They were a post-punk crew that migrated from the UK to the US, including Hitchens, Tina Brown and Salman Rushdie.ĬHELTENHAM, ENGLAND - OCTOBER 12: Salman Rushdie, 2019 Booker Prize, shortlisted author, at the Cheltenham Literature Festival 2019 on Octoin Cheltenham, England. Like earlier eras of literary heroes, Martin Amis traveled in a generational pack. It is the rare journalism that inspires regular re-reading, unlocking new insights, while waging a war against cliché. Nabokov” does not feel dated, despite being written decades ago. The prose from his non-fiction collections “The Moronic Inferno” and “Visiting Mrs. As a writer, I took his work off the shelf not just for pleasure but for renewal, recharging the creative adrenal gland when I was blocked and pacing the floors. It drove him from tragicomic stories of modern folly in pursuit of sex and money to the subjects of Hitler’s Holocaust and Stalin’s gulags, in his works “Time’s Arrow,” “Koba the Dread,” “House of Meetings” and “Zone of Interest.” “Ideology brings about a disastrous fusion,” he wrote, “that of violence and righteousness.”Īs a reader, the music of Amis’ best sentences stuck with me. ’”īeneath the virtuosic riffs, you could hear an author trying to defy the undertow of despair. Women–and they can be wives, lovers, gaunt muses, fat nurses, obsessions, devourers, exes, nemeses–will wake and turn to these men and ask, with female need-to-know, ‘What is it?” And the men will say, ‘Nothing. Or something like that…Swing low in your weep ship, with your tear scans and sob probes, and you would mark them. “Cities at night, I feel, contain men who cry in their sleep and then say Nothing. (Photo by David Levenson/Getty Images) David Levenson/Getty Imagesīritish author Martin Amis dead at 73, his publisher says The opening paragraph from his novel “The Information” shows Amis in full plume:Īuthor Martin Amis poses for a portrait at the Cheltenham Literature Festival held at Cheltenham Town Hall on Octoin Cheltenham, England. Gazing through shades, he could capture the sweep of skylines and dark alleys simultaneously. His voice was unmistakable, the sound of all synapses firing with nicotine precision, diamond sharp and darkly funny. He was not an overtly political writer – his markers were literary, from his father Kingsley Amis to Philip Larkin to Vladimir Nabokov and Saul Bellow, all of whom made frequent appearances in his work, with Martin acting as both witness and keeper of the flame. Martin Amis was one of our last literary heroes and his death at age 73 – from the esophageal cancer that also claimed the life of his best friend Christopher Hitchens – feels like a bookend to an era.Īn impossibly cool and erudite observer, he chronicled transatlantic culture from the rise of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan through 9/11 to the whiplash between Barack Obama and Donald Trump in novels and essays.
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