Martin Amis Goes Out With a Bang

This article was published online on December 8, 2020.

Posterity, you bitch. What are you going to say about Martin Amis? When the winnowing’s done, and the windbags and the mediocrities have all been blown out the side of the thresher, what will your verdict be? Will you hail him as a Bellovian/DeLillovian seer-novelist, bestriding the millennium with his mega-thoughts? Will you shake your head and say that he was a great comic talent misused, a prancing master wit who tripped himself up on the winding stair, the stony spiral, to seriousness and significance? Or will you be a bit confused about him, as we are, here in the clumsy, unfiltered present?

is the most confusing of the 14 novels, two short-story collections, one memoir, and seven works of journalism and history that, I’ve loved most of them—I know him, tonally, pretty well—and I have no idea. This is sometimes the way with the older Amis.