Martin Amis's Blog

In the second of a new series of reviews from the Observer archive, Martin Amis marvels at the third instalment of John Updike’s ‘Rabbit’ series

The great postwar American writer John Updike won two Pulitzer prizes for the Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom tetralogy. In a 2009 tribute to his hero, Martin Amis wrote that Updike “took the novel onto another plane of intimacy”.

John Updike’s “Rabbit series” are fattening into a sequence. Rabbit, Run (1960) gave us Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom’s disastrous early marriage, Rabbit Redux (1971) his chaotic experiments with adulthood. Rabbit Is Rich, the latest, traces with appalled affection the contours of Rabbit’s maturity: it is about middle-aged spread, physical, mental and (above all) material.

Updike’s style constitutes an embarrassment of riches – alert, funny and sensuous, yet also garrulous, mawkish and crank

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From the ecstatic comedy of Portnoy’s Complaint to the narrative richness of his American Trilogy, Philip Roth was a writer of genuine originality, says Martin Amis

Sarah Churchwell: How Philip Roth wrote America

As tributes pour in to Philip Roth, it is worth looking back to his early career, which was one of the strangest in American letters. Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) was my introduction to his work. I read it in the first edition of the paperback, and I thought: Here we have a really deafening new voice, and a whole new way of being funny – transgressive, corrosive, but with something ecstatic in its comedy.

Then I worked my way through the three predecessors: Goodbye, Columbus, Letting Go, and When She Was Good. They were engaging and diverting; they made you think, they made you smile, often, but they didn’t make you laugh. Ah, I thought, he’s what Saul Bellow calls “an exuberance hoarder”, restrained by High Seriousness and, in his case, restrained by an exaggerated reverence for Henry James. Portnoy was his real “letting go”; now the comic energies will surely surge and swell.

A writer’s life is not as detached and monastic as some would like to think

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'I'm not turning into Kingsley. I'm already Kingsley'

The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, Tuesday 16 February 2010

"In truth this is easily the most unusual thing about me," wrote Martin Amis in the column below: "I am the only hereditary novelist in the anglophone literary corpus." A reader points to at least one other, Anthony Trollope, following from his mother Frances.

Dear Anna Ford, Your surprise attack at least has the virtue of simplicity (Letters, 20 February). You argue that I should accept the sternest possible treatment from the press, ­because 1) I was and am a poor godfather to your daughter Claire, and 2) I paid a visit to your husband Mark Boxer's sickroom, with Christopher Hitchens (you say we were "filling in time" before going on to Heathrow), and we stayed too long, smoked cigarettes "over his bed", and then I trumped up a memoir where I lyingly claimed to have left the house in distress.

Your first point is well taken. Your second is an unworthy farrago.

Martin Amis on why the BBC dramatisation of his novel Money is great television

Watching an adaptation of your novel can be a violent experience: seeing your old jokes suddenly thrust at you can be alarming. But I started to enjoy Money very quickly, and then I relaxed.

It's a voice novel, and they're the hardest to film you've got to use some voiceover to get the voice. But I think the BBC adaptation was really pretty close to my voice just the feel of it, the slightly hysterical feel of it, which I like. It's a pity one line wasn't used. Speculating about whether Charles slept with Diana, in the book the barman says, "He's the heir to the frone. I mean, he's got to know what he's getting, hasn't he?" I was waiting for it and it didn't come. But that's just a tiny lost opportunity. You sort of let it go and think it's not going to be the book, it's someone else's idea of the book, the basic difference being that a novel is about interior life and a film about exterior life, and you accept that.

Martin Amis hails the peerless intelligence and rhetorical ingenuity of his exceptional friend, Christopher Hitchens

Spontaneous eloquence seems to me a miracle," confessed Vladimir Nabokov in 1962. He took up the point more personally in his foreword to Strong Opinions (1973): "I have never delivered to my audience one scrap of information not prepared in typescript beforehand My hemmings and hawings over the telephone cause long-distance callers to switch from their native English to pathetic French.

"At parties, if I attempt to entertain people with a good story, I have to go back to every other sentence for oral erasures and inserts nobody should ask me to submit to an interview It has been tried at least twice in the old days, and once a recording machine was present, and when the tape was rerun and I had finished laughing, I knew that never in my life would I repeat that sort of performance."

How should 'controversy' be pronounced? How are 'refute' and 'decimate' misused? Kingsley Amis's guide, The King's English, revealed all. Martin Amis celebrates his father's interest in language

Kingsley Amis was a lenient father. His paternal style, in the early years, can best be described as amiably minimalist in other words, my mother did it all. It should be noted, though, that if I did come across him (before he slipped back into his study), he always said something that made me laugh or smile. This went a long way. And the humour usually derived from the originality of his phrasing. When I was 16 or 17, and started reading books for grown-ups, I became, in his eyes, worth talking to. And when, six or seven years later, I started using the English language in the literary pages of the newspapers, I became worth correcting. I was in my early-middle 20s; my father was still amiable, but he was lenient no longer.

"Has your enormity in the Observer been pointed out to you?" he asked with enthusiasm over breakfast one Sunday morning (I had left home by then, but I still spent about every other weekend at his house). "My enormity?" I knew he was applying the word in its proper sense "something very bad", and not "something very big in size". And my mistake was certainly atrocious: I had used martial as a verb. Later, while continuing to avoid hopefully (a favourite with politicians, as he insists), I pooh-poohed his reprimand about my harmless use of the dangling thankfully. I also took it in good part when, to dramatise my discipleship, as he saw it, of Clive James (a very striking new voice in the 1970s), Kingsley started reading out my reviews in an Australian accent. But there was one conversation that I still recall with a sincere moan of shame: it concerned the word infamous. In a piece about the "Two Cultures" debate, I referred to FR Leavis's "infamous crucifixion of CP Snow". "You leave us in no doubt," said Kingsley watchfully, "that you disapproved of it." I remained silent. I didn't say, "Actually, Dad, I thought infamous was just a cool new way of saying controversial."

The sun is so close it's noisy, and London is under water welcome to JG Ballard's vision of the future, written 50 years ago. Martin Amis pays tribute to a bold, hypnotic novel, by an author with a genius for the perverse

Is prescience a literary virtue? And should the work of JG Ballard be particularly prized (as some critics maintain) for the "uncanny" accuracy of its forecasts? The answer to both these questions, I suggest, is a cheerful no.

In The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) Ballard famously tapped Ronald Reagan for president. His Hello America (1981), on the other hand, surmised that the United States in its entirety would be evacuated by 1990. The meteorological cataclysms envisaged by his first four novels still look plausible. But the social crisis envisaged by his last four novels violent and widespread anomie brought about by a glut of leisure and wealth now looks vanishingly remote.

An exclusive essay by Martin Amis, continued.

Click here to read part one, and here to read part two

The stout self-sufficiency or, if you prefer, the extreme incuriosity of Islamic culture has been much remarked. Present-day Spain translates as many books into Spanish, annually, as the Arab world has translated into Arabic in the past 1,100 years. And the late-medieval Islamic powers barely noticed the existence of the West until it started losing battles to it. The tradition of intellectual autarky was so robust that Islam remained indifferent even to readily available and obviously useful innovations, including, incredibly, the wheel. The wheel, as we know, makes things easier to roll; Bernard Lewis, in What Went Wrong?, sagely notes that it also makes things easier to steal.

By the beginning of the 20th century the entire Muslim world, with partial exceptions, had been subjugated by the European empires. And at that point the doors of perception were opened to foreign influence: that of Germany. This allegiance cost Islam its last imperium, the Ottoman, for decades a 'helpless hulk' (Hobsbawm), which was duly dismantled and shared out after the First World War - a war that was made in Berlin. Undeterred, Islam continued to look to Germany for sponsorship and inspiration. When the Nazi experiment ended, in 1945, sympathy for its ideals lingered on for years, but Islam was now forced to look elsewhere. It had no choice; geopolitically, there was nowhere else to turn. And the flame passed from Germany to the USSR.

An exclusive essay by Martin Amis, continued.

Click here to read part three

In Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples, VS Naipaul looks at some of the social results of polygamy, in Pakistan, and notes that the marriages tend to be serial. The man moves on, 'religiously tomcatting away'; and the consequence is a society of 'half-orphans'. Divorce is in any case unarduous: 'a man who wanted to get rid of his wife could accuse her of adultery and have her imprisoned'. It is difficult to exaggerate the sexualisation of Islamist governance, even among the figures we think of as moderate. Type in 'sex' and 'al-Sistani', and prepare yourself for a cataract of pedantry and smut.

As the narrative opens, Ayed is very concerned about the state of his marriages. But there's a reason for that. When Ayed was a little boy, in the early Eighties, his dad, a talented poppy-farmer, left Waziristan with his family and settled in Greeley, Colorado. This results in a domestic blow to Ayed's self-esteem. Back home in Waziristan, a boy of his age would be feeling a lovely warm glow of pride, around now, as he realises that his sisters, in one important respect, are just like his mother: they can't read or write either. In America, though, the girls are obliged to go to school. Before Ayed knows it, the women have shed their veils, and his sisters are being called on by gum-chewing kaffirs. Now puberty looms.