Martin (Louis) Amis - Early life, Early writing, Later career, Bibliography
Novelist and journalist, the son of Kingsley Amis, born in Oxford, Oxfordshire, SC England, UK. He studied at Exeter College, Oxford, and wrote his first novel, The Rachel Papers (1973), when he was 21. Later works include Dead Babies (1975), Other People (1981), Time's Arrow (1991), Night Train (1997), Yellow Dog (2003), and House of Meetings (2006). His collected short stories include Einstein's Monsters (1986) and Heavy Water and Other Stories (1999), and he has also produced a great deal of literary journalism. His memoirs, Experience, appeared in 2000.
Martin Amis (born August 25, 1949) is an English novelist.
Influenced by Saul Bellow and Vladimir Nabokov, as well as by his father Sir Kingsley Amis, Amis's distinctive style has itself influenced a generation of writers, including Will Self and Zadie Smith . The Guardian writes that "all his critics have noted what Kingsley Amis complained of as a 'terrible compulsive vividness in his style ...
Amis's raw material is what he sees as the absurdity of the postmodern condition and the excesses of late-capitalist Western society with its grotesque caricatures.
Early life
Amis's paternal grandfather was a mustard clerk from Clapham, and his maternal grandfather a shoe millionaire. The acclaim that followed Kingsley's first novel Lucky Jim sent the Amises to Princeton, New Jersey, where Kingsley lectured.
After Oxford, he found an entry-level job at The Times Literary Supplement, and at age 27 became literary editor of The New Statesman, where he met lifelong friend Christopher Hitchens, and then a feature writer for The Observer.
Early writing
According to Martin, Kingsley Amis famously showed no interest in his son's work. The most traditional of his novels, made into an unsuccessful cult film, it tells the story of a bright, egotistical teenager (which Amis acknowledges as autobiographical) and his relationship with the eponymous girlfriend in the year before going to university. This was the first example of Amis's fondness for symbolically 'pairing' characters in his novels, which has been a recurrent feature in his fiction since (Martin Amis and Martina Twain in Money, Richard Tull and Gwyn Barry in The Information, and Jennifer Rockwell and Mike Hoolihan in Night Train).
Other People: A Mystery Story (1981), about a young woman coming out of a coma, was a transitional novel in that it was the first of Amis's to show authorial intervention in the narrative voice, and highly artificed language in the heroine's descriptions of everyday objects, which was said to be influenced by his contemporary Craig Raine's 'Martian' school of poetry.
Later career
His best-known novels, and the ones most respected by critics, are Money, London Fields, Time's Arrow, and The Information (novel).
London Fields, Amis's longest work, describes the encounters between three main characters in London in 1999, as a climate disaster approaches.
Time's Arrow, the autobiography of a doctor who helped torture Jews during the Holocaust, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, drew notice both for its unusual technique — time runs backwards during the entire novel, down to the dialogue initially being spoken backwards — as well as for its topic.
The size of the advance (an alleged £500,000) demanded and obtained by Amis for The Information (1995) attracted what Amis described as "an Eisteddfod of hostility" from writers and critics after he left his agent of many years, Pat Kavanagh, in order to be represented by the Harvard-educated Andrew "The Jackal" Wylie. Kavanagh is married to Julian Barnes, with whom Amis had been friends for many years, but the incident caused a rift that, according to Amis in his autobiography Experience (1999), has not yet healed.
Night Train (1997) is a short novel in the stylised form of a US police procedural, narrated by the female, but mannish, Detective Mike Hoolihan, who has been called upon to investigate the suicide of her boss's daughter. Amis's American vernacular in the narrative was criticised by, among others, John Updike, although the novel found defenders elsewhere, notably in Janis Bellow, wife of Amis's sometime mentor Saul Bellow.
The memoir Experience is largely about his relationship with his father, Kingsley Amis, though he also writes of being reunited with long-lost daughter, Delilah Seale, the product of an affair in the 1970s, whom he did not see until she was 19, and the story of how one of his cousins, 21-year-old Lucy Partington, became a victim of Fred West .
In 2002, Amis published Koba the Dread, a book about the crimes of Stalinism.
In 2003, Yellow Dog, Amis's first novel in six years, was denounced by Tibor Fischer, whose comments were widely reported in the media: "Yellow Dog isn't bad as in not very good or slightly disappointing. Elsewhere, the book received mixed reviews, with some critics proclaiming the novel a return to form, but most considering Amis a spent force.
In September 2006, Amis published House of Meetings, a short novel about two half-brothers who loved the same woman and who were incarcerated together in a Soviet prison camp.
Amis has also released two collections of short stories (Einstein's Monsters and Heavy Water), three volumes of collected journalism and criticism (The Moronic Inferno, Visiting Mrs. Nabokov and The War Against Cliché), and Invasion of the Space Invaders .
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