Martin Amis, author, 1949–2023

“If you’ve read my novels, you already know everything about me,” wrote Martin Amis inside StoryHis 15th and final novel, published in 2020.

But having said that, the British author, who died of cancer of the esophagus at the age of 73 at his Florida home on Friday, was only continuing the dance between fantasy and reality that has been a hallmark of his novels and short stories. Was. launch. In inside StoryFor example, Amis comes full circle and returns nearly 50 years later to the figure of a teenage girlfriend, “Rachel”, who was the subject of the 1973 debut. Rachel Peppers,

The novel, published when its author was 24, won the Somerset Maugham Prize. Amis was in the limelight as the son of Kingsley Amis, one of Britain’s best-known novelists at the time (Kingsley won the Booker Prize in 1986; Martin never did, although his book arrow of time was shortlisted in 1991).

However, despite her illustrious literary father, it was actually Amis’s stepmother, the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, who encouraged her writing career – with Amis often paying generous tribute to her, saying that until she introduced her to Jane Austen Introduced, till then he had read nothing but comics. Books. And indeed Kingsley had little time to produce for his talented son. In ExperienceIn , Amis’s memoir published in 2000, he vividly documented how “obsessing with the reader; drawing attention to himself” were among his father’s sneering criticisms of his work.

Amis was born in London in 1949 to Kingsley and his wife Hilary Bardwell; He had an older brother, Philip, and a younger sister, Sally, who died in 2000. His parents separated in 1963; His father married Howard in 1965.

Once the younger Amis discovered literature, there was no stopping him. A “congratulations first” at Oxford led to a first job at the Times Literary Supplement, followed by the literary editorship of the New Statesman, then a powerhouse of young talent, whose cramped and dirty offices housed, besides Amis, the future novelist Julian Barnes. poet and critic James Fenton and essayist and polemicist Christopher Hitchens, who became one of Amis’s closest friends.

This tight circle of eager young male writers – they were all men – became the center of Britain’s new literary golden age. She was outspoken, deliberately outrageous, reveling in the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 70s, fiercely ambitious and ruthless in her criticism of her elders, especially the more senior women writers. They set out to do their work. Early fame and an element of swagger new to the British scene made Amis and his circle tabloid fodder.

The true literary heroes, for Amis, are across the Atlantic: Vladimir Nabokov, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth. And he was out of shock. Rachel Peppers followed quickly by dead child (1975): The New York Times dubbed his style “the new obnoxiousness”. Literary pyrotechnics were in fashion and Amis, eager to capture the zeitgeist, provided dazzling, witty, irreverent, multi-faceted prose in his most famous works. These include Wealth (1984), a satire about Thatcher’s consumerist society, london grounds And Information.

arrow of time (1991) used reverse chronology to reconstruct the life of the Holocaust doctor, at times Amis tackled Nazism, the Holocaust and Stalinism as subjects. another was from 2002 koba the dreadAnd later area of ​​interest, about a Nazi commandant living next to Auschwitz: Jonathan Glazer’s film version of the book debuted at the Cannes Film Festival this week. Other explorations into the dark reaches of human nature include synagogueAgain about Stalin’s rule in Russia.

Amis, for all his cool, bad-boy front, was also notably erudite, and his five volumes of collected journalism and criticism interspersed with memoirs and social commentary ranging from his literary idols to film and sports, from John Travolta to Everything was checked until Donald Trump. His journalism, in particular, did not always find him friends: one American critic described his output as “remarkable more or less equally for wit, intelligence and cynicism” – perhaps because Amis wrote about America. In his 1986 book of essays was entitled. the moronic inferno, However, many other readers enjoyed those first two qualities. Another critic wrote that the book “contains some of the best profiles of authors ever written”.

Even though there was often a gap of several years between novels, Amis was rarely out of the limelight and his ideas always ignited furious reactions: one example was his response to the 9/11 attacks, evident in the press. expressed, and subsequent comments that were considered Islamophobic.

In 2003, his novel yellow Dog brought some unfavorable reviews, and that year Amis moved to Uruguay with his second wife, Isabel Fonseca (herself Uruguayan-American) and their two daughters. After returning to London, and despite his earlier views on America, he relocated from London to Cobble Hill, Brooklyn around 2010. Lionel Esbo (2012), a novel about a vicious layout who wins millions on the lottery and launches himself into an even more vain, though very prosperous, life. After that, Amis’ preoccupation with Britain’s social underbelly was mostly replaced by reflections on American society and literature, particularly in his nonfiction and essays.

Amis was previously married to Antonia Phillips; He has two sons. He also had a daughter with Lamorna Seale, although he was unaware of her until she was a teenager. When he presented her with a grandson she said – typically scathing about the aging process – it was “like receiving a telegram from the mortuary”, although he was in fact, apparently a grandfather.

novelist, essayist, commentator, teacher and influencer; A writer always surprising and controversial, always at the nexus of divided opinion and critical argument: it would be hard to overstate Amis’s importance to the literary landscape of the English-speaking world over the past 50 years.

jan.dalley@ft.com