Martin Amis facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Martin Amis
FRSL
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Amis in 2014
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| Born | Martin Louis Amis 25 August 1949 Oxford, England |
| Died | 19 May 2023 (aged 73) Lake Worth Beach, Florida, US |
| Alma mater | Exeter College, Oxford |
| Notable works |
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| Spouse |
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| Children | 5 |
| Parents | Kingsley Amis (father) |
| Relatives | Sally Amis (sister) |
Martin Louis Amis FRSL (25 August 1949 – 19 May 2023) was an English novelist, essayist, memoirist, and screenwriter. He is best known for his novels Money (1984) and London Fields (1989). He received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his memoir Experience and was twice listed for the Booker Prize (shortlisted in 1991 for Time's Arrow and longlisted in 2003 for Yellow Dog). Amis served as the Professor of Creative Writing at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester from 2007 until 2011. In 2008, The Times named him one of the fifty greatest British writers since 1945.
Amis's work centres on the excesses of "late-capitalist" Western society, whose perceived absurdity he often satirised through grotesque caricature; he was portrayed as a master of what The New York Times called "the new unpleasantness". Inspired by Saul Bellow and Vladimir Nabokov, as well as by his father Kingsley Amis, Amis himself influenced many British novelists of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, including Will Self and Zadie Smith.
Contents
Early life
Amis was born on 25 August 1949 at Radcliffe Maternity Hospital in Oxford, England. His father, noted English novelist Sir Kingsley Amis, was the son of a mustard manufacturer's clerk from Clapham, London; his mother, Kingston upon Thames-born Hilary ("Hilly") Ann Bardwell, was the daughter of a Ministry of Agriculture civil servant. He had an older brother, Philip; his younger sister, Sally, died in 2000. His parents married in 1948 in Oxford and divorced when Amis was 12.
Amis attended a number of schools in the 1950s and 1960s including Bishop Gore School in Swansea, and Cambridgeshire High School for Boys, where he was described by one headmaster as "unusually unpromising". The acclaim that followed his father's first novel Lucky Jim (1954) sent the family to Princeton, New Jersey, in the United States, where his father lectured.
In 1965, at the age of 15, Amis played John Thornton in the film version of Richard Hughes' A High Wind in Jamaica.
Amis claimed to have read little more than comic books until his stepmother, the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, introduced him to Jane Austen, whom he often named as his earliest influence. He graduated from Exeter College, Oxford, with a congratulatory first in English, "the sort where you are called in for a viva and the examiners tell you how much they enjoyed reading your papers".
After Oxford, he found an entry-level job at The Times Literary Supplement. At the age of 27 he became literary editor of the New Statesman, where he cited writer and editor John Gross as his role model, and met Christopher Hitchens, then a feature writer for The Observer, who remained Amis's closest friend until his death in 2011.
Early writing
According to Amis, his father showed no interest in his work. "I can point out the exact place where he stopped and sent Money twirling through the air; that's where the character named Martin Amis comes in." "Breaking the rules, buggering about with the reader, drawing attention to himself," Kingsley complained.
His first novel The Rachel Papers (1973) – written at Lemmons, the family home in north London – won the Somerset Maugham Award. The most traditional of his novels, made into an unsuccessful cult film, it tells the story (which Amis acknowledges as autobiographical) of a bright, egotistical teenager and his relationship with the eponymous girlfriend in the year before going to university.
Dead Babies (1975), more flippant in tone, chronicles a few days in the lives of some friends. A film adaptation was made in 2000, which Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian's film critic, described as "boring, embarrassing, nasty and stupid – and not in a good way".
Success (1977) told the story of two foster-brothers, Gregory Riding and Terry Service, and their rising and falling fortunes. This was the first example of Amis's fondness for symbolically "pairing" characters in his novels, which has been a recurrent feature in his fiction since (Martin Amis and Martina Twain in Money, Richard Tull and Gwyn Barry in The Information, and Jennifer Rockwell and Mike Hoolihan in Night Train).
Amis wrote the screenplay for the film Saturn 3 (1980), an experience that he was to draw on for his fifth novel, Money, published in 1984.
Other People: A Mystery Story (1981) – the title is a reference to Sartre's Huis Clos – is about a young woman coming out of a coma. It was a transitional novel in that it was the first of Amis's to show authorial intervention in the narrative voice, and highly artificed language in the heroine's descriptions of everyday objects, which was said to be influenced by his contemporary Craig Raine's "Martian" school of poetry. It was also the first novel Amis published after committing to being a full-time writer in 1980.
Main career
1980s and 1990s
Amis's best-known novels are Money, London Fields, and The Information, commonly referred to as his "London Trilogy". Although the books share little in terms of plot and narrative, they all examine the lives of middle-aged men, exploring the sordid, debauched, and post-apocalyptic undercurrents of life in late 20th-century Britain. Amis's London protagonists are anti-heroes: they engage in questionable behaviour, are passionate iconoclasts, and strive to escape the apparent banality and futility of their lives. Amis writes: "The world is like a human being. And there’s a scientific name for it, which is entropy – everything tends towards disorder. From an ordered state to a disordered state."
Amis's 1997 offering, the short novel Night Train, is narrated by Mike Hoolihan, a tough woman detective with a man's name. Night Train is written in the language of American 'noir' crime fiction, but subverts expectations of an exciting investigation and neat, satisfying ending. Reviewers tended to miss the book's real story, and it was subjected to harshly negative criticism. John Updike "hated" it and others disapproved of a British author writing in an American idiom. But the novel found defenders elsewhere, notably in Janis Bellow, wife of Amis's mentor and friend Saul Bellow.
2000s
The 2000s were Amis's least productive decade in terms of full-length fiction since starting in the 1970s (two novels in ten years), while his non-fiction work saw a dramatic increase in volume (three published works including a memoir, a hybrid of semi-memoir and amateur political history, and another journalism collection).
In 2000 Amis published a memoir called Experience. Largely concerned with the strange relationship between the author and his father, the novelist Kingsley Amis, the autobiography nevertheless deals with many facets of Amis's life. Of particular note is Amis's reunion with his daughter, Delilah Seale, resulting from an affair in the 1970s, whom he did not see until she was 19. Amis also discusses, at some length, the murder of his cousin Lucy Partington by Fred West when she was 21. The book was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography.
In 2002 Amis published Koba the Dread, a devastating history of the crimes of Lenin and Stalin, and the denial that they received from many writers and academics in the West.
In 2003 Amis published Yellow Dog, his first novel in six years. Yellow Dog "made the 13-book longlist for the 2003 Booker Prize, despite some scathing reviews", but failed to win the award.
Following the harsh reviews afforded to Yellow Dog, Amis relocated from London to José Ignacio, Uruguay, with his family for two years, during which time he worked on his next novel away from the glare and pressures of the London literary scene.
In September 2006, upon his return from Uruguay, Amis published his eleventh novel. House of Meetings, a short work, continued the author's crusade against the crimes of Stalinism and also saw some consideration of the state of contemporary post-Soviet Russia. The novel centres on the relationship between two brothers incarcerated in a prototypical Siberian gulag who, prior to their deportation, had loved the same woman.
Amis's last published work of the 2000s was the 2008 journalism collection The Second Plane, a collection which compiled Amis's many writings on the events of 9/11 and the subsequent major events and cultural issues resulting from the War on Terror. The reception to The Second Plane was decidedly mixed, with some reviewers finding its tone intelligent and well reasoned, while others believed it to be overly stylised and lacking in authoritative knowledge of key areas under consideration. The most common consensus was that the two short stories included were the weakest point of the collection. The collection sold relatively well and was widely discussed and debated.
2010s
In 2010, after a long period of writing, rewriting, editing and revision, Amis published his long-awaited new long novel, The Pregnant Widow. Originally set for release in 2008, the novel's publication was pushed back as further editing and alterations were being made, expanding it to some 480 pages. The title of the novel is based on a quote by Alexander Herzen.
In 2012 Amis published Lionel Asbo: State of England. The novel is centred on the lives of Desmond Pepperdine and his uncle Lionel Asbo, a voracious lout and persistent convict. It is set against the fictional borough of Diston Town, a grotesque version of modern-day Britain under the reign of celebrity culture, and follows the dramatic events in the lives of both characters: Desmond's gradual erudition and maturing; and Lionel's fantastic lottery win of approximately £140 million.
Amis's 2014 novel, The Zone of Interest, concerns the Holocaust, his second work of fiction to tackle the subject after Time's Arrow. In it, Amis tries to imagine the social and domestic lives of the Nazi officers who ran the death camps, and the effect their indifference to human suffering had on their general psychology.
In December 2016, Amis announced two new projects. The first, a collection of journalism, titled The Rub of Time: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump. Essays and Reportage, 1986–2016, was published in October 2017. The second project, a new untitled novel which Amis was working on, was an autobiographical novel about three key literary figures in his life: the poet Philip Larkin, American novelist Saul Bellow, and noted public intellectual Christopher Hitchens.
Amis's next novel, Inside Story – his first in six years – was published in September 2020.
Other work
Amis also released two collections of short stories (Einstein's Monsters and Heavy Water), five volumes of collected journalism and criticism (The Moronic Inferno, Visiting Mrs Nabokov, The War Against Cliché , The Second Plane and The Rub of Time), and a guide to 1980s space-themed arcade video-game machines (Invasion of the Space Invaders) which he later disavowed. He also regularly appeared on television and radio discussion and debate programmes and contributed book reviews and articles to newspapers. His wife Isabel Fonseca released her debut novel Attachment in 2009 and two of Amis's children, his son Louis and his daughter Fernanda, have also been published in their own right in Standpoint magazine and The Guardian, respectively.
University of Manchester
In February 2007, Amis was appointed as a professor of creative writing at The Manchester Centre for New Writing in the University of Manchester, and started in September 2007. He ran postgraduate seminars, and participated in four public events each year, including a two-week summer school.
Of his position, Amis said: "I may be acerbic in how I write but...I would find it very difficult to say cruel things to [students] in such a vulnerable position. I imagine I'll be surprisingly sweet and gentle with them." He predicted that the experience might inspire him to write a new book, while adding sardonically: "A campus novel written by an elderly novelist, that's what the world wants." It was revealed that the salary paid to Amis by the university was £80,000 a year in return for 28 contracted hours. The Manchester Evening News broke the story saying that according to his contract Amis was paid £3,000 an hour for 28 contracted hours a year teaching. The claim was echoed in headlines in several national papers.
In January 2011, it was announced that Amis would be stepping down from his university position at the end of the current academic year. Of his time teaching creative writing at Manchester University, Amis was quoted as saying, "teaching creative writing at Manchester has been a joy" and that he had "become very fond of my colleagues, especially John McAuliffe and Ian McGuire". He added that he "loved doing all the reading and the talking; and I very much took to the Mancunians. They are a witty and tolerant contingent". Amis was succeeded in this position by the Irish writer Colm Tóibín in September 2011.
From October 2007 to July 2011, at Manchester University's Whitworth Hall and Cosmo Rodewald Concert Hall, Amis regularly engaged in public discussions with other experts on literature and various topics (21st-century literature, terrorism, religion, Philip Larkin, science, Britishness, ageing, his 2010 novel The Pregnant Widow, violence, film, the short story, and America).
Personal life
Amis returned to Britain in September 2006 after living in Uruguay for two and a half years with his second wife, the writer Isabel Fonseca, and their two young daughters. Amis became a grandfather in 2008, when his daughter (by Lamorna Seale) Delilah gave birth to a son. He said, "Some strange things have happened, it seems to me, in my absence. I didn't feel like I was getting more rightwing when I was in Uruguay, but when I got back I felt that I had moved quite a distance to the right while staying in the same place." He reported that he was disquieted by what he saw as increasingly undisguised hostility towards Israel and the United States.
In late 2010 Amis bought a brownstone residence in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, US, although it was unclear how much time he would be spending there. In 2012, Amis wrote in The New Republic that he was "moving house" from Camden Town in London to Cobble Hill. He also had a residence in Lake Worth Beach, Florida, US.
Death
Amis died from oesophageal cancer at his home in Florida on 19 May 2023. Like his father, he died at the age of 73. Amis was a lifelong smoker, as was his friend Christopher Hitchens, who died due to complications from the same form of cancer.
Views
Nuclear proliferation
Through the 1980s and 1990s, Amis was a strong critic of nuclear proliferation. His collection of five stories on this theme, Einstein's Monsters, began with a long essay entitled "Thinkability" in which he set out his views on the issue, writing: "Nuclear weapons repel all thought, perhaps because they can end all thought."
Foreign policy
In comments on the BBC in October 2006, Amis expressed his view that North Korea was the more dangerous of the two remaining members of the Axis of Evil, but that Iran was Britain's "natural enemy", suggesting that Britain should not feel bad about having "helped Iraq scrape a draw with Iran" in the Iran–Iraq War, because a "revolutionary and rampant Iran would have been a much more destabilising presence".
Electoral politics
In June 2008, Amis endorsed the candidacy of Barack Obama for president of the United States, stating: "The reason I hope for Obama is that he alone has the chance to reposition America's image in the world." When briefly interviewed by the BBC during its coverage of the 2012 United States presidential election, Amis displayed a change in tone, stating that he was "depressed and frightened" by the US election, rather than excited. Blaming a "deep irrationality of the American people" for the apparent narrow gap between the candidates, Amis claimed that the Republicans had swung so far to the right that former President Reagan would be considered a "pariah" by the present party – and invited viewers to imagine a Conservative Party in the UK that had moved to the right so much that it disowned Margaret Thatcher: "Tax cuts for the rich," he said, "there's not a democracy on earth where that would be mentioned!"
In 2015, Amis criticised Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn in an article for the Sunday Times, describing him as "humourless" and "under-educated".
Agnosticism
In 2006, Amis said that "agnostic is the only respectable position, simply because our ignorance of the universe is so vast" that atheism is "premature". Clearly, "there's not going to be any kind of anthropomorphic entity at all", but the universe is "so incredibly complicated", "so over our heads", that we cannot exclude the existence of "an intelligence" behind it.
In 2010, he said: "I'm an agnostic, which is the only rational position. It's not because I feel a God or think that anything resembling the banal God of religion will turn up. But I think that atheism sounds like a proof of something, and it's incredibly evident that we are nowhere near intelligent enough to understand the universe...Writers are above all individualists, and above all writing is freedom, so they will go off in all sorts of directions. I think it does apply to the debate about religion, in that it's a crabbed novelist who pulls the shutters down and says, there's no other thing. Don't use the word God: but something more intelligent than us... If we can't understand it, then it's formidable. And we understand very little."
See also
In Spanish: Martin Amis para niños
