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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

This is not an evaluative book so much, in subtext and increasingly in text, as a competitive one, and in the circumstances, I think this sort of ‘impertinent’ pop psychological speculation does seem asked for. The anxiety-of-influence relationship most visible here is not that between Martin and Kingsley Amis, but between Neil Powell and Martin Amis.

A straight memoir by Neil Powell, who is a fine writer and a subtle reader, might well be interesting. But the way he introduces it here, the way, in the Martin chapters, he starts talking about ‘we’ and ‘our generation’, is at first awkward and becomes a little bit creepy: as if he’s trying to paste a passport snap of himself onto the head of an unidentified figure in an Amis family photograph; and at the same time scribbling Martin’s face out with a black biro.

The sustained attack on Martin’s writing — and, it has to be said, a great deal of it is persuasive, where he sticks to the writing — makes the reader uneasy because it feels so personal. Marshalled as before a court are Martin’s failure as a writer to understand ‘ordinary people’, to inhabit women, to write accurately about shopkeepers; his empty repetitions and hollow paradoxes; his ugly neologisms and affected Americanisms; his aggression and preening. Sheesh, you want to say. Nobody’s perfect.

The animus — I suspect conceived in the course of writing the book — emerges in the very first paragraph of his first chapter about Martin.

‘I was very short of money when I was a baby,’ says Martin, with a wretched attempt at winsomeness.

Doesn’t that ‘wretched’, just slightly over-torqued, yelp from the page?

Martin’s ignorance of classical music is adduced almost as a moral failing, and Powell swoops with gleeful mortification on

a truly shocking moment in Experience, where he refers to ‘Bach’s Concerto for Cello’, in four words conveying ignorance of musical history, the composer’s oeuvre and the difference between a concerto and a sonata (of which there are in any case six by J. S. Bach).

He couldn’t resist that parenthesis, could he?

This is an interesting book about Kingsley and Martin Amis. It is not a decent one.

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