century.

Jonathan Glazer’s adaptation of Amis’ 2014 novel The Zone of Interest premiered on Saturday at the Cannes Film Festival. The film, about a Nazi commandant who lives next to Auschwitz with his family, drew some of the best reviews of the festival.

Martin Louis Amis was born in Oxford on August 25, 1949, the second of three children that Kingsley Amis had with his first wife, Hilary Bardwell.

Kingsley was a huge figure in the literary world when Amis was growing up, riding high on the success of his 1954 novel Lucky Jim. That took the family to Princeton University in the United States, where he taught.

After graduating from Oxford University, Amis published his first novel, The Rachel Papers, in 1973. He followed up with Dead Babies two years later, which marked his first dalliance with morbid humour.

In the years that followed, he enjoyed some success with Success and Other People, before hitting the big time with Money, London Fields and Time’s Arrow.

It was the third of his “London” novels, The Information, published in 1995, which launched him into the gossip columns.

Amis was handed a £500,000 advance, which coincided with him leaving his agent, Pat Kavanagh, the wife of one of his best friends, fellow novelist Julian Barnes. It caused a rift between the two writers.

By then Amis had left his first wife Antonia Phillips, an American academic, with whom he had two sons, to begin a relationship with Isabel Fonseca, an heiress.

The 1990s were the peak of Amis’ literary powers, even when he was being accused of misogyny and, later, Islamophobia – claims he firmly rejected. “I not only think of myself as a feminist but as a gynocrat,” he said in 2018. “I look forward to a utopia where women are in charge.”

Amis and Fonseca, who had two daughters, settled in Brooklyn, New York. Amis also wrote two collections of short stories, six non-fiction books and a memoir.

But, for many fans, the acerbic brilliance of Money makes it his stand-out novel, reflecting perhaps Amis’s own views on the waning powers of the older writer.

“Age waters the writer down,” he wrote in 2009 in a newspaper review of a John Updike book.

“The most terrible fate of all is to lose the ability to impart life to your creations.”

I not only think of myself as a feminist but as a gynocrat. I look forward to a utopia where women are in charge

MARTIN AMIS