His father Kingsley had been famous for comic novels, but Martin Amis did not believe that talent was inherited
a throb. A recognition of something he had probably buried long ago in his subconscious, which could be exposed now. A calorific infusion, announcing the next novel he had to write. The throb went into his notebook, and when he had set up the morning—a double espresso, then that first cigarette his lungs were sobbing for—he went to his desk to work.
There had been 14 novels, eight non-fiction collections, two volumes of short stories. His first novel, “The Rachel Papers” in 1973, featuring a horny young man’s pre-university adventures, had won the Somerset Maugham award, but after that he was not much garlanded. His books did not unite people, let alone judges. They were verbally prodigious, structurally wayward, profane and often vividly experimental. He might look, and speak, like a shy public schoolboy, but as a writer he smashed plates.
Real victims were hard to write about. He produced two books on the Holocaust, two on Stalin; in “Time’s Arrow”, about a doctor in Auschwitz, time was reversed so that the doctor, in his own warped mind, restored his patients rather than destroying them. In “House of Meetings” about Stalin’s gulag, he felt he had not suffered enough to tell the tale.
His father envied him, perhaps. It was the besetting sin of writers. “The Information” detailed the worst horror, a man’s best friend becoming more celebrated than he was. His own inner egomaniac dreaded any blazing talent coming up on his flank, even though he moved in the most sparkling and influential literary set of the 1980s and 1990s—with Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes, Salman Rushdie and “Hitch”, Christopher Hitchens, his closest friend, who still lived for Trotskyist struggle.
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