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The War Against Cliche: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000
Is there anything that Martin Amis can’t write about? In this virtuosic, career-spanning collection he takes on James Joyce and Elvis Presley, Nabokov and English football, Jane Austen and Penthouse Forum, William Burroughs and Hillary Clinton. But above all, Amis is concerned with literature, and with the deadly cliches–not only of the pen, but of the mind and the heart.
In The War Against Cliché, Amis serves up fresh assessments of the classics and plucks neglected masterpieces off their dusty shelves. He tilts with Cervantes, Dickens and Milton, celebrates Bellow, Updike and Elmore Leonard, and deflates some of the most bloated reputations of the past three decades. On every page Amis writes with jaw-dropping felicity, wit, and a subversive brilliance that sheds new light on everything he touches.
In The War Against Cliché, Amis serves up fresh assessments of the classics and plucks neglected masterpieces off their dusty shelves. He tilts with Cervantes, Dickens and Milton, celebrates Bellow, Updike and Elmore Leonard, and deflates some of the most bloated reputations of the past three decades. On every page Amis writes with jaw-dropping felicity, wit, and a subversive brilliance that sheds new light on everything he touches.
531 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 26, 2001
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3302 people want to read
About the author
Martin Amis
116 books3,027 followersMartin Amis was an English novelist, essayist, and short story writer. His works included the novels Money, London Fields and The Information.
The Guardian writes that "all his critics have noted what Kingsley Amis [his father] complained of as a 'terrible compulsive vividness in his style... that constant demonstrating of his command of English'; and it's true that the Amis-ness of Amis will be recognisable in any piece before he reaches his first full stop."
Amis's raw material is what he sees as the absurdity of the postmodern condition with its grotesque caricatures. He has thus sometimes been portrayed as the undisputed master of what the New York Times has called "the new unpleasantness."
The Guardian writes that "all his critics have noted what Kingsley Amis [his father] complained of as a 'terrible compulsive vividness in his style... that constant demonstrating of his command of English'; and it's true that the Amis-ness of Amis will be recognisable in any piece before he reaches his first full stop."
Amis's raw material is what he sees as the absurdity of the postmodern condition with its grotesque caricatures. He has thus sometimes been portrayed as the undisputed master of what the New York Times has called "the new unpleasantness."
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March 18, 2023
Here it is, all 500 pages, a book containing the essays and reviews written between the years 1971 and 2000 by the inimitable Martin Amis. Thus we have the literary artist as a younger man - in those years Martin was between the ages of 21 and 50.
Oh, the writers and subjects you will meet. There's all here, the dads (and some of the moms), that is, the established writers of the previous generation and beyond - V.S. Pritchett, Brian Aldiss, John Fowles, Philip Larkin, Malcolm Lowry, Gore Vidal and many more. Sidebar: other than a few passing references, there is absolutely no mention of Kingsley Amis.
Since Martin is all about colorful style and penetrating insight, I would like to share my enthusiasm for this book by linking my comments to direct quotes. I recognize my choices are a bit eclectic but, hey, I'm the one writing the review here.
The Philosopher's Pupil by Iris Murdoch
"Miss Murdoch's style was never elegant, but is was crisp and precise, capable of preserving her macabre and often beautiful perceptions. . . . Miss Murdoch believes in her characters - the good, the bad, the ugly - and it is a belief ignited by love. That love is palpable, inordinate, scarily intense. It is far too strong a force to tolerate the thwarting intercession of art."
Methinks Martin has a bit of irony going here when he casts an author's love for her characters in opposition to the steely demands of art.
The Day of Creation by J. G. Ballard
"Ballard often seems to be on the very crest of modernity. But there is something antique about him too, something prelapsarian. For all its ambition and Freudian grandeur, The Day of Creation is an adventure story, as was Hello America. Further paradoxes include the fact that despite his acuity and wit, his deep ironies, Ballard remains an essentially humorless writer. Humor is available to the man, but it is denied access to the page."
In another part of the essay Martin Amis notes that if a reader doesn't go along with Ballard's obsession (in this novel, obsessing over the river), the entire work can become very boring very quickly. After reading The Day of Creation myself, that was exactly my sentiment.
Abba Abba by Anthony Burgess
"Burgess cares about his prose and works hard on it. Every sentence is sure to contain some oddity or other - frequently as a result of will, you feel, rather than of inspiration or even of appropriateness. Burgess starts a sentence, puts another clause in, ends it just like that, without the courtesy of an and."
In his assessing a writer's work, Martin delves into the details of how language is employed in all its various phases. Since an Anthony Burgess novel explores and expands language as much as it does the subject, that's the lion's share of the focus of Martin's review, including how a novelist will divide their own creative energies between character and motive on the one side and wit, ideas and language on the other.
Riding the Rap by Elmore Leonard
"We are in a kind of marijuana tense (Dawn saying), creamy, wandering, weak-verbed. Such sentences seem to open up a lag in time, through which Mr. Leonard easily slides, gaining entry to his players' hidden minds. He doesn't just show you what these people say and do. He shows you where they breath."
Bull's eye, Martin! That's exactly my experience reading an Elmore Leonard novel - you instantly get in the head of his slimeball characters and live and breath with them. And the aftereffects are lasting, even occasionally staggering: an Elmore Leonard character sticks with you for more days and weeks than you might wish, if not consciously, than certainly unconsciously.
"He understands the post-modern world - the world of wised-up rabble and zero authenticity. His characters are equipped not with obligingly suggestive childhoods or case-histories, but with a cranial jukebox of situation comedies and talk shows and advertising jingles, their dreams and dreads all mediated and secondhand. Terrible and pitiable (and often downright endearing), they are simply junk souls: quarter-pounders with cheese."
Again Martin hits the target. With Elmore Leonard, there isn't a refined artist or literary writer or sensitive aesthete within miles - at the opposite end of the literary spectrum from Henry James or Vladimir Nabokov.
Cities of the Red Night by William S. Burroughs
"To begin with, Cities of the Red Night reads like a new departure for William Burroughs: it has plot, it has characters, and you can just about tell what's going on. This is daring stuff indeed, coming from the zap-poet of drug-highs and sex-deaths, the militant Beat, the author of Naked Lunch and six further experiments in hallucinatory chaos."
Martin acknowledges the ways in which authors scope out their literary turf - and with oh so much pizzazz, spice, bite, piquancy, sparkle and vigor. True, sometimes a vinegary vigor but each paragraph is worth the read and reread.
"The truth is that for all his sophistication Burroughs remains a primitive, extreme, almost psychotic artist. His work is in many respects impenetrably clandestine, and frighteningly personal."
Tell it like it is, M.A.!. I can't imagine one author speaking with more admiration of another as Martin does here.
Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism by John Updike
"There is a trundling quality, increasingly indulged: too much trolly-car nostalgia and baseball-mitt Americana, too much ancestor worship, too piety. In his collected art criticism. Just Looking, Updike often seemed happier with the hack than with the genius."
Martin doesn't hesitate from taking a writer, even a great writer, to task. That's my own sense with John Updike - such a fantastic spinner of words and phrases, characters and moods, short tales and long novels, but standing behind it all there's frequently a man having more in common with Norman Rockwell than Jackson Pollock or Barnett Newman.
The Complete Short Stories by Franz Kafka
Kafka saw the artist's isolation as Christlike - an infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing, yet capable of wincing laughter."
Lovers of Kafka will enjoy Martin's review here touching on such Kafka tales as Before the Law and An Imperial Message. I enjoyed every single one of Martin's sentences on Kafka.
Whenever I need a little juice to fuel my own writing, I simply open this Martin collection and begin reading. Not long thereafter, I have the needed impetus to sit down at the old computer and begin writing my own review. Thanks, Martin!
April 2, 2024
When I read a wide-ranging, sensitive, incisive collection of criticism like this, I sometimes like to amuse myself by imagining how great the author would have been on Goodreads. Martin Amis, though, would have had no time for it. Already when this collection came out in 2000, he could see the way things were going: ‘A brief consultation of the Internet will show,’ he says, that ‘everyone has become a literary critic – or at least a book-reviewer,’ the caesura serving to underline the fact that these are not necessarily the same thing.
What he hated, in particular, was the tendency (more advanced now than ever) to react on a reflexively ethical basis to writing – to complain about Kerouac's sexism or Conrad's racism or whatever it might be. To make criticism into a kind of register of feelings rather than anything analytical.
For Amis, what mattered – pretty much the only thing that mattered – was the quality of the writing. What the writing was about came a distant second. Which is not to say that he doesn't talk about ethics, only that he talks about it in the context of the phrase-making itself: ‘style is morality. Style judges.’
‘No writer can determine what may appeal to his imagination,’ he argues at one point, ‘and it is simply philistine to arraign him for the things he happens to write about best.’ This is offered in defence of Angus Wilson, but the point applies even more justly to a writer like Nabokov (whom Amis half-reveres), or indeed to any number of right-thinking novelists who wrote, in Amis's opinion, with insufficient skill.
Like many a reviewer, he perhaps finds it easier to condemn the wicked than to convey the qualities of the virtuous. Certainly his censure is often more instructive than his praise. The close reading of Andrew Harvey's A Journey in Ladakh is typical:
…which are things up with which Amis will not put. He takes Michael Crichton to task on the same basis (‘You will listen in “stunned silence” to an “unearthly cry” or a “deafening roar”. Raptors are “rapacious”. Reptiles are “reptilian”. Pain is “searing”’), although his sensitivity to platitude does sometimes seem a little overcranked: is it really a cliché for A. Alvarez to say that someone ‘winked meaningfully’? And if so, is this really any worse than some of Amis's own terminology (‘meaningless babble’, ‘flashes of panic’)?
Still, to his infinite credit, he never confuses style for traditional grammar. Here is a sentence from his review of Thomas Harris's Hannibal:
A more pretentious writer would have said ‘We scum’, blunting the tone considerably. But for Amis, a fine readable sentence always trumps a strictly grammatical one – which may sound obvious, but it's not something that can be said of most critic-practitioners, from Orwell and EB White to David Foster Wallace. ‘Never mind the p's and q's of fine prose,’ Amis says elsewhere. ‘Whatever works…’
His direct criticisms are often unapologetically blunt. ‘The sentence is a wreck: ugly, untrue and illiterate,’ is one comment he makes while reviewing Alexander Theroux. I liked this directness better, though, than the sarcasm, which at its worst has more than a hint of the sneer behind it. ‘Seldom in his fiction has Fowles played host to humour, gaiety or brio,’ he will write. ‘Here, alas, he lets his hair down.’ In another review: ‘Possibly Mr Cornwell has something of interest to say about the verse, but…’
The uncertainty in the second example, and that ‘alas’ in the first, are pure affectation. This kind of patrician high-handedness would be unbearable from someone on Goodreads. But Martin Amis, of course, is…well, he's Martin Amis, isn't he. Sometimes his tone leans a little too heavily on this status as a famous novelist. It's more apparent in his early essays from the 1970s, I think; by the later work, in the 90s, you can sense a confidence to be more directly judgemental, and also, perhaps, a greater generosity in the judgements.
There is plenty to disagree with Amis about in here. His tastes in general are very much skewed to the grand old men of the literary canon; he is not the sort of critic you would turn to if you want to be uncovering new women's voices in Mauretania. And his thinking did evolve beyond what's shown in these pieces: he came to have more complex feelings on Nabokov, for example, and the literary treatment of paedophilia.
But what he does convince you of is the ground on which such battles must be fought: prose style, the talent at putting words in front of each other, and the discipline of demonstrating this through direct quotation. Look directly at the text, and within that look directly at the words themselves. I found the commitment to this conviction exhilarating, inspiring and – since he died – in rather short supply.
What he hated, in particular, was the tendency (more advanced now than ever) to react on a reflexively ethical basis to writing – to complain about Kerouac's sexism or Conrad's racism or whatever it might be. To make criticism into a kind of register of feelings rather than anything analytical.
The reviewer calmly tolerates the arrival of the new novel or slim volume, defensively settles into it, and then sees which way it rubs him up. The right way or the wrong way. The results of this contact will form the data of the review, without any reference to the thing behind. And the thing behind, I am afraid, is talent, and the canon, and the body of knowledge we call literature.
For Amis, what mattered – pretty much the only thing that mattered – was the quality of the writing. What the writing was about came a distant second. Which is not to say that he doesn't talk about ethics, only that he talks about it in the context of the phrase-making itself: ‘style is morality. Style judges.’
‘No writer can determine what may appeal to his imagination,’ he argues at one point, ‘and it is simply philistine to arraign him for the things he happens to write about best.’ This is offered in defence of Angus Wilson, but the point applies even more justly to a writer like Nabokov (whom Amis half-reveres), or indeed to any number of right-thinking novelists who wrote, in Amis's opinion, with insufficient skill.
Like many a reviewer, he perhaps finds it easier to condemn the wicked than to convey the qualities of the virtuous. Certainly his censure is often more instructive than his praise. The close reading of Andrew Harvey's A Journey in Ladakh is typical:
There are, for example, ‘mangy flearidden dogs nosing for food in the gutters’. My first thought, on reading this, was that Harvey hadn't really looked at the dogs – ‘mangy’ and ‘flearidden’ are received, automatic adjectives…
…which are things up with which Amis will not put. He takes Michael Crichton to task on the same basis (‘You will listen in “stunned silence” to an “unearthly cry” or a “deafening roar”. Raptors are “rapacious”. Reptiles are “reptilian”. Pain is “searing”’), although his sensitivity to platitude does sometimes seem a little overcranked: is it really a cliché for A. Alvarez to say that someone ‘winked meaningfully’? And if so, is this really any worse than some of Amis's own terminology (‘meaningless babble’, ‘flashes of panic’)?
Still, to his infinite credit, he never confuses style for traditional grammar. Here is a sentence from his review of Thomas Harris's Hannibal:
How does it go for them – for Count and Countess Lecter? Us scum, of course, are given only a few tantalizing glimpses.
A more pretentious writer would have said ‘We scum’, blunting the tone considerably. But for Amis, a fine readable sentence always trumps a strictly grammatical one – which may sound obvious, but it's not something that can be said of most critic-practitioners, from Orwell and EB White to David Foster Wallace. ‘Never mind the p's and q's of fine prose,’ Amis says elsewhere. ‘Whatever works…’
His direct criticisms are often unapologetically blunt. ‘The sentence is a wreck: ugly, untrue and illiterate,’ is one comment he makes while reviewing Alexander Theroux. I liked this directness better, though, than the sarcasm, which at its worst has more than a hint of the sneer behind it. ‘Seldom in his fiction has Fowles played host to humour, gaiety or brio,’ he will write. ‘Here, alas, he lets his hair down.’ In another review: ‘Possibly Mr Cornwell has something of interest to say about the verse, but…’
The uncertainty in the second example, and that ‘alas’ in the first, are pure affectation. This kind of patrician high-handedness would be unbearable from someone on Goodreads. But Martin Amis, of course, is…well, he's Martin Amis, isn't he. Sometimes his tone leans a little too heavily on this status as a famous novelist. It's more apparent in his early essays from the 1970s, I think; by the later work, in the 90s, you can sense a confidence to be more directly judgemental, and also, perhaps, a greater generosity in the judgements.
There is plenty to disagree with Amis about in here. His tastes in general are very much skewed to the grand old men of the literary canon; he is not the sort of critic you would turn to if you want to be uncovering new women's voices in Mauretania. And his thinking did evolve beyond what's shown in these pieces: he came to have more complex feelings on Nabokov, for example, and the literary treatment of paedophilia.
But what he does convince you of is the ground on which such battles must be fought: prose style, the talent at putting words in front of each other, and the discipline of demonstrating this through direct quotation. Look directly at the text, and within that look directly at the words themselves. I found the commitment to this conviction exhilarating, inspiring and – since he died – in rather short supply.
June 3, 2011
Here's another piece about that chick who's dying in her bookstore because, according to the NYRB, she's allergic to Martin Amis. Poor girl... Well, I have my problems too, sister, but I don't have yours. I'm not allergic to Martin Amis. I am addicted to Martin Amis.
Those of my Booksters who have known me too long now are aware that I have a very serious and embarrassing Martin Amis Problem. It reminds one of youthful compulsions towards hedonism, vice, wildly inappropriate men, and all those thrilling pursuits that ultimately made one feel sick and terrible about oneself, yet remained too alluring to avoid for long, resulting in a torturous and conflicted cycle of repelled abstinence followed by glorious, shaming relapse... Of course, this particular cliche would be more comforting had I actually given up everything harmful and remained addicted now only to Martin Amis's writing. But it's more that I've resigned myself to my countless other moral shortcomings and failures of will, and this is simply the only one that still seems worthy of note.
I've never read Amis's criticism before, and by the second page of the Foreword, I was grateful for that. As noted elsewhere, I've found all his novels that I've read to be deeply flawed. Here, though, I felt like I was mainlining shit so good it might have killed me if I'd started on it too soon, before I'd worked my way up on the more adulterated, low-grade stuff. I'm aware this guy's style hasn't done it for a lot of people (including, famously, his own father!), but I love the way he writes so much that I swear it gets me high. I actually wish I owned this book so I could underline my favorite sentences -- and I am NOT the type of girl who does that, I HATE book vandalism! See what Martin Amis does to me? I'm a mess!
Uh, this is a lot of gushing considering that I just started this thing. We'll see how far I get and whether I retain my susceptibility or develop a tolerance soon and start totally hating him.
In any case, if The War Against Cliche's publication didn't predate this website, I might have thought Amis had somehow encountered my own work:
A brief consultation of the Internet will show that... everyone has become a literary critic -- or at least a book-reviewer. Democratization has made one inalienable gain: equality of the sentiments. I think Gore Vidal said this first, and he said it, not quite with mockery, but with lively scepticism. He said that, nowadays, nobody's feelings are more authentic, and thus more important, than anybody else's. This is the new credo, the new privilege. It is a privilege much exercised in the contemporary book-review, whether on the Web or in the literary pages. The reviewer calmly tolerates the arrival of the new novel or slim volume, defensively settles into it, and then sees which way it rubs him up. The right way or the wrong way. The results of this contact will form the data of the review, without any reference to the thing behind. And the thing behind, I am afraid, is talent, and the canon, and the body of knowledge we call literature.
Probably some readers are getting the impression that I think these developments are to be deplored. Not so. It is the summit of idleness to deplore the present, to deplore actuality...
Wait, am I just slavishly transcribing the Foreword to this book like some kind of mindless fangirl? Yes. I am.
Literature is the great garden that is always there and is open to everyone twenty-four hours a day. Who tends it? The old tour guides and sylviculturists, the wardens, the fuming parkies with their sweat-soaked serge: these have died off. If you do see an official, a professional, nowadays, then he's likely to be a scowl in a labcoat, come to flatten a forest or decapitate a peak. The public wanders, with its ohs and ahs, its groans and jeers, its million opinions. The wanderers feed the animals, they walk on the grass, they step in the flowerbeds. But the garden never suffers. It is, of course, Eden; it is unfallen and needs no care.
I want to copulate and reproduce myself with this man's brain. I'm sorry if that's gross, but it's really how I feel.
--------
The Actual Review (such as it is)
While reading this, I kept wondering how Martin Amis feels when impressed-but-speed-dialing blurbists laud his "mastery of language." It should in theory turn his stomach, but does hearing stuff like that about yourself ever get old? I would personally welcome any such compliments, no matter how shopworn, but then, not being Martin Amis, I gotta take what I can get.
Naturally I feel an "overpowering urge" to review this solely in the language of cliche, but I don't have the energy tonight for a high concept and this book's got to go back to the library. I haven't freaked out about a book this way in a pretty long time, though, and I want to record some thoughts so that I remember why, because I've realized that if I don't write something about a book then two weeks later it's like I never read it.
The War Against Cliché is one of the greatest titles, and ideas, that I've ever heard. It actually makes me freak out and want to start screaming just from how great it is. As my own previous comments below suggest, this was my response to a number of Martin Amis's lines: they sent me into some apoplectic shock where I was so overwhelmed with joy and awe that my brain shut down non-essential functions and all I could do was repeat the words to myself and go, "Aaaaghh! AAAGHH!" I can't think of many other writers who have provoked this in me, and I'm not sure if the guy's stuff has this effect on other people.
The War Against Cliché made me feel like an illiterate loser, but I kept reminding myself that this shit is Martin Amis's job. He reads and writes books for a living, it's, like, his thing. When I chilled out and stopped being so intimidated, I settled into enjoying the plump fruits of someone else's well-read labo(u)rs. Honestly I have read very few professional book reviews in my time, and almost certainly none that I enjoyed this much. It made me want to become a better book reporter -- sort of. Well, it made me want to be more responsible about quoting from what I read, instead of always returning the book to the library or leaving it at work and then banging something out later based on my half-drunk recollections.
Well, unfortunately I am tired from three hours at the gym tonight, and I am not going to write a competent review of this book. But I AM going to quote Amis, and then sit here and freak out. He's at his best when he's hanging off the side of the platform, acting goofy and obnoxious and showing off his mad skillz; the more straightforward and admiring pieces in here were predictably more dull, and I enjoyed the Michael Crichton end of the spectrum far more than his paeans to Nabokov. Amis's own high style often shines brightest while he's reviewing the mass-market books that most people actually read. He writes that the author of Silence of the Lambs, Thomas Harris, "has done what all popular writers hope to do: he has created a parallel world, a terrible antiterra, airless and arcane but internally coherent."
AARRGHH!!! See, somehow that sentence there just makes me FREAK OUT. There is just something about the choice of words there and their arrangement which makes me fall into a paralytic swoon. It's not really that Amis makes me want to be a better reviewer -- note I'm typing a long, rambly, unreadable response to his work here that no one sane would ever be expected to get through -- but more accurately that he makes me want to become a better reader.
Amis is a great reader, and that's why this is a joy. The guy fucking loves to read, and he's great at it, and his response to literature is itself art, perhaps better art than his actual art (the novels), which maybe sucks for him. Reading this made me briefly ponder questions that I know lots of other people have already spent too much time asking, questions like, "What exactly is the difference between book reviews and criticism?" Amis actually refers to this distinction in a discussion of Updike, whose reviewing he calls "high-powered enough to win the name of literary criticism -- which is to say, it constantly raises the question (a question more interesting than it at first sounds), 'What is literature?'"
What, indeed, is literature? I have no clue and zero interest in trying to field that one. What this book made me wonder about instead was: "What we are to do with it?" -- literature, that is, being it (I've lost my basic language skills; Martin's shamed them into slinking off, they're in hiding somewhere living strenuously banal new lives under an assumed name). Let's say we know it when we see it, we know what we like, etc. etc., when it comes to literature, so then what comes next? Once we've got our grubby mitts on some, what then do we do with it?
One of the reasons these perhaps cliched questions feel new to me is that I haven't historically found them interesting. Despite their being the sole arena in my life where I ever performed well, I hated English classes. Okay, I did like writing those papers, but only because it was easy and often felt satisfying in the same way as the crossword puzzle, but I didn't believe in it: excavating symbols and themes, arguing some esoteric claim about an underlying secret message purportedly buried in a canonized text... That was bullshit, a parlor trick, that could be fun or annoying. Most literary criticism and a lot of English majors frustrated me because I didn't understand why they were taking it all so seriously. Why build up these complex theories and earnestly strain yourself trying to interpret a work of fiction, when there is so much in the real world demanding more practical exegesis? It seemed dumb. It seemed superfluous. I really didn't get it. Yeah, it could be entertaining, but it was an activity (unlike books themselves) that was essentially without any real meaning or importance.
And that's why this website, for a long time, was like hard drugs for me. I've always loved to read but there was never anything to do with it: once I'd finished a book, my work there was done. The things I knew people did -- endless dissertations on that strangely neglected topic; book club musings about which plucky character we identified with the best -- were repellent. But the Goodreads book report was, for a time, the perfect form for me. I loved book reporting, reading other people's book reports, freaking out about books on threads with nerdy strangers with whom I shared this woozy passion... Amis mocks it above, but it was the affective and personalized quality of the Goodreads book report that I loved the most. I'd review a book to let people know if I recommended it or not, but the more important thing was its purely subjective aspect: this book made me cry, this one reminded me of an annoying ex-coworker who suddenly died... I read this book during a sixteen-hour layover in the Istanbul airport, while suffering from a dose of the clap... For a few years the Goodreads book report felt so important and true to me. I know that this site made me a better reader; I hope it made me a better writer, though sometimes I wonder if the opposite is true... Okay, there's a digression... Anyway. Nothing gold can stay, Ponyboy, and I've grown pretty tired of them by now. So it was nice to read some stuff for once by a professional, no offense guys, but, like, no one on here's written this, from a 1976 review of Who's Who in Twentieth Century Literature:
Quotations so exotic that you can't imagine anyone human holding them are frequently made to sound banal and secondhand by the World-weary Seymour-Smith. 'It is now fashionable,' for instance, 'to dismiss his poetry while acknowledging his enormous influence.' Who might this be? Rubén Dario, the Nicaraguan poet who died in 1916. Well, if it is fashionable, I shall start dismissing Dario's poetry at once, while naturally acknowledging his enormous influence. How, you wonder, can Seymour-Smith keep in touch with so many cultures? Do people ring him up from time to time and say, 'Someone else has learnt to read and write down here?'
AARGHHHHH!!!! See but, okay, and now here's the thing: if you are involved in some sort of study testing the effects of a safer alternative to Ritalin and Adderall and have therefore made it this far through my rambling boringness, chances are good that the above quotation didn't make you shriek so loud you woke the neighbors and then sink limply down in your seat with an idiot smile playing upon your tired lips. The biggest surprise lesson this website held for me was that taste remains shockingly subjective, and honestly that's what I don't quite get about all the book reviewing or criticism or whatever it is.
Trying to assign the little book report star ratings has always been hard but recently has become so agonizing that I might have to stop doing it. I've always had a very firm rule that my stars are nakedly subjective and based on how my I personally enjoyed a book and not how "good" I think it is. I mean, I gave Valley of the Dolls five stars, and I couldn't make it through Moby Dick. Does this mean that I think Valley of the Dolls is a finer piece of literature than Moby Dick? No, it just means that I'm a semi-literate troglodyte. Maybe the point is that society must maintain a stable of professional-class book reviewers who are not semi-literate troglodytes and who thus can competently evaluate the merits of various works of literature. But reading just seems like such a wildly intimate and personal experience, and I'm still confused about how reviews and criticism deal with that.
Because my own answer to the question of what it is that we are to do with literature is: "Read it. Cry about it. Laugh at it. And then...?" Well, then I'm not sure, but I loved this book because Amis clearly does know what to do. He engages with the books and with authors and with their subject: the world. He responds. He ties it to other things. He makes something great out of it. Gore Vidal "gives the impression of believing that the entire heterosexual edifice -- registry offices, Romeo and Juliet, the disposable diaper -- is just a sorry story of self-hypnosis and mass hysteria"; Lee Harvey Oswald "made only one notch on the calendar. It was meaningless; he just renamed an airport, violently."
So like, yeah, I really gotta go to bed now. I loved this book and I love the image of The War Against Cliché. I love picturing Amis as a general enlisting hapless burnouts like myself and turning us into fierce Berserker-style warriors, taking on reading and writing as a martial -- a violent -- activity.
In closing, I just realized something about Martin Amis which maybe explains why it's been so hard for me to describe my response to him without resorting to stretched and worn-out sexual cliche: In addition to being hilarious, Martin Amis makes reading and writing seem cool. He makes it high-stakes and thrilling, and not a little fucked-up. I love him and I'd definitely join his military. I'm sure he wouldn't have me, unless of course The War Against Cliche winds up dragging on a lot longer than he'd initially hoped, and he exhausts all the fit volunteers and is forced to lower his standards for enlistment.
Okay, off to bed with a gorgeous picture in my mind of Martin Amis screaming at me through basic training, forcing me to do pushups and teaching me to fire a submachine gun.
Sweet dreams!
Those of my Booksters who have known me too long now are aware that I have a very serious and embarrassing Martin Amis Problem. It reminds one of youthful compulsions towards hedonism, vice, wildly inappropriate men, and all those thrilling pursuits that ultimately made one feel sick and terrible about oneself, yet remained too alluring to avoid for long, resulting in a torturous and conflicted cycle of repelled abstinence followed by glorious, shaming relapse... Of course, this particular cliche would be more comforting had I actually given up everything harmful and remained addicted now only to Martin Amis's writing. But it's more that I've resigned myself to my countless other moral shortcomings and failures of will, and this is simply the only one that still seems worthy of note.
I've never read Amis's criticism before, and by the second page of the Foreword, I was grateful for that. As noted elsewhere, I've found all his novels that I've read to be deeply flawed. Here, though, I felt like I was mainlining shit so good it might have killed me if I'd started on it too soon, before I'd worked my way up on the more adulterated, low-grade stuff. I'm aware this guy's style hasn't done it for a lot of people (including, famously, his own father!), but I love the way he writes so much that I swear it gets me high. I actually wish I owned this book so I could underline my favorite sentences -- and I am NOT the type of girl who does that, I HATE book vandalism! See what Martin Amis does to me? I'm a mess!
Uh, this is a lot of gushing considering that I just started this thing. We'll see how far I get and whether I retain my susceptibility or develop a tolerance soon and start totally hating him.
In any case, if The War Against Cliche's publication didn't predate this website, I might have thought Amis had somehow encountered my own work:
A brief consultation of the Internet will show that... everyone has become a literary critic -- or at least a book-reviewer. Democratization has made one inalienable gain: equality of the sentiments. I think Gore Vidal said this first, and he said it, not quite with mockery, but with lively scepticism. He said that, nowadays, nobody's feelings are more authentic, and thus more important, than anybody else's. This is the new credo, the new privilege. It is a privilege much exercised in the contemporary book-review, whether on the Web or in the literary pages. The reviewer calmly tolerates the arrival of the new novel or slim volume, defensively settles into it, and then sees which way it rubs him up. The right way or the wrong way. The results of this contact will form the data of the review, without any reference to the thing behind. And the thing behind, I am afraid, is talent, and the canon, and the body of knowledge we call literature.
Probably some readers are getting the impression that I think these developments are to be deplored. Not so. It is the summit of idleness to deplore the present, to deplore actuality...
Wait, am I just slavishly transcribing the Foreword to this book like some kind of mindless fangirl? Yes. I am.
Literature is the great garden that is always there and is open to everyone twenty-four hours a day. Who tends it? The old tour guides and sylviculturists, the wardens, the fuming parkies with their sweat-soaked serge: these have died off. If you do see an official, a professional, nowadays, then he's likely to be a scowl in a labcoat, come to flatten a forest or decapitate a peak. The public wanders, with its ohs and ahs, its groans and jeers, its million opinions. The wanderers feed the animals, they walk on the grass, they step in the flowerbeds. But the garden never suffers. It is, of course, Eden; it is unfallen and needs no care.
I want to copulate and reproduce myself with this man's brain. I'm sorry if that's gross, but it's really how I feel.
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The Actual Review (such as it is)
While reading this, I kept wondering how Martin Amis feels when impressed-but-speed-dialing blurbists laud his "mastery of language." It should in theory turn his stomach, but does hearing stuff like that about yourself ever get old? I would personally welcome any such compliments, no matter how shopworn, but then, not being Martin Amis, I gotta take what I can get.
Naturally I feel an "overpowering urge" to review this solely in the language of cliche, but I don't have the energy tonight for a high concept and this book's got to go back to the library. I haven't freaked out about a book this way in a pretty long time, though, and I want to record some thoughts so that I remember why, because I've realized that if I don't write something about a book then two weeks later it's like I never read it.
The War Against Cliché is one of the greatest titles, and ideas, that I've ever heard. It actually makes me freak out and want to start screaming just from how great it is. As my own previous comments below suggest, this was my response to a number of Martin Amis's lines: they sent me into some apoplectic shock where I was so overwhelmed with joy and awe that my brain shut down non-essential functions and all I could do was repeat the words to myself and go, "Aaaaghh! AAAGHH!" I can't think of many other writers who have provoked this in me, and I'm not sure if the guy's stuff has this effect on other people.
The War Against Cliché made me feel like an illiterate loser, but I kept reminding myself that this shit is Martin Amis's job. He reads and writes books for a living, it's, like, his thing. When I chilled out and stopped being so intimidated, I settled into enjoying the plump fruits of someone else's well-read labo(u)rs. Honestly I have read very few professional book reviews in my time, and almost certainly none that I enjoyed this much. It made me want to become a better book reporter -- sort of. Well, it made me want to be more responsible about quoting from what I read, instead of always returning the book to the library or leaving it at work and then banging something out later based on my half-drunk recollections.
Well, unfortunately I am tired from three hours at the gym tonight, and I am not going to write a competent review of this book. But I AM going to quote Amis, and then sit here and freak out. He's at his best when he's hanging off the side of the platform, acting goofy and obnoxious and showing off his mad skillz; the more straightforward and admiring pieces in here were predictably more dull, and I enjoyed the Michael Crichton end of the spectrum far more than his paeans to Nabokov. Amis's own high style often shines brightest while he's reviewing the mass-market books that most people actually read. He writes that the author of Silence of the Lambs, Thomas Harris, "has done what all popular writers hope to do: he has created a parallel world, a terrible antiterra, airless and arcane but internally coherent."
AARRGHH!!! See, somehow that sentence there just makes me FREAK OUT. There is just something about the choice of words there and their arrangement which makes me fall into a paralytic swoon. It's not really that Amis makes me want to be a better reviewer -- note I'm typing a long, rambly, unreadable response to his work here that no one sane would ever be expected to get through -- but more accurately that he makes me want to become a better reader.
Amis is a great reader, and that's why this is a joy. The guy fucking loves to read, and he's great at it, and his response to literature is itself art, perhaps better art than his actual art (the novels), which maybe sucks for him. Reading this made me briefly ponder questions that I know lots of other people have already spent too much time asking, questions like, "What exactly is the difference between book reviews and criticism?" Amis actually refers to this distinction in a discussion of Updike, whose reviewing he calls "high-powered enough to win the name of literary criticism -- which is to say, it constantly raises the question (a question more interesting than it at first sounds), 'What is literature?'"
What, indeed, is literature? I have no clue and zero interest in trying to field that one. What this book made me wonder about instead was: "What we are to do with it?" -- literature, that is, being it (I've lost my basic language skills; Martin's shamed them into slinking off, they're in hiding somewhere living strenuously banal new lives under an assumed name). Let's say we know it when we see it, we know what we like, etc. etc., when it comes to literature, so then what comes next? Once we've got our grubby mitts on some, what then do we do with it?
One of the reasons these perhaps cliched questions feel new to me is that I haven't historically found them interesting. Despite their being the sole arena in my life where I ever performed well, I hated English classes. Okay, I did like writing those papers, but only because it was easy and often felt satisfying in the same way as the crossword puzzle, but I didn't believe in it: excavating symbols and themes, arguing some esoteric claim about an underlying secret message purportedly buried in a canonized text... That was bullshit, a parlor trick, that could be fun or annoying. Most literary criticism and a lot of English majors frustrated me because I didn't understand why they were taking it all so seriously. Why build up these complex theories and earnestly strain yourself trying to interpret a work of fiction, when there is so much in the real world demanding more practical exegesis? It seemed dumb. It seemed superfluous. I really didn't get it. Yeah, it could be entertaining, but it was an activity (unlike books themselves) that was essentially without any real meaning or importance.
And that's why this website, for a long time, was like hard drugs for me. I've always loved to read but there was never anything to do with it: once I'd finished a book, my work there was done. The things I knew people did -- endless dissertations on that strangely neglected topic; book club musings about which plucky character we identified with the best -- were repellent. But the Goodreads book report was, for a time, the perfect form for me. I loved book reporting, reading other people's book reports, freaking out about books on threads with nerdy strangers with whom I shared this woozy passion... Amis mocks it above, but it was the affective and personalized quality of the Goodreads book report that I loved the most. I'd review a book to let people know if I recommended it or not, but the more important thing was its purely subjective aspect: this book made me cry, this one reminded me of an annoying ex-coworker who suddenly died... I read this book during a sixteen-hour layover in the Istanbul airport, while suffering from a dose of the clap... For a few years the Goodreads book report felt so important and true to me. I know that this site made me a better reader; I hope it made me a better writer, though sometimes I wonder if the opposite is true... Okay, there's a digression... Anyway. Nothing gold can stay, Ponyboy, and I've grown pretty tired of them by now. So it was nice to read some stuff for once by a professional, no offense guys, but, like, no one on here's written this, from a 1976 review of Who's Who in Twentieth Century Literature:
Quotations so exotic that you can't imagine anyone human holding them are frequently made to sound banal and secondhand by the World-weary Seymour-Smith. 'It is now fashionable,' for instance, 'to dismiss his poetry while acknowledging his enormous influence.' Who might this be? Rubén Dario, the Nicaraguan poet who died in 1916. Well, if it is fashionable, I shall start dismissing Dario's poetry at once, while naturally acknowledging his enormous influence. How, you wonder, can Seymour-Smith keep in touch with so many cultures? Do people ring him up from time to time and say, 'Someone else has learnt to read and write down here?'
AARGHHHHH!!!! See but, okay, and now here's the thing: if you are involved in some sort of study testing the effects of a safer alternative to Ritalin and Adderall and have therefore made it this far through my rambling boringness, chances are good that the above quotation didn't make you shriek so loud you woke the neighbors and then sink limply down in your seat with an idiot smile playing upon your tired lips. The biggest surprise lesson this website held for me was that taste remains shockingly subjective, and honestly that's what I don't quite get about all the book reviewing or criticism or whatever it is.
Trying to assign the little book report star ratings has always been hard but recently has become so agonizing that I might have to stop doing it. I've always had a very firm rule that my stars are nakedly subjective and based on how my I personally enjoyed a book and not how "good" I think it is. I mean, I gave Valley of the Dolls five stars, and I couldn't make it through Moby Dick. Does this mean that I think Valley of the Dolls is a finer piece of literature than Moby Dick? No, it just means that I'm a semi-literate troglodyte. Maybe the point is that society must maintain a stable of professional-class book reviewers who are not semi-literate troglodytes and who thus can competently evaluate the merits of various works of literature. But reading just seems like such a wildly intimate and personal experience, and I'm still confused about how reviews and criticism deal with that.
Because my own answer to the question of what it is that we are to do with literature is: "Read it. Cry about it. Laugh at it. And then...?" Well, then I'm not sure, but I loved this book because Amis clearly does know what to do. He engages with the books and with authors and with their subject: the world. He responds. He ties it to other things. He makes something great out of it. Gore Vidal "gives the impression of believing that the entire heterosexual edifice -- registry offices, Romeo and Juliet, the disposable diaper -- is just a sorry story of self-hypnosis and mass hysteria"; Lee Harvey Oswald "made only one notch on the calendar. It was meaningless; he just renamed an airport, violently."
So like, yeah, I really gotta go to bed now. I loved this book and I love the image of The War Against Cliché. I love picturing Amis as a general enlisting hapless burnouts like myself and turning us into fierce Berserker-style warriors, taking on reading and writing as a martial -- a violent -- activity.
In closing, I just realized something about Martin Amis which maybe explains why it's been so hard for me to describe my response to him without resorting to stretched and worn-out sexual cliche: In addition to being hilarious, Martin Amis makes reading and writing seem cool. He makes it high-stakes and thrilling, and not a little fucked-up. I love him and I'd definitely join his military. I'm sure he wouldn't have me, unless of course The War Against Cliche winds up dragging on a lot longer than he'd initially hoped, and he exhausts all the fit volunteers and is forced to lower his standards for enlistment.
Okay, off to bed with a gorgeous picture in my mind of Martin Amis screaming at me through basic training, forcing me to do pushups and teaching me to fire a submachine gun.
Sweet dreams!
June 4, 2013
Lately, I've got criticism on my mind. Although I've been a lifelong consumer of reviews, in especial those of the projected screen and the written page—indeed, a quick estimate would have to place the ratio of content of which I've partaken solely of the review and not the material under discussion (movies loom large here) in the neighborhood of ten-to-one—I've tended to avoid collections featuring critiques of the same, perhaps of a part with my anxiety over becoming lost—and, hence, burning through those precious reserves of time available for primary material ingestion—in reading about books and movies when I could simply dispense with the middle-man and dive straight into the source. That's purely an abstract anxiety, mind—reviews are absolutely my forté, what with being about observation and intake over action and expression, and thus eminently suited for a noarthern pillock who can talk a good game but, when it comes time to get skin into the frame, generally flames out in glorious displays of molehill crashes and gold-unto-shit alchemy. Do as I say? That's not what I do is a life's mantra in my book—not to mention That wasn't my girlfriend, it was my meatloaf.
Yet be that as it may, Martin Amis' The War against Cliché—a collection of his material from across three decades—was the first work of critical literary essays that I read in its entirety. I like the way Amis writes: even when I can feel him straining towards the limits of his capabilities, ever-daring unto those stratospheric heights of which his paradigmatic peer Nabokov ascended with alacrity, his ambitions nonetheless fail in their revelation to prove detrimental to his prose. He has managed to incorporate it within his elegantly street-smart style and make it work. The word that comes to mind for this collection is solid—and there's nothing at all wrong with consistency if you're not quite kitted out for being an apex predator amongst the literati.
It's an eclectic mix of authors and offerings Amis attends to here, ranging from his affectionately admiring returns to Nabokov—which conclusion features an absolutely superb exegetical interlude upon Lolita, especially in that his averment of Nabokov as being the laureate of cruelty peals in full resonance with my own chordal experience of Hebephiliac Humbert's memoir; his questionable-but-convincing ground-staking of Underworld as representing the first true masterpiece from Don DeLillo; several encounters with an Iris Murdoch who alternates between earning his appreciation and bewilderment; excellently placed textual excursions upon such literary stalwarts as Cervantes, Joyce, and Dickens; and a plethora of critiques of familiar authors' unfamiliar works together with musings upon more abstracted themes that recur in modern fiction, in which he delves into their strengths and weaknesses, impartations and occlusions with the baritone brio that I've come to register as his singularly discernible voice. One such moment which proved particularly sticky is an addendum to Zeus and the Garbage, wherein, after intelligently bruising Robert Bly's maudlin-gone-marauding masculine starbursts to the degree that he decided to make lectures out of the written word, Bly himself, in attendance at one such, asked of Amis Why he was so frightened of male grandeur; the latter's immediate interior* response—because it is frightening—cannot, in my estimation, be improved upon.
Unsurprisingly, I most relished his stiletto maneuvers against texts which I had previously read and not been bound to by any ties beyond simple completion—Mailer's Tough Guys Don't Dance being a prime example, and wherein Amis quickly and astutely nails what were the essential problems I had with it:
*Yes, it is regrettable that Amis' stones failed him in the moment, but I am nothing if not sympathetic to such mnemonic pauses as life is wont to present us with—my entire existence is replete with Jerk Store moments, and I've unfortunately not even possessed the wherewithal to pull a u-turn after inspiration's lancet strike and fervidly rush back towards the airport...
**While this rather blunt homophonic quip could, to some eyes, serve to cover the doughy base and layered tiers of a sizable lasagna, I like its one-two punchiness. Fully of that ample-but-not-acme critical quality which Amis enjoyably represents.
Yet be that as it may, Martin Amis' The War against Cliché—a collection of his material from across three decades—was the first work of critical literary essays that I read in its entirety. I like the way Amis writes: even when I can feel him straining towards the limits of his capabilities, ever-daring unto those stratospheric heights of which his paradigmatic peer Nabokov ascended with alacrity, his ambitions nonetheless fail in their revelation to prove detrimental to his prose. He has managed to incorporate it within his elegantly street-smart style and make it work. The word that comes to mind for this collection is solid—and there's nothing at all wrong with consistency if you're not quite kitted out for being an apex predator amongst the literati.
It's an eclectic mix of authors and offerings Amis attends to here, ranging from his affectionately admiring returns to Nabokov—which conclusion features an absolutely superb exegetical interlude upon Lolita, especially in that his averment of Nabokov as being the laureate of cruelty peals in full resonance with my own chordal experience of Hebephiliac Humbert's memoir; his questionable-but-convincing ground-staking of Underworld as representing the first true masterpiece from Don DeLillo; several encounters with an Iris Murdoch who alternates between earning his appreciation and bewilderment; excellently placed textual excursions upon such literary stalwarts as Cervantes, Joyce, and Dickens; and a plethora of critiques of familiar authors' unfamiliar works together with musings upon more abstracted themes that recur in modern fiction, in which he delves into their strengths and weaknesses, impartations and occlusions with the baritone brio that I've come to register as his singularly discernible voice. One such moment which proved particularly sticky is an addendum to Zeus and the Garbage, wherein, after intelligently bruising Robert Bly's maudlin-gone-marauding masculine starbursts to the degree that he decided to make lectures out of the written word, Bly himself, in attendance at one such, asked of Amis Why he was so frightened of male grandeur; the latter's immediate interior* response—because it is frightening—cannot, in my estimation, be improved upon.
Unsurprisingly, I most relished his stiletto maneuvers against texts which I had previously read and not been bound to by any ties beyond simple completion—Mailer's Tough Guys Don't Dance being a prime example, and wherein Amis quickly and astutely nails what were the essential problems I had with it:
Still, Mailer may be capable of mischief, flippancy and haste, but he is not capable of broad comic design. For all of his wit, irony and high spirits, he is essentially humourless: laughs in Mailer derive from the close observation of things that are, so to speak, funny already. The humour can never turn inward. Besides, one smile in the mirror at this stage in his career and the whole corpus would corpse**. Self-parody is not Mailer's style.And in his first attempt upon DeLillo's potent but steely fictive mind, Amis aptly places the author's perch within modern literature while finding angles into Mao II that repelled my own recollection:
Even its exponents could see, in post-modernism, the potential for huge boredom. Why all the tricksiness and self-reflection? Why did writers stop telling stories and start going on about how they were telling them? Well, nowadays the world looks pretty post-modern in many of its aspects. It is equally fantastical and wised-up, and image-management vies for pride of place with an uninnocent reality. Post-modernism may not have led anywhere much; but it was no false trail. It had tremendous predictive power.All in all, it's the kind of book that more than adequately sates one's appetite for literary erudition and authorial opinion whilst simultaneously whetting future ones—not to mention imparting considerable impetus for seeking out the tomes detailed within that one might empirically gauge the accuracy with which Amis has captured them.
Don DeLillo is an exemplary post-modernist. And perhaps he is also pointing somewhere beyond. Whereas his contemporaries have been drawn to the internal, the ludic and the enclosed, DeLillo goes at things the other way. He writes about the new reality—realistically. His fiction is public. His dramatis personae are icons and headliners: politicians, assassins, conspirators, cultists. His society has two classes: those who shape the modern mind, and those whose minds are duly shaped.
But we all know that second-hand isn't close enough any more. Or better say third-hand. The event or the person if first-hand. TV is second-hand. Print is third-hand...It is, one gathers, the simple theft and dissemination of his likeness ('the image world is corrupt') that releases Bill from his mythic solitude. Release him, in fact, into the heart of the contemporary action, into the 'event glamour'
The main difficulty with Mao II is knowing how seriously, or respectfully, we are meant to take Bill and Bill's ideas, many of which struck this reader as neither true nor interesting...But Bill is lopsided. Too often the novel seems to bear Bill out—to weave a circle round him thrice. Brita compares his study to 'a bunker'; on her way to Bill's place, she feels she is 'being taken to see some terrorist chief at his secret retreat'. 'Some' terrorist chief? Which terrorist chief lives in Westchester or wherever it is, writing fiction and shunning publicity?
*Yes, it is regrettable that Amis' stones failed him in the moment, but I am nothing if not sympathetic to such mnemonic pauses as life is wont to present us with—my entire existence is replete with Jerk Store moments, and I've unfortunately not even possessed the wherewithal to pull a u-turn after inspiration's lancet strike and fervidly rush back towards the airport...
**While this rather blunt homophonic quip could, to some eyes, serve to cover the doughy base and layered tiers of a sizable lasagna, I like its one-two punchiness. Fully of that ample-but-not-acme critical quality which Amis enjoyably represents.
June 10, 2017
Maybe I'm a sucker for the Brits but Amis has this stern yet satiric and subtly poetic take on contemporary literature which is second to none. There is a sense of finality to the things he says, in the sense of tough authority and savagely on-point wit.
Just look at his face on the cover: there's this "you didn't REALLY think you could pull one over on me, did you?" quality which would either be an immediate turn-off to a prospective reader or a confirmation of his taste, wit, and learning.
I learned about him through my years-long Hitch obsession as the literati best friend (and, as with all things Hitch, occasional "frienemey") and I went to his essays first. I don't regret it.
Money was legit in its Swiftian satire, endlessly unique and niftily aphoristic, though the shorter fiction wasn't much to shake a stick at, to be honest.
The essays are where I think Amis really shines, though the major fiction is admittedly something I've yet to really get to.
This man loves his sentences, his literary aesthetics are severe and elegant. I wouldn't say that he's flawless or perenially correct (he falls on his face enough times on matters political to show he's got a duodenum as much as anybody else) but there are few contemporary writers whose work I enjoy as much on the level of sheer articulation, readability and imaginitive style.
If there's going to be a war against cliche, let Amis get in the front lines with his tin hat on.
August 13, 2015
If there is a book on Literary Criticism funnier, starter, wittier, more vigilant, suave, original, imaginative, compulsive than this, I'll eat my computer. If I've never said this before, let me say this now, Martin Amis is a genius, his literary gifts, his energy of language unrivaled. The greatest critic of his generation.
This book is a work of genius!
This book is a work of genius!
April 9, 2010
Stunning.
August 2, 2025
Everything is adequately written, which means readers can see clearly how Amis is a middlebrow reviewer whose conventional mind was welcome in all kinds of journals and papers. His taste is snobbish, and he's boorish at times, especially when he's hostile to modes of writing he wouldn't want to do and can't do, and he often favours his own cleverness over the book under review. That he manages to put down about half-a-dozen remarks that make sense is perhaps mostly a statistical probability for anyone who writes enough. The first surprise in this book is when Amis says someone else "compiled" the contents, a strange kind of out-sourcing. Not saying this is a book people should avoid, but it doesn't repay the time.
April 25, 2024
I got this from the library on impulse and thoroughly enjoyed it. Amis is witty, cutting, funny and insightful.
Probably the best parts are the book reviews. Interesting to find out he was a huge fan of J.G Ballard, Kurt Vonnegut and William Burroughs.
Why don't we produce public intellectuals like this anymore?
Probably the best parts are the book reviews. Interesting to find out he was a huge fan of J.G Ballard, Kurt Vonnegut and William Burroughs.
Why don't we produce public intellectuals like this anymore?
September 12, 2008
I dare you to get through 5 sentences of Amis without having to look up a word. I also dare you to show that he could have used another word.
I think Amis is the most incisive critic I know. And a master of verbal logistics. And someone with sentiment, and unabashed sensitivity. How can you skewer your subject (target) so deftly and yet be so soft?
Oh. And anyone that likes to think, to juxtapose, to discover, to parry... you'll be laughing out loud at least once per page.
I think Amis is the most incisive critic I know. And a master of verbal logistics. And someone with sentiment, and unabashed sensitivity. How can you skewer your subject (target) so deftly and yet be so soft?
Oh. And anyone that likes to think, to juxtapose, to discover, to parry... you'll be laughing out loud at least once per page.
September 11, 2021
Aside from Money I have never cared much for Amis’s novels. The reviewing is a different story. Whether praising Elmore Leonard’s ear, John Updike’s gaze or Nabokov’s prose, he is never less than wickedly entertaining - a tour guide with spark. The best piece (on Lolita) is sensibly kept for last and worth the cover price alone.
August 21, 2007
Martin Amis is smarter than you.
March 22, 2008
Read poolside at the Arizona Inn. The first essay I turned to, about Elmore Leonard, was one of the strongest, though they are all superb. A great book to just pick up from time to time and read a random selection. This is my first exposure to M. Amis, and I am extremely envious of his writing flair and natural talent. Some of the earlier essays date from his early 20s!
July 28, 2011
I really just don't know what to say. I feel smarter for reading this. Not nearly as smart as Martin Amis though. I've always loved his writing but sometimes got the shits with his ... I dunno, misanthropy? The darker side or whatever. But here, it's all about the writing and the thinking. More human. Just great.
September 9, 2008
Amis' critiques are funny and smart. But, unless you have read the books he reviews, or at least know something of the authors, he will run off without you. He will leave you on the curb hailing a cab. Sometimes he'll just keep talking, not noticing you've gone home.
September 29, 2020
Ya know how if someone has great vocals people will say I could listen to her sing the phone book? Well that's how I feel about Martin Amis, except with reviewing. I could read this guy's review of a phone book. (If phone books still exist) And he all but does review a phone book in this somewhat overstuffed grab bag of a collection.
November 30, 2007
Martin Amis is probably a better critic than he is a writer (as many people before me have pointed out). This collection of essays and reviews is pretty great, especially when he tears somebody a new one in his very well mannered, British gentleman way.
November 6, 2024
Amis’ essays have definitely aged better than his novels. On the whole, Amis is a perceptive and illuminating critic - especially when he clearly respects the writer. On the occasions when he takes against a (in his eyes) lesser writer, however, his essays transform from criticism into diatribes which seem to have the sole purpose of proving to the reader how much cleverer and more eloquent he is than the writer in question. Sadly, these latter essays bear uncanny resemblance to many of his novels.
September 23, 2011
Literary and popular cultures are examined in this book of essays -written between 1971 and 2000. Authors of acknowledged masterpieces (Cervantes, Jane Austen, Coleridge, Updike, Dickens, Saul Bellow, etc.), popular authors (Michael Crichton, Tom Wolfe...), politicians, chess and sports are forced to cohabit in this collection.
Like many young intellectuals, Amis as a young critic is more in love with his own cleverness than with the author or celebrity he examines. As he gets older, he is more temperate, more interested in the work itself, and more interesting as a result. His wit and bite are often present. Part One of the collection is titled "On Masculinity and Related Questions," and yet includes Hillary Clinton, Margaret Thatcher and Andy Warhol.
He questions the validity of masterpieces classification. One striking example is James Joyce's Ulysses. The question that arises after reading Amis' essay on the subject is: Should a piece that is obscure and oblivious of readership qualify as a great book because of its relative un-readability? Amis responds and closes the essay with these biting sentences: "Joyce could have been the most popular boy in the school, the cleverest, the kindest. He ended up with a more ambiguous distinction. He became the teacher's pet."
Amis is much more indulgent with Nabokov -obviously his own literary pet. There is no doubt he is a good, witty writer. And a talented critic who knows what he likes and what he doesn't. I hadn't read this British author before, but because of the title of the book, I expected to see more diversity. More women, more Black, Asian, Latin and other world authors. Amis does have a section called "Ultramundane" that alludes to some of these. But I would have wished for more. The great majority of the culture he examines is male and white Anglo-American. And because of that, The War Against Cliche might be too big of a title.
Like many young intellectuals, Amis as a young critic is more in love with his own cleverness than with the author or celebrity he examines. As he gets older, he is more temperate, more interested in the work itself, and more interesting as a result. His wit and bite are often present. Part One of the collection is titled "On Masculinity and Related Questions," and yet includes Hillary Clinton, Margaret Thatcher and Andy Warhol.
He questions the validity of masterpieces classification. One striking example is James Joyce's Ulysses. The question that arises after reading Amis' essay on the subject is: Should a piece that is obscure and oblivious of readership qualify as a great book because of its relative un-readability? Amis responds and closes the essay with these biting sentences: "Joyce could have been the most popular boy in the school, the cleverest, the kindest. He ended up with a more ambiguous distinction. He became the teacher's pet."
Amis is much more indulgent with Nabokov -obviously his own literary pet. There is no doubt he is a good, witty writer. And a talented critic who knows what he likes and what he doesn't. I hadn't read this British author before, but because of the title of the book, I expected to see more diversity. More women, more Black, Asian, Latin and other world authors. Amis does have a section called "Ultramundane" that alludes to some of these. But I would have wished for more. The great majority of the culture he examines is male and white Anglo-American. And because of that, The War Against Cliche might be too big of a title.
April 23, 2010
The ascerbic deconstruction of some pieces were deserved and spot-on. But so what? Many books are popular, favourites or are revered as classics because of their sentimental appeal, not just the cerebral. I don't think that Martin Amis' critique should be looked upon as the yardstick of what is and what isn't highbrow, or as the pulse of the literati. Amis sometimes writes with arrogant authority, but you shouldn't let it silence your own judgment. In sum, I found it a grating read.
May 14, 2007
the most sheerly fun book of criticism (journalistic cricitism, not scholarly stuff) I've ever read.
Shaped a lot of my current feelings about the relationship between reader and writer, and the manner in which a reader can claim his or her own portion of the literary conversation.
Quote to live by: "All writing is a campaign against cliche."
Shaped a lot of my current feelings about the relationship between reader and writer, and the manner in which a reader can claim his or her own portion of the literary conversation.
Quote to live by: "All writing is a campaign against cliche."
January 13, 2008
amis is incredible.
March 17, 2017
"[...] all writing is a campaign against cliché. Not just clichés of the pen but clichés of the mind and clichés of the heart."
While reading The War Against Cliché (2001), a voluminous collection of literary reviews by Martin Amis, has been a lot of fun it has also been a deeply humbling experience. Comparing Mr. Amis' deep, witty, polished reviews with my own attempts is like comparing paintings by Velázquez with a toddler's smears. The reviews in the collection are gorgeously written and very funny, often viciously and sarcastically funny. At the same time the reviews expose the author's cynical and common-sense outlook on our crazy world. Mr. Amis is an extraordinary writer in terms of the literary technique. In fact, I much prefer his reviews to his fiction (I have reviewed several novels on Goodreads, for instance, Time's Arrow , Success , and many more), which - although interesting and very readable - are no match for the excellence of his literary reviews.
I guess my admiration for this collection is mainly due to the fact that Mr. Amis addresses several topics that are my idées fixes about literature and its perception:
1. Most books are too long.
2. Cliché is a rot that begins on the surface of a book, i.e. in the language, and diffuses toward its deeper layers: moods, emotions, meanings.
3. Readers might benefit by shifting their focus from the story told in a novel to the artistry of the story teller.
4. Nothing in art conveys reality better than well-written fiction.
(After the rating, I include Mr. Amis' quotes that illustrate the above four points.)
Quite a few reviews in this set are devastating and devastatingly funny. About Michael Crichton's writing: "Animals [...] are what he is good at. People are what he is bad at. People, and prose." Thomas Harris' Hannibal is obliterated as a "novel of such profound and virtuoso vulgarity." Andy Warhol's self-absorption and vacuousness are made severe fun of. And on the topic of "funny": there is a passage in the review of Philip Roth's Sabbath's Theater, which is one of the funniest anecdotes I've heard in my life. I strongly recommend checking out the story to which the punchline is "That's how good Drenka was."
Mr. Amis conveys his loving admiration for great literature and offers extended analyses of works he calls "Great Books": among them Don Quixote, Ulysses, and Lolita. Yet another wonderful feature of this collection is that the pieces are engrossing even when they are about things that do not interest me in the slightest, such as football and poker.
Four and a quarter stars.
Some great quotes:
On books that are too long:
While reading The War Against Cliché (2001), a voluminous collection of literary reviews by Martin Amis, has been a lot of fun it has also been a deeply humbling experience. Comparing Mr. Amis' deep, witty, polished reviews with my own attempts is like comparing paintings by Velázquez with a toddler's smears. The reviews in the collection are gorgeously written and very funny, often viciously and sarcastically funny. At the same time the reviews expose the author's cynical and common-sense outlook on our crazy world. Mr. Amis is an extraordinary writer in terms of the literary technique. In fact, I much prefer his reviews to his fiction (I have reviewed several novels on Goodreads, for instance, Time's Arrow , Success , and many more), which - although interesting and very readable - are no match for the excellence of his literary reviews.
I guess my admiration for this collection is mainly due to the fact that Mr. Amis addresses several topics that are my idées fixes about literature and its perception:
1. Most books are too long.
2. Cliché is a rot that begins on the surface of a book, i.e. in the language, and diffuses toward its deeper layers: moods, emotions, meanings.
3. Readers might benefit by shifting their focus from the story told in a novel to the artistry of the story teller.
4. Nothing in art conveys reality better than well-written fiction.
(After the rating, I include Mr. Amis' quotes that illustrate the above four points.)
Quite a few reviews in this set are devastating and devastatingly funny. About Michael Crichton's writing: "Animals [...] are what he is good at. People are what he is bad at. People, and prose." Thomas Harris' Hannibal is obliterated as a "novel of such profound and virtuoso vulgarity." Andy Warhol's self-absorption and vacuousness are made severe fun of. And on the topic of "funny": there is a passage in the review of Philip Roth's Sabbath's Theater, which is one of the funniest anecdotes I've heard in my life. I strongly recommend checking out the story to which the punchline is "That's how good Drenka was."
Mr. Amis conveys his loving admiration for great literature and offers extended analyses of works he calls "Great Books": among them Don Quixote, Ulysses, and Lolita. Yet another wonderful feature of this collection is that the pieces are engrossing even when they are about things that do not interest me in the slightest, such as football and poker.
Four and a quarter stars.
Some great quotes:
On books that are too long:
"There are two kinds of long novel. Long novels of the first kind are short novels that go on for a long time."Alas, the majority of long novels fall into this category. On the second item in my list above the author writes:
"Cliché spreads inwards from the language of the book to its heart. Cliché always does."Nabokov's quote (on Emma Bovary's reading habits) re-quoted by Mr. Amis illustrates the third item:
"The subject may be crude and repulsive. Its expression is artistically modulated and balanced. This is style. This is art. This is the only thing that really matters in books.And on the power of fiction:
"[...] when fiction works, the individual and the universal are frictionlessly combined."
June 22, 2023
This is a review of two books, Virginia Woolf's The Second Common Reader and Martin Amis' The War Against Cliche
These two books, which form a set of bookends for 20th-century literary criticism, have similar shortcomings. On the one hand, we have Virginia Woolf, whose essays call for an appreciation of those writers who practiced their craft in an age permeated with class distinctions; tellingly, she admits she has trouble foreseeing the prospect of writers working in an age where there is a true a democratic politics which abjures class privilege. On the other hand, we have Martin Amis, who scribbles about writers for whom sex is not about procreation, but the extension of privilege. It seems to me that the gender-bound class-distinctions of Woolf's criticism, in the early 20th century, was mutated, by the end of the century, into Amis' writing, which descends into college-educated toilet-reading for the busy newspeak professional. Ostensibly, these authors are both good writers, but I would not be surprised if these two books are eventually swept into the trash bin of history as a result of what is predicted to be the rising dominance of machines controlled by artificial intelligence where, due to the catholicity of the patterns it learns in its digital training and the textual manifestations of its neural networks, books such as these (and the viewpoints of the writers themselves) come to be in a position of great peril. Specifically, I have a dim view of the prospects for a future society where literacy is promulgated, effectively transmitted and produced in such an "on-demand" fashion; perhaps literature will someday even be created by machines. It seems to me to be highly dubious whether such a society will be able to instill in citizens with an underdeveloped literate consciousness the will that is necessary to read books like these, much less write them. The fact that these books are so severely "dated" as the result of advances in technology, advances that render the mode of reading them critically obsolete, gives additional weight to the argument that the future will be one marked by a diminishing range of choices rather than a utopia of limitless possibility. Read these books, or others like them, while you still can. Three stars.
These two books, which form a set of bookends for 20th-century literary criticism, have similar shortcomings. On the one hand, we have Virginia Woolf, whose essays call for an appreciation of those writers who practiced their craft in an age permeated with class distinctions; tellingly, she admits she has trouble foreseeing the prospect of writers working in an age where there is a true a democratic politics which abjures class privilege. On the other hand, we have Martin Amis, who scribbles about writers for whom sex is not about procreation, but the extension of privilege. It seems to me that the gender-bound class-distinctions of Woolf's criticism, in the early 20th century, was mutated, by the end of the century, into Amis' writing, which descends into college-educated toilet-reading for the busy newspeak professional. Ostensibly, these authors are both good writers, but I would not be surprised if these two books are eventually swept into the trash bin of history as a result of what is predicted to be the rising dominance of machines controlled by artificial intelligence where, due to the catholicity of the patterns it learns in its digital training and the textual manifestations of its neural networks, books such as these (and the viewpoints of the writers themselves) come to be in a position of great peril. Specifically, I have a dim view of the prospects for a future society where literacy is promulgated, effectively transmitted and produced in such an "on-demand" fashion; perhaps literature will someday even be created by machines. It seems to me to be highly dubious whether such a society will be able to instill in citizens with an underdeveloped literate consciousness the will that is necessary to read books like these, much less write them. The fact that these books are so severely "dated" as the result of advances in technology, advances that render the mode of reading them critically obsolete, gives additional weight to the argument that the future will be one marked by a diminishing range of choices rather than a utopia of limitless possibility. Read these books, or others like them, while you still can. Three stars.
June 30, 2021
Witty and incisive. The books reviews and essays on the craft of various writers are the best part of the book. The chapter devoted to Philip Larkin is a fair and objective look at his legacy.
November 26, 2022
Gooooooood writing about good writing and great writing about bad writing.
March 25, 2024
Enjoyed it.
Read
April 21, 2014My first reaction to this impressive work is that Martin Amis has chosen mainly male writers to review and although not all the reviews are glowing, the most glowing are reserved for his favourite male writers. The book commands respect because the reviews are themselves so well written. Amis avoids cliché and so doesn’t just preach, he practices.
In describing why Philip Larkin is a better poet than novelist, Amis reviews two of Larkin’s early novels and in particular looks at A Girl in Winter which he sees as “Larkin getting ready to use his special genius: his ability to make landscape and townscape answer to human emotions (p.159-151).” He goes on to say, “This is the larval Larkin, displayed more transparently here than in even his earliest verse (p., 151).” Amis displays his own originality with “larval Larkin”, his love of alliteration is apparent in other reviews where he describes Nabokov’s Lolita, “The sexual spasm is still cooling on his mackintosh when he receives his spectacular and sanguinary retribution (p.263).”
Amis is unafraid to critically review even the most acclaimed writers. He says of Iris Murdoch “Were she to slow down – were she to allow one of those ominous ‘silences’ to gather, silences such as more tight-lipped novelists periodically ‘break’ – she would be accepting a different kind of responsibility to her critics and to her own prodigious talents. She would, in short, begin to find out how good she is, that strange and fearful discovery.” This extract illustrates how powerful Amis’ pen is in both the act of praise and critical review.
It occurred to me, that Amis is highly successful when writing critical reviews and essays and that perhaps the same could be said of him, as he said of Larkin regarding his novels and poetry – that Amis is at his best not when writing novels, but when critiquing them. I have tried to read some of Amis’ novels and not enjoyed them nearly as much as these reviews nor as much as I enjoyed his memoir/biography Experience. It could be argued, that Amis’ over-riding intellectual approach to writing, has in some way, stalled him in the creative process. He aspires to be a great writer and in his literary criticisms he achieves this. I suspect, but have no firm basis for my opinion, that his novels do not have the same broad appeal. It is my impression from reading Experience that Martin Amis has struggled to overcome his father’s (Kingsley Amis) reputation and in doing so, has set extremely high standards for both himself and other writers.
The final section of the book looks at “Great Books” and it is telling that the only “Great Book” in this section by a woman writer, is Pride and Prejudice. At the risk of sounding too smart and cheeky, and with some slight trepidation, it could be said, that this particular choice is something of a cliché itself.
This collection of essays and reviews, compiled by Professor James Diedrick and written by Martin Amis, is very much a review of the best of mostly male literature. So, are we to conclude that the males write better, or that Martin Amis believes this? In any event, it is a very worthwhile read and for any aspiring writer perhaps a little daunting (or perhaps even somewhat encouraging?) when fault can be found with even the most revered writers.
In describing why Philip Larkin is a better poet than novelist, Amis reviews two of Larkin’s early novels and in particular looks at A Girl in Winter which he sees as “Larkin getting ready to use his special genius: his ability to make landscape and townscape answer to human emotions (p.159-151).” He goes on to say, “This is the larval Larkin, displayed more transparently here than in even his earliest verse (p., 151).” Amis displays his own originality with “larval Larkin”, his love of alliteration is apparent in other reviews where he describes Nabokov’s Lolita, “The sexual spasm is still cooling on his mackintosh when he receives his spectacular and sanguinary retribution (p.263).”
Amis is unafraid to critically review even the most acclaimed writers. He says of Iris Murdoch “Were she to slow down – were she to allow one of those ominous ‘silences’ to gather, silences such as more tight-lipped novelists periodically ‘break’ – she would be accepting a different kind of responsibility to her critics and to her own prodigious talents. She would, in short, begin to find out how good she is, that strange and fearful discovery.” This extract illustrates how powerful Amis’ pen is in both the act of praise and critical review.
It occurred to me, that Amis is highly successful when writing critical reviews and essays and that perhaps the same could be said of him, as he said of Larkin regarding his novels and poetry – that Amis is at his best not when writing novels, but when critiquing them. I have tried to read some of Amis’ novels and not enjoyed them nearly as much as these reviews nor as much as I enjoyed his memoir/biography Experience. It could be argued, that Amis’ over-riding intellectual approach to writing, has in some way, stalled him in the creative process. He aspires to be a great writer and in his literary criticisms he achieves this. I suspect, but have no firm basis for my opinion, that his novels do not have the same broad appeal. It is my impression from reading Experience that Martin Amis has struggled to overcome his father’s (Kingsley Amis) reputation and in doing so, has set extremely high standards for both himself and other writers.
The final section of the book looks at “Great Books” and it is telling that the only “Great Book” in this section by a woman writer, is Pride and Prejudice. At the risk of sounding too smart and cheeky, and with some slight trepidation, it could be said, that this particular choice is something of a cliché itself.
This collection of essays and reviews, compiled by Professor James Diedrick and written by Martin Amis, is very much a review of the best of mostly male literature. So, are we to conclude that the males write better, or that Martin Amis believes this? In any event, it is a very worthwhile read and for any aspiring writer perhaps a little daunting (or perhaps even somewhat encouraging?) when fault can be found with even the most revered writers.
May 8, 2024
The greatest.
September 4, 2008
The great thing about starting a "war against cliche" is that it's so catchy. Why write a book about how to avoid cliches when you can let loose the dogs of war and lay down some shock and awe.
Since we're going to war and all's fair in love and war, we need to get some things straight. First, let's remember what we've learned from the movies.
1) You're very likely to survive any battle in any war, unless you show someone a picture of your sweetheart back home.
2) All G.I.s know how to make a still out of a jeep radiator.
3) If a main character dies, his sweetheart back home will have a nightmare at that exact same moment
4) The hero's weapon is always different from everyone elses.
5) Elite units (Special Forces, Rangers, Commandos) are always recruited from convicts and other socially degenerate segments of society.
6) Elite units are always considered expendable even though they cost much much more to train and maintain.
7) The battle hardened vet will always fall on a grenade for the new guy, rather than picking up the grenade and throwing it away, or jumping out of the fox hole.
8) Major characters never run out of ammunition, nor do they ever have to reload.
9) When superheroes use high technology to protect themselves, the bad guys never take advantage of obvious weaknesses, such as no face protection.
10) NEW requirement: all automatic pistols must be held sideways in order to be fired.
*
"Don't fire authors until you see the trites of their reprise", really brings this back to the subject at hand, which is of course that we are at war with cliches. Hopefully my banal description of our purpose does not offend, but such are the fortunes of war.
Since we're going to war and all's fair in love and war, we need to get some things straight. First, let's remember what we've learned from the movies.
1) You're very likely to survive any battle in any war, unless you show someone a picture of your sweetheart back home.
2) All G.I.s know how to make a still out of a jeep radiator.
3) If a main character dies, his sweetheart back home will have a nightmare at that exact same moment
4) The hero's weapon is always different from everyone elses.
5) Elite units (Special Forces, Rangers, Commandos) are always recruited from convicts and other socially degenerate segments of society.
6) Elite units are always considered expendable even though they cost much much more to train and maintain.
7) The battle hardened vet will always fall on a grenade for the new guy, rather than picking up the grenade and throwing it away, or jumping out of the fox hole.
8) Major characters never run out of ammunition, nor do they ever have to reload.
9) When superheroes use high technology to protect themselves, the bad guys never take advantage of obvious weaknesses, such as no face protection.
10) NEW requirement: all automatic pistols must be held sideways in order to be fired.
*
"Don't fire authors until you see the trites of their reprise", really brings this back to the subject at hand, which is of course that we are at war with cliches. Hopefully my banal description of our purpose does not offend, but such are the fortunes of war.
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