The death of Martin Amis marks the passing of a kind of writer who simply doesn’t exist anymore. Demotic, scabrous, funny, transgressive, always stylish, he was the writer every young man wanted to be.
‘Young man’ because Amis was a quintessentially male writer of his era. Mailer, Roth, Bellow, Updike, Heller, Wolfe were all in his ‘camp’ in a way ( or rather he was in theirs). These were voices that were powerful, confident, satirical and above all readable - Amis more than the rest ( apart from Tom Wolfe). And they were macho. Sex always was writ large, but also the absurdities of the male psyche. Any who thinks Amis actually identified with his anti-heroes - for instance the appalling John Self in ‘Money’ - misunderstood him. But he did give voice to all the doubts and confusions of a kind of man that other writers would simply write - or write off - as a stereotype.
Not that Amis was above stereotyping. When I read ‘Lionel Asbo’, yet another attempt to depict masculine pond-life from an elevated literary viewpoint , Amis’ snobbery about the ‘great unwashed’ - as his father probably called them - was clearly on show. He didn’t bother about the kindness and sympathy showed by an equally funny writer, Alan Bennet, Amis had too many jokes to have at the expense of the lumpenproletariat. Coming from a working class background myself I found this aspect of his somewhat disturbing - but my god it was readable. No one delivered a class insult like Amis.
I admired Amis immensely. He was above all an exciting writer, charged with the kind of frenetic energy of Joseph Heller in his Catch 22 period. . Other than Jonathan Frantzen, there isn’t a writer alive I look forward to with the kind of anticipation I used to look forward to an Amis novel. It was a rock n roll event. And Amis delivered - almost always.
I was always annoyed by the lack of respect he was shown by the literary establishment. He didn’t play by their rules. His prose wasn’t polite and he didn’t mind offending people. Also, he was immensely readable. This would never endear him to the literary brahmins who prefer their prose obscurantist - preferably somewhat unreadable - and ideally in translation. Amis was more American than English in his approach because he was demotic, he wanted people to read his books, and they did. I certainly did.
As if he wasn’t a terrific novelist, he was a magnificent essayist and memoirist. His nonfiction is absolutely up there with his fiction, and ‘Experience’ is probably his masterpiece.
I would say I am going to miss him, but in truth I missed him long before his death. It wasn’t simply that his voice had faltered as a writer - and I think it had - but that the cultural sphere had moved away from him and had left him behind. The kind of passion and scathing satirical wit he possessed was no longer considered de rigeur ( if it ever had been in the first place). We have returned to politeness. Who do we have as our leading novelist today? Well - there isn’t one really, other than perhaps Zadie Smith ( who I think of as being very much - since she is contemporary in her writing and witty and energetic - an inheritor of Amis). Apart from that what have we got? Sally Rooney? Maggie O’ Farrell? Dolly Alderton? All very well and good in their own way, all decent writers - but I doubt posterity will bestow on them anything like the honours that Amis will deserve ( even if he never receives them).