Books
The tyrant of cool
by R Carl Shuker
Literary critics in England have lined up to give Martin Amis a sound thrashing over his latest novel – a bleak satire of lewd royals and sleazebag paparazzi. But Amis is still cool, still funny, and still, occasionally, fascinating.
Yellow Dog, by Martin Amis (Jonathan Cape, $59.95).
It is the fork in the path when writer number two attempts evisceration of established writer number one. Everyone is asking who, exactly, is Tibor Fischer? And the answer is, he’s not the writer of this, or that book, any longer; he’s the man who described Martin Amis’s new novel, Yellow Dog, as “like your favourite uncle being caught in a school playground, masturbating”.
This has been cast as “a literary feud” reminiscent of Amis and long-time friend Julian Barnes’s famous falling-out. Amis had two agents after he finished The Information back in 1995, and he wanted a big advance to pay for a World Trade Center of dental disasters – gum disease, a jawful of useless teeth and a tumour – so he dropped his English agent, Barnes’s wife. Barnes ended the letter that ended their friendship with two words: “The words consist of seven letters. Three of them are fs.”
Well, maybe it’s not so serious as that. But it’s a fork in the path for Fischer, nonetheless, because Amis – ageing, endlessly alliterative, aggravatingly self-assured – always seems to survive. He’s in it for the long haul; he’s still cool, still funny, still flawed, but still, occasionally, fascinating.
In the memoir Experience Amis likens his younger self to Hamlet’s chattering, vain and meddlesome Osrick. It is astute self-knowledge, and readily applies to a lot of the earlier fiction. Osrick is -“spacious in the possession of dirt” says the prince – that is, rich, privileged and nepotistically advanced.
Amis’s love of and obsession with Nabokov manifested early in the overwrought, literarily priggish brutality of his style. No sentence could be left alone, until, as in much of Other People: A Mystery Story, and Dead Babies, the weary, put-upon reader simply starts to skim over whole “golden” paragraphs of feverish overblown description bathetically juxtaposed with spastically rendered street slang and a slew of dropped aitches, on the hunt for some kind of emotional touchstone, a joke or two, some general narrative thrust. Nabokovian prose sparkles, and although all his life he has aimed at peerdom, the Amisian mode is usually a harsh glitter.
But the contemporary Amis is not simply the son of any of his “fathers”: Kingsley, Nabokov, Bellow, Updike. A case in point: Nabokov tells us, with truth, economy and elegance, of a cloud of gnats that “darn” the air. This, from Yellow Dog: “The wasp came weaving towards him the way they do, like a punchy old southpaw, with its half-remembered moves, its ponderous fakes and feints.”
This is excellent, but its also excellent later Amis: there’s even, for once, a little poignancy (“half-remembered”), and the simile, instead of effete, is street. The observation is beautiful, and true, and, thankfully, restrained (and yet it must be said: automatically we do think of Nabokov when we read Amis at his best, as if all his achievements within the sentence represent some kind of homage).
The point that Fischer, in his fairly successful bid for temporary notoriety, has missed, is that far from being “a novel unworthy of his talent”, Yellow Dog actually represents a maturity and economy; the summit of one of the three peaks of the Amisian mode: this being the black comic satire; the second being the metafictional experiment in form (1991’s Booker-nominated Time’s Arrow), and the third being the literary review, as collected in 2001’s intense and exhilarating The War Against Cliché.
Like Night Train, Other People (in itself something between a nod and a bow to Nabokov’s Transparent Things), London Fields, and the almost-unreadable (but timely) 80s satire Money, all take a kind of metaphysical paradox or problem as their narrative motors. In the superb über-noir Night Train it’s the suicide of a person who has “a perfect life” – and who shoots herself in the head. Three times. In Other People it’s the return to life of a murdered woman as an amnesiac, who, as she grows from a state of innocence to the corrupt and shitty world of experience (the oft-repeated leitmotif of the memoir), reverses the trajectory of her former identity and becomes again the woman who must be murdered.
But it wasn’t until Time’s Arrow that Amis found a case where his somewhat transparent experiments in form would suit the material: the (admittedly a little hokey) conceit was that of a soul narrating a life backwards, beginning with extinction in death and relentlessly travelling towards birth. But it made a punchy, brutal kind of sense when the bemused, elegantly prosodic soul was narrating the travails of a Nazi “doctor” – from his death, postwar concealment in America, to Europe, to the Anus Mundi of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, the reanimation and unironic “healing” of the Jews (backwards, they are revived in the gas chambers, given miraculous curatives for horrific ills by Mengele et al, Reichsbank gold is charitably turned into fillings for their teeth, they grow fat, are loaded into cattle cars, and sent home), thence to his youth and finally, his birth. A small book, elegant, disturbing, its content utterly alive and responsive to its form; Time’s Arrow, the reviews, and the memoir, will be Amis’s lasting legacy.
And Yellow Dog, in a completely different way, is pretty good, too.
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