Martin Amis as an essayist

I have before me a collection of essays by Martin Amis. Visiting Mrs. Nabokov and Other Excursions is a departure for the British author. Amis is primarily a novelist, the bulk of his literary output pure fiction. His forays into non-fiction – four collections of essays, a memoir, and a scathing indictment of Lenin and Stalin – are not well-known, a surprising fact given Amis’s ability to generate controversy. His fame, the product of his his parents’ literary preeminence and his own meteoric rise, became infamy as society, disillusioned by his grim assessment of life in twentieth century Britain, sought to erase the message by eradicating the messenger.

If his early work sparked controversy, his later novels were incendiary. Self-righteous outrage over the title of Dead Babies became genuine anger, a facade concealing doubt and despair. Amis’s loose trilogy of books centered in London – Money, London Fields, and The Information – encapsulated the fears of a generation. His entry into late middle-age, the point at which men learn that they inhabit a low-budget horror film, has done nothing to diminish his unparalleled ability to provoke critics. Age has not softened him. He remains the most controversial author working today.

New Amis novels always receive mixed reviews. His dominance encourages skeptics while his sclerotic opinions further divide factions. His popularity among the tabloid readers, society’s most visible schadenfreude merchants, is more curse than blessing. Pedestals always collapse. The literati complain that his new works are devoid of substance. Trapped by comparison they accuse him of trying (and failing) to replicate past successes. New readers are perplexed: “why is he so important?” “why should I care?”

Through all of the praise and all of the invective Martin Amis has persevered. He has managed to navigate the stormy channels of popular opinion by producing work that is undeniably unique. He will not – perhaps cannot – prostitute himself to the plummeting expectations of a society obsessed with instant gratification. He refuses to write for the lowest common denominator. Martin Amis is fighting a war against cliché.

Very few people apprehend the significance of Amis’s work. He does not write for his faceless readership and he does not write for the critic’s poisonous pen. Martin Amis writes for an ideal. He believes writing is intrinsically valuable. Every page stamped with his unmistakable signature is quietly dedicated to Vladimir Nabokov. If Nabokov, writing in his second (or third or fourth) language led the charge against withering novelties and moribund constructions, Amis has taken over as iconoclast-in-chief. Like Updike and Bellow, Nabokov grasped the unalloyed power of the English language. Entering from without he saw what the natives had long ago forgotten: that English was engorged on overripe clichés, trapped in an endless linguistic boneyard. More than anything else, more than anyone else, Amis writes with the knowledge that words will outlive us all. It is an elegant certainty: in the end there will only ever be the words.

This is why Martin Amis is so important. He sees language not as a tool for expressing ideas but as the idea itself. A feeling of great liberation accompanies the knowledge that civilization is working against the clock; time’s arrow points inexorably to the end of all things. Transience carries with it the same joyous freedom felt by Camus’s Sisyphus. The rock was his thing, language is ours. It is our monument and it will be our only testament. Even as the edifices of society crumble into ruins our words will remain: “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair.”

In the end, Amis’s depictions of everyday life, of quotidian activity and innocent pleasure, say more than the lapidary novels critics love to hate. In Visiting Mrs. Nabokov Amis writes about the things he likes. A brief inventory: Greene, Updike, tennis, chess, book festivals, snooker, RoboCop II, John Lennon, being expelled from school, Philip Larkin, Roman Polanski, and Madonna’s sex book. Work is merely labour but passion is the soul of a man. Amis understands this better than anyone. His uses fiercely individual prose to elevate the mundane, the average, and the ordinary. Gone are the hallmarks of high literature: abstruse morality, inevitable tragedy, and the futile search for meaning. His essays contain the literary pyrotechnics for which his fiction is renowned, but they emphasize without pretension the triumph of everyday life.

The heroes of fiction are not like us. We thrive on the simple and the wholly unremarkable. That is why they call it fiction. Martin Amis is a vital essayist because he give weight to everything the literati refuse to justify: in life as in chess the pawns are important.