The War Against Cliche: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 By Martin Amis (Talk Miramax Books)
Once
described by the New York Times as "a novelist with acid
in his inkwell," Martin Amis has never been interested
in making friends. Both his fiction and literary journalism
have always featured a snarling sensibility grounded in a
lifetime of voluminous reading, along with the firm conviction
in the absolute inviolability of what he is saying.
In the mid-90's, Amis generated a rabid storm of publicity
by having his famously mangled (but typically English) teeth
fixed, leaving his wife for another woman and signing a
megabuck book deal; but even without having done this, he
would still reign, along with cohort Christopher Hitchens,
as one of the bad boys of contemporary literature. Not that
there is a lot of competition for the title in the buttoned-down,
Ivy League-tenured state of contemporary letters. When Jonathan
Franzen can turn the publishing world on its ear by simply
saying that he doesn't want to go on Oprah, it's readily
apparent that there isn't a whole lot of guile left in the
literary community. It almost makes you long for the return
of a younger Norman Mailer to run
for mayor and stab a wife or two...
Almost.
While working as an editorial assistant and finishing his
early novels The Rachel Papers and Dead Babies, Amis, whose
father, Kingsley, was celebrated enough to make his son
a scion to literary life, wrote book reviews for The Times
Literary Supplement and The New Statesman. Many of the reviews
contained in the book come from these early days, but there
are also newer pieces from The Independent, The Observer,
and The Atlantic Monthly. One can surmise from these early
reviews that, as early as his early 20's, Amis was one of
those rare creatures who managed to establish his voice
at an early age, and has strayed little in the ensuing years.
Moving up the ladder from struggling young writer trying
to escape the shadow of his famous father to the accomplished
writer of today, the one thing that ties his early reviews
together which his more recent ones is that throughout his
career, he has never shown any inclination to practice the
art of the objective review. Time and again, Amis aims his
arrows and lets them fly with the all the acuity that his
prodigious talent allows. Often from the first few lines,
it's easy to discern whom Amis likes and whom he considers
a great waster of ink and paper. Saul Bellow, both Naipaul
brothers, J.G. Ballard (of Crash: "possibly the most
extreme example in modern fiction of how beautifully and
lovingly someone can write 70,000 words of vicious nonsense"),
Elmore Leonard, Philip Larkin and John Updike are some of
those he heaps praise upon. Let us not forget, in our list
making, Mr. Nabakov, over whom Amis gushes at every chance,
particularly in the last pages of the book, which is a fawning
treatise on Lolita: "In a sense Lolita is too great
for its own good.", "No narrator in literature,
I think, goes on about his physical splendor as passionately
and comically as the narrator of Lolita."
He may be right in this last assertion, but it smacks of
the kind of editorializing Amis dreams of
catching in someone else's prose, the easier to cut the
writer down a notch or two.
Amis considers reading an art, and rightly so. "When
we read, we are doing more than delectating words on a page,
¦we are communicating with the mind of the author."
he says in a 1997 piece on Saul Bellow. As such, there are
two traits Amis insists a work have in order to be deemed
worthy of the adroit reader's gaze, and he treats both time
and again with the same intensity. The first is a writer's
use of grammar, and the second is the raw emotional impact
of the prose itself. The grammatical aberrations he finds
in some works and his disgust at having to point them out
has no doubt made some editors weep: ''Even in the interests
of pseudo-elegant variation, you cannot start a clause with
a 'which' and then switch to a 'that.' '', or when he makes
a plea in defense of expanded usage of the semicolon, which
he claims is a foreign concept to the younger generations.
Few contemporary reviewers can (or want to) write as passionately
and convincingly of prepositions and clauses as Amis. Of
course, Amis' own prose is packed
so tight, infused with so much emotive Strum und Drang that
he is one of the elite group who can justifiably launch
such criticisms while not fearing a flank attack from someone
finding his own work thusly flawed, imperfect as his (or
anyone's) body of work.
Amis doesn't just obsess over literature, though. He seems
to actually have interests outside of the insular world
of letters. One of the more entertaining pieces in the book
is piece on soccer -- specifically, the breathless expectation
any soccer fan whose team faces possible elimination from
the World Cup qualifying rounds knows. He also touches on
chess, nuclear weapons, poker and takes an early stab at
the Guinness Book of World records.
While Amis has garnered as much criticism as praise, he's
fundamentally right in treating the writing game is a battle.
It's a battle between asserting grandiose notions of the
Self (and therefore losing the audience in an exercise in
navel-gazing) and losing the Self in the creation of the
prose. Not only this, however, it's also a battle to create
something new within the finite realm of language. Those
who rely on cliche commit a mortal sin by giving up the
fight before it even gets started. Unfortunately, much of
what passes for writing relys on tired cliche and de facto
plagarism to try and make its way in the world. Indeed,
as Amis says in his review of Crichton's The Lost World,
in the jungle of the world of leters: "Out there, beyond
the foliage, you see herds of cliches, roaming free."
- Paul McLeary
|