Amis, Martin (1949- ) novelist, essayist, screenwriter

Born in Swansea, Wales, and educated in Oxford, Martin Amis is the son of author Kingsley Amis and his wife, Hilly. Amis’s first novel, The Rachel Papers (1973), featuring a lusty teenage narrator, earned him the Somerset Maugham Prize. His second novel, Dead Babies (1975), is an account of a decadent weekend at an English country house that goes horribly awry. Later stories and novels deal with disasters of a more political nature, including the collection Einstein’s Monsters (1987), about nuclear war; Time’s Arrow (1991), a meditation on the Holocaust that created controversy by suggesting memory can distort such historical events; and The Information (1995), in which a frustrated novelist decides to ruin his best friend’s political ambitions.

Amis prefers to depict emotionally trying situations rather than well-adjusted characters. In the murder novel London Fields (1989) he writes, “Who but Tolstoy has really made happiness swing on the page?” Many of Amis’s novels depict characters who are emotionally or spiritually numb at the outset but attain some sort of renewal.

Amis makes use of science fiction and fantasy conventions in much of his work. Dead Babies, for instance, takes place in the near future and features a protagonist who has become rich running an abortion factory. Other People, A Mystery Story (1981) takes place in an afterlife. In Time’s Arrow, time reverses itself, taking an elderly former Nazi back through the 20th century. More conventional is Amis’s screenplay for the 1980 movie Saturn 3, in which a madman and his killer robot attempt to destroy a research station on Saturn’s moon Titan.

Amis has been likened to a rock star by the British press, who watched closely as in recent years he secured unprecedented large advances from publishers, learned he had an illegitimate daughter, divorced his wife, married fellow writer Isabel Fonseca, and expressed a preference for inventive America over stodgy England. In his memoir Experience (2000), Amis laments the exhausting pace that comes with being a famous novelist: “You arrive in each city and present yourself to the media; after that, in the evening . . . you appear at the bookshop and perform.”

Early in Amis’s career, he held editorial positions at the London Times Literary Supplement, the Observer, and the New Statesman. After his novelwriting career began, he regularly contributed essays and reviews to the New York Times Book Review, Vanity Fair, Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, and the New Yorker. Many of these essays are collected in The Moronic Inferno (1986) and Visiting Mrs. Nabokov and Other Excursions (1993). Critic Victoria N. Alexander, writing in Antioch Review, argues that Amis has successfully positioned himself as the intellectual heir of Saul Bellow and Vladimir Nabokov and credits him with “ruthlessly brilliant comedy.”

Critical Analysis. Martin Amis’s career has generated more controversy than his books. His feuds with other writers and critics, the half-million-pound advance he insisted on for The Information, and his relationship with his father, novelist Kingsley Amis, have all conspired to make Amis a larger-than-life figure in contemporary British literature. Although the critical reception of his work has been sharply divided, his impact on younger generations of writers is undeniable.

The sardonic wit and self-conscious verbal play of his novels have earned Amis comparisons with Vladimir Nabokov, while some critics have evoked Jonathan Swift in pointing out his taste for moralistic satire. Like his father, Amis is most interested in the constantly changing state of English society, including all its fads, buzzwords, and trends, which he mercilessly dissects with his sharp, descriptively inventive prose.

His early novels, The Rachel Papers, Dead Babies, and Success, were groundbreaking in their approach and material. They follow the misadventures of England’s depraved youth through joyless drug abuse, sexual perversion, and arbitrary violence. Critics praised Amis’s deliberate attempts to be truly nasty, welcoming the energy and honesty he brought to his depictions of a society in decline.

However, Amis emerged from the shadow of his father’s work with his 1984 novel Money. Taking on subjects such as greed and the increasingly pervasive (and, in Amis’s view, pernicious) American influence on British culture, Amis creates one of his most memorable characters, the ad man John Self. Having gained a reputation by making shocking commercials for pornography and cigarettes, Self takes on a major film production in New York City only to watch it fall apart, to his professional ruin.

In this book, Amis developed the distinctive blend of flashy prose, self-conscious chic, biting social critique, and postmodern play (one of the characters, a snobbish British writer, is named Martin Amis) that has characterized much of his later work. It also established a pattern in his novels of writing about writers. Regardless of his critical reception, however, Amis has left a permanent and substantial mark on succeeding generations of writers.

Other Works by Martin Amis:
- Experience: A Memoir. New York: Talk Miramax Books, 2000.
- Heavy Water and Other Stories. New York: Harmony Books, 1999.
- House of Meetings. New York: Vintage, 2008.
- Money. New York: Viking, 1984.
- Night Train. New York: Harmony Books, 1997. Success. New York: Harmony Books, 1978.