The novelist's universe

On the fictional world of Martin Amis:

What kind of private universe is this? Well, for starters it's a universe shaped by gusts and headwinds of comic hyperbole ("her buttocks...danced behind her knees like punch-balls") and an undercurrent of the literary high style ("the gloomy pools that were her eyes"). It's a universe both strange and strangely familiar; a universe racked with drink, drugs, and porno (Money); environmental disaster and nuclear weapons (London Fields, Einstein's Monsters); sexual revolution and male anxiety (The Pregnant Widow, The Information). It's a private universe shaped by a partly outraged and partly excited response to the late twentieth century. Much of the comedy in Amis comes from this strange ambivalence. It's what makes reading his essays on topics like Madonna, American presidential campaigns, and Hugh Hefner so engaging. Amis doesn't reject or cower from what he once called the "great convulsion of stupidity" of the modern world; however savage his critique, you can never really shake the feeling that part of Amis takes a perverse pleasure in the modern. He is the fiercely moral litterateur who upholds the achievements of Joyce, Nabokov and Bellow. But he is also the laddish, snooker-playing, cigarette-smoking son of the twentieth century.

 Irving Howe wrote of Saul Bellow's prose that it was sometimes "strongly anti-literary," that it tried to "break away from the stateliness of the literary sentence." Amis, in turn, credited Bellow (his literary mentor and surrogate father) with attempting to find a voice appropriate to the twentieth century, and his own fiction is an extension of this ambition. In London Fields the writer-narrator Samson Young muses that, "perhaps because of their addiction to form, writers always lag behind the contemporary formlessness. They write about an old reality, in a language that's even older."

Contrary to this tendency, Amis risks form in the pursuit of a language that mirrors the contemporary formlessness. His best novels — Money, London Fields, The Information — are oddly shaped and (with the exception of the nearly-perfect Money) very uneven. But unlike your run-of-the-mill Booker contenders, routinely jettisoning their cargos of contemporary speech in order to stay afloat on a sea of polite style, Amis' novels go right into the currents and whirlpools of modernity, surging and hoarding without constraint.