by Martin Amis
I have hurt too much too many bodies with my twisted poor hands to be proud of them. French epithets, a Dorset yokel’s knuckles, an Austrian tailor’s flat fingertips – that’s Humbert Humbert.
At one point, comparing himself to Joyce, Nabokov said: ‘my English is patball to [his] champion game’. At another, he tabulated the rambling rumbles of Don Quixote as a tennis match (the Don taking it in four hard sets). And we all remember Lolita on the court, her form ‘excellent to superb’, according to her schoolmistress, but her grace ‘so sterile’, according to Humbert, ‘that she could not even win from panting me and my old fashioned lifting drive’. Now, although of course Joyce and Nabokov never met in competition, it seems to me that Nabokov was the more ‘complete’ player. Joyce appeared to be cruising about on all surfaces at once, and maddeningly indulged his trick shots on high-pressure points – his drop smash, his sidespun half-volley lob. Nabokov just went out there and did the business, all litheness, power and touch. Losing early in the French (say), Joyce would be off playing exhibitions in Casablanca with various arthritic legends, and working on his inside-out between-the-legs forehand dink; whereas Nabokov and his entourage would quit the rusty dust of Roland Garros for somewhere like Hull or Nailsea, to prepare for Wimbledon on our spurned and sodden grass. We still talk about Joyce in the pavilion, constantly: the footwork, the flow, the dream backhand, the maybes, the might-have-beens, the time he won the Italian with his left hand shackled to his right leg. Then we move on to the great Russian, and the eye strays to the honours board – and Nabokov’s fat wedge of Grand Slams.
When they come across something wise or witty, or fond, or funny, or something obviously necessary to the whole, warmed readers make a little vertical mark on the page with their bookside pencils. Accordingly, then, the perfect novel would have perfect verticals running down the length of every margin. It never works out quite like that, because the novel is a tangled thing, and shifts its shape over the years. I have read Lolita eight or nine times and not always in the same edition; but the margins of my staple hardback bear a Pompeiian litter of ticks, queries, exclamation marks, and lines straight and squiggly and doubled and tripled. My pencilled comments, I realize, form a kind of surrealistic summary of the whole:
but you can’t … steady insult … ear … disguise … playing with Dostoevsky … love proceeds … v. v. good … travelling eye … one pup and at least three important dogs … vampire again … oh, oh … Flaub.… co-ed … the bike … poor, poor Dolly … brimming … quite mad … now alone … sobbing over sneaker … all along! … all dead … horribly experienced …
Clearly, these are not a scholar’s notes, and they move towards no edifice of understanding or completion. They are gasps of continually renewed surprise. I expect to read the novel many more times. And I am running out of clean white space.
Atlantic Monthly September 1992
Martin Amis is the author of thirteen novels, the memoir Experience, two collections of stories, and six nonfiction books. He lives in Brooklyn.
Books by MARTIN AMIS
FICTION
The Rachel Papers
Dead Babies
Success
Other People
Money
Einstein’s Monsters
London Fields
Time’s Arrow
The Information
Night Train
Heavy Water
Yellow Dog
House of Meetings
The Pregnant Widow
Lionel Asbo
NONFICTION
Invasion of the Space Invaders
The Moronic Inferno
Visiting Mrs. Nabokov
Experience
The War Against Cliché
Koba the Dead
The Second Plane
ALSO BY
MARTIN AMIS
DEAD BABIES
The residents of Appleseed Rectory have primed themselves both for a visit from a triad of Americans and a weekend of copious drug taking and sexual gymnastics. There’s even a heifer to be slugged and a pair of doddering tenants to be ingeniously harassed. But none of these variously bright and dull young things has counted on the intrusion of “dead babies”—dreary spasms of reality. Or of the uninvited presence of a mysterious prankster named Johnny, whose sinister idea of fun makes theirs look like a game of backgammon.
Fiction/Literature
EINSTEIN’S MONSTERS
A collection of stories about a frightening world inhabited by people dehumanized by the daily threat of nuclear war and postwar survivors deformed by its results.
Short Stories/Literature
EXPERIENCE
In Experience, one of the most gifted writers of our time discloses a private life every bit as unique and fascinating as his novels. The son of the great comic novelist Kingsley Amis, Amis explores his relationship with this father and the various crises of Kingsley’s life. He also examines the life and legacy of his cousin, Lucy Partington, who was murdered by one of Britain’s most notorious serial killers. Amis deconstructs the changing literary scene, offering portraits of Saul Bellow, Salman Rushdie, Allan Bloom, Philip Larkin, and Robert Graves, among others. Not since Nabokov’s Speak, Memory has such an implausible life been recorded by such an inimitable talent.
Memoir
HEAVY WATER
In this wickedly delightful collection of stories, Martin Amis once again demonstrates why he is a modern master of the form. In “State of England,” Mal, a former “minder to the superstars,” discovers how to live in a country where “class and race and gender were supposedly gone.” In “Career Move,” screenwriters struggle for their art, while poets are the darlings of Hollywood. And in “Straight Fiction,” the love that dare not speak its name calls out to the hero when he encounters a forbidden object of desire—the opposite sex. In Heavy Water and Other Stories, Amis astonishes us with the vast range of his talent, establishing that he is one of the most versatile and gifted writers of his generation.
Fiction/Short Stories
HOUSE OF MEETINGS
In 1946, two brothers and a Jewish girl fall into alignment in pogrom-poised Moscow. The fraternal conflict then marinates in Norlag, a slave-labor camp above the Arctic Circle, where a tryst in the coveted House of Meetings will haunt all three lovers long after the brothers are released. And for the narrator, the sole survivor, the reverberations continue into the new century.
Fiction/Literature
THE INFORMATION
Fame, envy, lust, violence, intrigues literary and criminal—they’re all here in The Information. How does one writer hurt another writer? This is the question novelist Richard Tull mulls over, for his friend Gwyn Barry has become a darling of book buyers, award committees, and TV interviewers, even as Tull himself sinks deeper into the sub-basement of literary failure. The only way out of this predicament, Tull believes, is to plot the demise of Barry.
Fiction/Literature
KOBA THE DREAD
A brilliant weave of personal involvement, vivid biography and political insight, Koba the Dread is the successor to Martin Amis’s award-winning memoir, Experience. Koba the Dread captures the appeal of one of the most powerful belief systems of the 20th century—one that spread through the world, both captivating it and staining it red. It addresses itself to the central lacuna of 20th-century thought: the indulgence of Communism by the intellectuals of the West.
Biography/Autobiography
LIONEL ASBO
Des Pepperdine is a boy out of place. He lives on the thirty-third floor of a London housing project; while his peers pick fights, Des retreats to the public library. What’s more, Des’s uncle and guardian, Lionel Asbo, is one of the most notorious petty criminals in the city. Yet Lionel, full of inept devotion to his nephew, dutifully teaches Des the essentials of becoming a man (always carry a knife; pornography is easier than dating; pit bulls should be fed Tabasco sauce). Lionel wins £140 million in the lottery and the mone
y ushers in a public-relations firm for Lionel, along with a cannily ambitious topless modelpoet. Through it all, Lionel remains his vicious, oddly loyal self, and his problems, as well as Des’s, only seem to multiply.
Fiction/Literature
LONDON FIELDS
London Fields is Amis’s murder story for the end of the millennium. The murderee is Nicola Six, a “black hole” of sex and self-loathing intent on orchestrating her own extinction. The murderer may be Keith Talent, a violent lowlife whose only passions are pornography and darts. Or is the killer the rich, honorable, and dimly romantic Guy Clinch?
Fiction/Literature
NIGHT TRAIN
Homicide detective Mike Hoolihan has seen it all. A veteran of the force, she’s gone from walking a beat, to homicide. But one case—this case—has gotten under her skin. When Jennifer Rockwell, darling of the community and daughter of a respected career cop—now top brass—takes her own life, no one is prepared to believe it. Especially her father, Colonel Tom. Hoolihan, longtime colleague and friend of Colonel Tom, is ready to “put the case down.” Suicide. Closed. Until Colonel Tom asks her to do the one thing any grieving father would ask: take a second look.
Fiction/Literature
OTHER PEOPLE
She wakes in an emergency room in a London hospital, to a voice that tells her: “You’re on your own now. Take care. Be good.” She has no knowledge of her name, her past, or even her species. It takes her a while to realize that she is human—and that the beings who threaten, befriend, and violate her are other people. Some of whom seem to know all about her. In this eerie, blackly funny, and sometimes disorienting novel, Martin Amis gives us a mystery that is as ambitious as it is intriguing, an investigation of a young woman’s violent extinction that also traces her construction of a new and oddly innocent self.
Fiction/Literature
THE PREGNANT WIDOW
The year is 1970, and Keith Nearing, a twenty-year-old literature student, is spending his summer vacation in a castle on a mountainside in Italy. The Sexual Revolution is in full-swing—a historical moment of unprecedented opportunity—and Keith and his friends are immediately caught up in its chaotic, ecstatic throes. Yet they soon discover a disturbing truth: between the death of one social order and the birth of another, there exists a state of liminal purgatory, once described by the Russian thinker Alexander Herzen as “a pregnant widow.” As Amis deftly explores the repercussions and consequences of that one summer, he presents us with a precise and poignant portrait of the liberating possibilities, and the haunting consequences, of change.
Fiction/Literature
THE RACHEL PAPERS
In his uproarious first novel Martin Amis gave us one of the most noxiously believable—and curiously touching—adolescents ever to sniffle and lust his way through the pages of contemporary fiction. On the brink of twenty, Charles Highway preps desultorily for Oxford, cheerfully loathes his father, and meticulously plots the seduction of a girl named Rachel—a girl who sorely tests the mettle of his cynicism when he finds himself falling in love with her.
Fiction/Literature
THE SECOND PLANE
A master not only of fiction but also of fiercely controversial political engagement, Martin Amis here gathers fourteen pieces that constitute an evolving, provocative, and insightful examination of the most momentous event of our time. Whether lambasted for his refusal to kowtow to Muslim pieties or hailed for his common sense, wide reading, and astute perspective, Amis is indisputably a great pleasure to read—informed, elegant, surprising—and this collection a resounding contemplation of the relentless, manifold dangers we suddenly find ourselves living with.
Essays
SUCCESS
In Success Amis pens a pair of foster brothers—one “a quivering condom of neurosis and ineptitude,” the other a “bundle of contempt, vanity and stock-response”—in a single London flat. He binds them with ties of class hatred, sexual rivalry, and disappointed love, and throws in a disloyal girlfriend and a spectacularly unstable sister to create a modern-day Jacobean revenge comedy that soars with malicious poetry.
Fiction/Literature
TIME’S ARROW
In Time’s Arrow the doctor Tod T. Friendly dies and then feels markedly better, breaks up with his lovers as a prelude to seducing them, and mangles his patients before he sends them home.
Fiction/Literature
VISITING MRS. NABOKOV
To this tantalizing nonfiction collection Martin Amis brings the same megawatt wit, wickedly acute perception, and ebullient wordplay that characterize his novels. He encompasses the full range of contemporary politics and culture (high and low) while also traveling to China for soccer with Elton John and to London’s darts-crazy pubs in search of the perfect throw.
Essays/Literary Criticism
THE WAR AGAINST CLICHÉ
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 clichés—not only of the pen, but of the mind and the heart.
Essays/Literary Criticism
YELLOW DOG
When “dream husband” Xan Meo is vengefully assaulted in the garden of a London pub, he suffers a head injury and a personality change. Like a spiritual convert, the familial paragon becomes an anti-husband, an anti-father. He submits to an alien moral system—one among many to be found in these pages.
Fiction/Literature
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