I wrote this dissing Amis junior before the meme, but it seemed a good excuse to post it. Scroll down for the actual paragraph from the book. * Timely because apparently they're making a film of it with David Cronenberg, whose films I also loathe. Remind me not to see it.
So as I'm passing on the bus, I notice another art gallery has opened up in Cambridge Heath Road, the Keith Talent gallery.
Keith Talent, I muse, that rings a bell... then I realise it's because it namechecks the anti-hero in the book I'm currently reading, Martin Amis' London Fields (I picked it up because I thought it was set in London Fields, but naturally, it's set in Notting Hill. I feel a bit cheated.)So someone has picked up on that - though why you'd call your art gallery after a fictional, and pretty philistine character, who is not even based in London Fields at all, is not clear.
I don't know why I keep persisting with Martin Amis, I don't really like his books. Sure he writes a mean sentence, but you often wonder what he's flannelling on about. His writing is something like getting this huge, lavishly wrapped present with gold ribbons on it, unwrapping it and finding an empty box. (Whilst Mark Haddon, say, is like someone handing you a brown paper bag and finding a diamond necklace inside.)
He seems to jump up and down shouting 'look at me! look at me! Look at my lovely sentences! Aren't I great!' whilst forgetting he's actually meant to be telling you a story.
It's a flaw that many postmodern writers seem to have - I had a feeling at college that I was always too unsure of myself to express, that all these writers like Robert Coover and Donald Barthelme would employ this tricksy meta-fictionalzzzzzzzz sorry nodded off there for a minute devices deconstructing the classic narrative, because they didn't really know how to write your basic plot.
Here, for example, old Martin starts off with a mystery structure, which should be quite intriguing and suspenseful, except we already know the murderer and the victim. He also has a metafictional narrator who is a character within the story, a failed author, commenting on how it's developing all the way through ('Look at me! I'm a writer! Aren't I clever!')
At one point, this narrator remarks 'I'm not one of those excitable types who get caught making things up... I can embellish, I can take certain liberties. Yet to invent the bald facts of a life (for example) would be quite beyond my powers.' Hmmmm...
What's my major problem? (Apart from the fact that through the women characters, he comes across like one of those men who can't quite believe that women are real human beings with an independent existence, as opposed to miraculous animated blowup sex dolls) It's as if his work is written by a teenager trying to be profound, but with no actual experience except vicariously through reading novels ... These books are all about... books. Though they'd like you to think they are all about Life.
* When she got home she slipped out of her coat and twirled into bed still wearing her high heels. When she awoke around midnight she bathed and then compulsively cooked herself a bushel of pasta and sat eating it and watching television and drinking nearly two bottles of Barolo.
He called the day after, which was just as well.
10 comments:
i don't like Martin Amis one little bit.
Oh good.
He's so smug too.
I recently read "Money" (which I found in a second-hand bookshop)and realised that it wasn't so much a book about books but a book about how clever Martin Amis thinks he is.
I'll join the anti-Amis clique.
we'll have him running for the hills in no time.
I like your critique a lot Annie - it has made me think about Amis more than perhaps I should have done in the past. I have read most if not all of his books including his autobiography. I seem to remember disliking London Fields the most out of my collection and liking Dead Babies and Times Arrow the best. Times Arrow is brilliant. Re: the quoted sentence - how on earth can you 'compulsively cook a bushel of pasta' - crap and the description of a bushel makes me feel sick for some reason - I guess it is the unnecessary description more akin to Jilly Cooper perhaps? I always thought Will Self looked up to and tried to be Martin Amis - reading that one paragraph has made me rather presumptively surmise that perhaps Self may be the better writer....but who am I to judge?
Even Experience turns out to be less about his actual, you know, experience, and more about how he can co-opt the more dramatic experiences in other people's lives and shallow-ise them.
He has been a cultural disappointment.
Having said that, he has been interesting. The Islam stuff. He hasn't been predictable.
I've never read any Martin but I have "Lucky Jim" by his father. I couldn't relate to it as I've never been to university - so much for that type of humour!
Why do you dislike Cronenberg? His more recent stuff like Existenz and Spider were fantastic. There's near-subliminal messages on many levels in his films, I like trying to suss what they're about. He's the thinking man's director (ok, the non-uni thinking man's director).
yeah, i like Cronenberg almost as much as i dislike Amis.
I've only read Yellow Dog and while it was fairly contentless, there was one sentence about a corpse waiting with its teeth bared that blew me away. And some decent ideas.
On the subject of properly done po-mo, I never miss a chance to recommend House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski. It has all sorts of linguistic and visual trickery going on, but crucially it also has a cracking and relatively straightforward plot. And it's genuinely scary, which isn't something I get a lot from books.
Re Cronenberg... I'm not so much a fan of his omgwtf kind of stuff, but his last two films were mondo to the max (including the best and least glamorous fight scene in film history).
Alan - hurrah!
Rosie - yes he's crying into his champagne in his Holland Park mansion as we speak.
RoMo - cheers, my dear. To my shame, I've never read any Will Self, though I saw him at a book launch once and he seemed kind of cute, nice and funny. I've read the odd article and at least he comes across as more human and warm - not a very literary way to judge I know.
Hi, Miss Schlegel. Looking at Wikipedia now, it says he claims Jane Austen as an influence, which I would never have guessed.
Istvanski, he's good at conjuring the 80s Thatcher era I guess... I don't dispute that Cronenberg is a clever film-maker. I guess the words 'unpleasant' and 'graphic' sum it up for me.
Emordino, that sounds great, I will check it out. I realise I made it sound like I don't like any kind of style or ambition in writing, or any postmodernism, but that's not true - David Mitchell for example blows me away, but he wraps this stylish writing around actual content. I also really love Borges, his metafictional stories really make your mind boggle...
Post a Comment