The War Against Cliche: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 (Vintage International)

by Martin Amis

  ‘Dutch’ Leonard is as American as jazz, and jazz is in origin a naïve form. Yet he is no Louis Armstrong. He can do melody, but he is also as harshly sophisticated as late-period Coleman Hawkins. 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. They are not lost souls or dead souls. Terrible and pitiable (and often downright endearing, they are simply junk souls: quarter-pounders, with cheese.

  In Riding the Rap, Chip Ganz, ageing pretty boy, parasite and predator, plans to commit the crime of the century. Not this century: the next. His crime will be a new crime. ‘Burning herb’, ‘maintaining on reefer’, the marijuana-sotted Chip has picked up various odds and ends about the hostages in Beirut – ‘seen them on TV when they were released, read a book one of them wrote’. His idea is to take rich Miamians hostage. ‘You talking about kidnapping?’ asks his associate, Louis Lewis. No. You don’t demand a ransom. You don’t call his family. You wait, and then you ask the victim how much his life is worth.

  Starting out, Chip had pictured a damp basement full of spiders and roaches crawling around, pipes dripping, his hostages huddled against the wall in chains. He wanted it to be as bad as any of the places in Beirut he’d read about.

  He told Louis and Louis said, ‘Where we gonna find a basement in Florida?’

  So the malefactors have to catch as catch can. The hostage they take is not a politician or a diplomat; he is a mob bookie called Harry Arno. The muscle they hire is not a Shia terrorist but a Puerto Rican debt-collector called Bobby Deogracias. (Leonard’s names: he once had a woman called LaDonna team up with a man called DeLeon.) The dungeon they use is not a fetid cellar but a spare bedroom in an oceanfront residence in Palm Beach owned by Chip’s mother. The diet they put their hostage on consists not of bread and water but of frozen dinners and Jell-O. ‘Louis said the Shia fixed their hostages rice and shit but no doubt would have given them TV dinners if they had any.’

  Of course the scheme unravels into a peculiarly American havoc. Crime, Mr Leonard insistently informs us, is always half-baked, and always goes off half-cocked. Death (or life, behind bars) comes in the form of the fast buck, or its promise. Ranged against these seedy blunderers is United States Marshal Raylan Givens (a welcome carry-over, like Harry Arno, from the previous novel, Pronto). Raylan is perhaps the cleanest character in the entire oeuvre, dead straight and ‘all business’, a genuine enforcer, unlike the grey-area skip-tracers and writ-servers who, in Mr Leonard’s work, usually represent the law-and-order industry. Raylan isn’t post-modern; he is an anachronism from out of town. And he is fascinating, because he shows you what Mr Leonard actually holds dear – the values he can summon in a different kind of prose, in different American rhythms, those of Robert Frost, or even Mark Twain:

  He could cut official corners to call a man out … but couldn’t walk in a man’s house unless invited, or else with a warrant and bust down the door.

  It was the way he was raised, to have good manners … back when they were living in a coal camp and the miners struck at Duke Power: Raylan walking a picket line most of the year, his dad in the house dying of black lung, and company gun thugs came looking for Raylan’s uncle … They came across the street, five of them, a couple with pick handles, and up the walk to where his mother stood on the porch … The gun thugs said they wanted to speak to her brother … She told them, ‘You don’t walk in a person’s home ‘less you’re invited. Even you people must believe that. You have homes, don’t you? Wives and mothers keeping house?’ … They shoved her aside and hit Raylan with the pick handles to put him down …

  Her words hadn’t stopped them. No, what they did was stick in Raylan’s mind – her words, her quiet tone of voice – and stop him, more than twenty years later, from breaking into this man’s house.

  I first read Riding the Rap in mid-January. In mid-March I read it again. The reviewer curling up with the present participle. Re-reading Elmore Leonard in the morning, and saying it was work. The experience, like the book, was wicked and irresistible. This was post-modern decadence. This was bliss.

  New York Times Book Review May 1995

  Half Wolfe

  A Man in Full by Tom Wolfe

  This book will be a good friend to you. Maybe the best you ever had – or so it will sometimes seem. I read A Man in Full during a week of lone travel, and it was always there for me: nestling in my lap on planes and trains, enlivening many a solitary meal, and faithfully waiting in my hotel room when I returned, last thing. Like its predecessor, The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe’s new novel is fiercely and instantly addictive. It is intrinsically and generically disappointing, too, bringing with it an unavoidable hangover. But a generously mild one, really, considering the time you had.

  We begin with the bovine figure of Charlie Croker, out shooting quail on his vast South Georgia plantation with an old-money Atlanta pal, Inman Armholster. Although Croker is a semi-literate redneck from ‘below the gnat line’, he has amassed a volatile real-estate fortune that now rivals Armholster’s. But retributive justice – known hereabouts as capitalism – stands ready in the wings. Croker’s empire is haemorrhaging money on a ‘dead elephant’ called Croker Concourse: ‘You could take somebody into the lobby and the sheer “curb flash” would bowl him over … the Henry Moore sculpture out front, the marble arch over the doorway … the Belgian tapestries, the piano player in a tuxedo playing classical music from 7:30 a.m. …’ As always, Wolfe is very good at evoking the unreality and weird onerousness of colossal expenditure. It brings out the sadist in him. Croker, like Sherman in Bonfire, is about to be hideously stripped.

  Now we switch to a spiffy black lawyer, Roger White, as he drives to an urgent appointment with Buck McNutter, coach to the local football team. McNutter, a Mississippi cracker with a neck that seems to be ‘unit-welded’ to his shoulders, has a problem in the person of his star player, Fareek Fanon, an ex-ghetto boy who now wears a gold chain ‘so chunky you could have used it to pull an Isuzu pickup out of a red clay ditch’. Fareek has just been accused of raping the eighteen-year-old daughter of a white Atlanta bigwig – Croker’s old buddy, Inman Armholster …

  The next chapter, mysteriously entitled ‘The Saddlebags’, is the best thing in the book. Croker has been summoned to a breakfast meeting with the ‘workout team’ at PlannersBanc, where he owes half a billion dollars. The stage has been lovingly set. Croker is seated facing the unbearable glare of the early sun, with a paper mug of coffee smelling of ‘incinerated PVC cables’ and a ‘huge, cold, sticky, cheesy, cowpie-like cinnamon-Cheddar coffee bun that struck terror in the heart of every man in the room who had ever read an article about arterial plaque or free radicals’. For the ‘orientation’ of the workout team is now ‘post-goodwill’; and Croker, once so eagerly wined and dined, has descended to the status of ‘shithead’: ‘Shithead was the actual term used at the bank and throughout the industry. Bank officers said “shithead” in the same matter-of-fact way they said “mortgagee,” “co-signer,” or “debtor,” which was the polite form of “shithead,” since no borrower was referred to as a debtor until he defaulted.’ As the grilling continues (‘This here’s the morning after, bro’), we approach the moment devoutly anticipated by the whole team. It comes when the two patches of sweat from the shithead’s armpits finally converge on his sternum, and his breasts look like saddlebags.

  With the appearance, now, of the black Mayor, we seem ready for a most welcome reheat of Bonfire: a smug nabob will crash and burn across the racial fault line. But here the novel lurches off in an unexpected direction – and it depresses me to have to report, for instance, that the mouthwatering duo of McNutter and Fareek will absent itself for 500 pages. Instead we meet Conrad Hensley, an entirely (and entirely improbably) wholesome young man e
mployed as a ‘product humper’ or ‘freezer picker’ at a Croker meat-warehouse near Oakland, Calif. Charlie Croker’s snap decision – 15 per cent layoffs – sets the wronged Conrad on a course that will lead him, over several chapters, to one of the greatest anti-epiphanies that American life can offer. Imagine: you’re in the ‘reeking lizard cage’ of Santa Rita Rehab Centre, and the big ponytailed shot-caller named Rotto comes strolling across the pod room to ask you for a date. And not nicely.

  All the prison stuff is so harrowing and comic and above all thorough that you feel that Wolfe, going about his famous ‘research’, must have voluntarily served at least a five-year term. Still, the fight with the excellent Rotto is effectively the novel’s climax. Hereafter A Man in Full is afflicted by a strange tristesse. As almost invariably happens in the Big Picture narrative, the second half becomes a zestless hireling of the first. Our author has so many structural chores to get done (like the transfer of Conrad from Santa Rita to Croker’s house in Buckland, Atlanta: real product-humping, this) that there’s little room or energy for the incidental pleasures of Wolfe’s satire. And besides, for all the scaffolding he throws up and for all the grunting menials he sets to work on it, the plot just doesn’t stay standing. The destiny cobbled together for Croker is both implausible and sympathy-forfeiting. And Conrad, the other half of ‘the man in full’, is a 2D, for-younger-readers creation, and one sentimentally conceived.

  You also have the leisure, around now, to inspect Wolfe’s dependency on mannerism and iteration. ‘Sullenly, sulkily, surlily, Roger sank back …’; ‘he had suffered a dreadful, shameful, humiliating defeat’; within half-a-dozen lines a dancing girl is described as ‘salacious’, ‘lubricious’ and ‘concupiscent’. Well, they’re all in my thesaurus too. Later on, it occurs to Wolfe that a crowded party is like a sea; so, in ten pages, we get a ‘regular Typhoon’, a ‘roaring sea’, a ‘shrieking sea’, a ‘roaring swell’ and a ‘boiling social sea’ (complete with ‘boiling teeth’ – a steal from Bonfire). There would also appear to be something wrong with Wolfe’s typewriter: a faulty repeater-key, perhaps. Or maybe he meant to write ‘Oooooooooo’ and ‘Ahhhhhhhhh’ and ‘Nahhhhhhhh’ and ‘Hmmmmmmmmmmmm’.

  In an oft-quoted manifesto for the ‘new social novel’ Wolfe advised writers to go easy on the inspiration and buckle down to some real ‘research’. The great stories were out there, not in here; and the future of the novel lay with ‘a highly detailed realism’ based on journalism. Journalists, obviously, were much taken with this notion, and still use it as ammunition against more ‘literary’ efforts. It seems to me equally obvious, indeed tautologous, that if you take a journalistic approach then you will write a journalistic novel. In other words, local ephemera will tend to deuniversalize your prose. Tom Wolfe, with his bright architectural eye, writes so well about institutions that he forces you to compare him to his beloved Dickens. Dickens was a great visitor of institutions and no doubt he ‘researched’ his Marshalsea Prison, his Chancery, and so on. But he also dreamt them up, and reshaped them in the image of his own psyche, his own comic logic. That is perhaps why they have lasted and why Wolfe’s edifices look more trapped in time.

  Guardian November 1998

  Bob Sneed Broke the Silence

  Hannibal by Thomas Harris

  Mason Verger, the villain of Thomas Harris’s Hannibal, is an incredibly evil guy. Here’s a thing he likes to do: he likes to get hold of one of the ‘African-American children’ – preferably orphans – he keeps around the place and tell the kid horrible things. Your foster-mother doesn’t love you because your skin is too dark. Your pet, Kitty Cat, is going to hurt and die. When the child cries, a nurse wipes the tears away and puts ‘the wet swatches in Mason’s martini glass, chilling in the playroom’s refrigerator beside the orange juice and Cokes’. What a terrible guy. And what a terrible martini. To Mason Verger, though, the tears of an African-American orphan are as sweet, and as drunk-making, at the finest Tanqueray. That’s how incredibly evil this guy is.

  So ends page 66. With another 420 to come. A Harris fan from way back, I got through the thing in the end, with many a weary exhalation, with much dropping of the head and rolling of the eyes, and with considerable fanning of the armpits. In evaluating a novel with a lot of pig interest (man-eating hogs, bred for savagery) it seems apt to bellow the assurance that Hannibal is, on all levels, a snorting, rooting, oinking porker, complete with twinkling trotters and twirlaround tail.

  Try telling that to the Gadarene swine. The publication of Hannibal back in June cut the ribbon on a festival of stupidity. In the US the critical consensus was no more than disgracefully lenient. In the UK, though, the reviews comprised a veritable dunciad. There were exceptions, most of them (significantly, I think) written by women. Elsewhere the book pages all rolled over for Dr Lecter. I sat around reading long lists of what Hannibal isn’t (‘a great popular novel’, for instance), long lists of what it doesn’t do, long lists of what it never gets close to pulling off or getting away with. The eager gullibility felt sinisterly unanimous. Is this the next thing? Philistine hip? The New Inanity?

  There’s really not much you can say to the miserable idiots who were ‘skewered’ to their seats by this harpoon of unqualified kitsch. And I found I could sit still while pundits talked about Harris’s ‘real moral impact’, how ‘every line … is suffused with the sense of a titanic struggle with evil in its blackest form’ despite the clear fact that the novel is helplessly voulu, sentimental, and corrupt. But when I see Hannibal enlisted as literature (‘a plausible candidate for the Pulitzer Prize’, ‘a momentous achievement’), then my pen is obliged to flash from its scabbard.

  At this point, Lecters I and II – Red Dragon (1981) and The Silence of the Lambs (1988) – cry out for reinspection. And they effortlessly withstand it. In these books 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. It is the world of the human raptor in the American setting (with his equipment, his weapons, his mobility), and of those who would hunt him down. Harris’s subject is predacity – serial murder – but his intelligent eye is alert to its quieter manifestations. Look at this apparently incidental passage, in Red Dragon, which describes the career of a tabloid reporter. It has the cold satirical swing of Kurt Vonnegut:

  He started as Cancer Editor at a salary nearly double what he had earned before. Management was impressed with his attitude …

  Marketing surveys showed that a bold ‘New Cure for Cancer’ or ‘Cancer Miracle Drug’ cover line boosted supermarket sales of any [National] Tattler issue by 22.3 percent. There was a six-percentile drop in those sales when the story ran on page one beneath the cover line, as the reader had time to scan the empty text while the groceries were being totaled.

  Marketing experts discovered it was better to have the big cover line in color on the front and play the story in the middle pages, where it was difficult to hold the paper open and manage a purse and grocery cart at the same time.

  The standard story featured an optimistic five paragraphs in ten point type, then a drop to eight point, then to six point before mentioning that the ‘miracle drug’ was unavailable …

  Now consider this pivotal modulation from The Silence of the Lambs. The scene is a rustic funeral home in the town of Potter, West Virginia, and young Clarice Starling is about to unzip a body bag containing a scalped and half-flayed ‘floater’ – the waterlogged corpse of a girl with waxed legs and glitter polish on her fingernails. In a few moments Clarice will get her first apprehension of the nature of the killer she hunts (‘sometimes the family of a man produces, behind a human face, a mind whose pleasure is what lay on the porcelain table’). But first she must clear the room of a crowd of mumbling deputies and state troopers, asserting her slender authority. Notice how the author binds us to the victim, allowing us, through Clarice (‘let me take care of her’), to mourn for the girl on the slab:

 
Starling took off her scarf and tied it over her hair like a mountain midwife. She took a pair of surgical gloves out of her kit. When she opened her mouth for the first time in Potter, her voice had more than its normal twang and the force of it brought Crawford to the door to listen. ‘Gentlemen. Gentlemen! You officers and gentlemen! Listen here a minute. Please. Now let me take care of her.’ She held her hands before their faces as she pulled on the gloves. ‘There’s things we need to do for her. You brought her this far, and I know her folks would thank you if they could. Now please go on out and let me take care of her.’

  Hannibal Lecter, as we are often told, does what he does ‘for fun’ – or, more accurately, he does what he does for the hell of it. Needless to say, the books would fall apart in an instant if we thought the same were true of his creator. Lecters I and II are thrillers, procedurals of pain and panic, and they involve the reader in various simplifications and unrealities (particularly towards the endings, with all their ritual satisfactions). This is generic decorum. But Harris maintains human decorum, too. His prose is hard and sober and decently sad as he takes us to the place where the dragon bears down on the lambs.