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Amis & Son: Two Literary Generations

Not a decent book

Neil Powell
Macmillan, 429pp, £20,

Sam Leith

Wednesday, 14th May 2008

Sam Leith on a joint critical study of Kingsley and Martin Amis

The best parts of this book — and they are at times very, very good indeed — are the brief readings of the individual novels. Powell agrees with Kingsley, and I (largely) agree with Powell, that the most important job of criticism is to assess merit. Powell is erudite and well-informed, has a great ear — he’s also a poet — and is terrifically sure and decisive in judgment, if not always generous. He is alive to the Kingsleyisms in Martin’s teenage letters home — the ‘craps’ and ‘f***king fools’ — as he is to a Martinism dropped into one of Kingsley’s novels.

But — and the nature of his project as well as his temperament seems to condemn him to it — judgment is applied with the same peremptory certainty to life. He can’t resist pop-psychological speculation. Reading Kingsley’s life into his work is at best an intriguing diversion and at worst irrelevant. But reading Martin’s life into his work, and speculating about the effect on his psyche of Kingsley’s ‘negligent’ parenting is, I’m afraid, bloody impertinent.

Kingsley wouldn’t have had much time for a mention of his ‘demons’; and in Martin’s war against cliché, the observation that ‘Kingsley, like many creative people, must have instinctively sensed that his creativity was inextricably bound up with his depression’ would have been an early casualty.

Then there’s the hostility. Powell’s discussions of the novels read more or less like book reviews (relatively few of either author’s novels, probably, would greatly repay academic attention, and Powell seems to acknowledge this). Many of them are bad. Indeed, the last third of this book might be regarded as the longest bad review Martin Amis has ever received: a thrillingly rancorous assault on his reputation: ‘tiresome’, ‘painful’, ‘meaningless’, ‘vain’, ‘incomprehensible’.

There is a certain disapproving earnestness to Powell; a hostility to the pop culture that informs Martin’s writing, and, differently, Kingsley’s. He’s annoyed, you sometimes feel, because Kingsley and Martin aren’t the writers, or the people, he’d like them to be. Why didn’t Kingsley make friends with Donald Davie? Wasn’t his interest in genre fiction a bit of a waste of time? Writing a book about James Bond was, he says rather absurdly, ‘impossible . . . to excuse’.

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