One of the burdens of being a famous father is trying to measure up in that same arena.
British author Martin Amis, who has died at the age of 73, not only matched his illustrious father Kingsley, but briefly surpassed him.
The influential author’s 1984 novel “Money” became one of the books that summed up a generation.
“Money is not evil if we say it is evil, it goes from strength to strength. It is a fantasy, an addiction and a tacit conspiracy,” he said, in the publication “Novelists in Interview”, his book coming out. out after a year.
Ronald Reagan, giving Self-Serving Greed its full title in Thatcherite Britain and America under “Money: A Suicide Note”, is considered one of the most searing, insightful and bitingly funny English-language novels of the 20th Is. century.
It follows a “semi-literate alcoholic”, John Self, an advertising executive with an appetite for pornography, drugs and fast food, as he shuttles between London and New York to make a film.
The characters border on cartoons but the language is sharp and vivid and the comedy as dark and sharp as his father wrote.
Arguably, this is a tour de force in the Amis canon, though few could argue for his 1989 novel “London Fields” or 1991’s “Time’s Arrow,” which have a backwards narrative — including dialogue in reverse — As it stands Autobiography of a Nazi Concentration Camp Doctor.
“Time’s Arrow” was short-listed for the Booker Prize, an award which Amis did not receive throughout his career.
British director Jonathan Glazer’s adaptation of the novel “The Zone of Interest,” set in a Nazi death camp, is currently garnering praise at the Cannes Film Festival.
“The novel is an incredibly intimate portrait of a writer,” Amis once told the BBC, looking back on his career.
“Although I am not an autobiographical writer, I am in all my books.”
literary roots
Martin Louis Amis was born in Oxford on August 25, 1949, the second of three children of Kingsley Amis with his first wife, Hilary Bardwell.
When Martin was growing up, Kingsley was a major figure in the literary world after the success of his novel “Lucky Jim” in 1954. He moved the family to Princeton in America, where he taught, where he lived up to the image of the bitter flirt he carefully nurtured.
After graduating from the University of Oxford, Martin Amis published his first novel, “The Rachel Papers”, in 1973. He followed two years later with “Dead Babies”, which marked his first fascination with morbid humour.
In the years that followed, he enjoyed some success with “Success” and “Other People”, before hitting the big time with “Money”, “London Fields” and “Time’s Arrow”.
It was the third of his “London” novels, “The Information”, published in 1995, that launched him into the gossip column.
The reason was money.
Amis was given an advance of £500,000, which coincided with his agent, Pat Kavanagh, leaving the wife of one of his best friends, fellow novelist Julian Barnes.
This created a rift between the two authors.
By that stage Amis had already left his first wife, Antonia Phillips, an American academic with whom he had two sons, to begin a relationship with Isabel Fonseca, an heiress who interviewed him for the British Literary Review. Was. They married in 1996.
divided opinion
The 1990s were the peak of Amis’s literary powers, even when she was being accused of misogyny and later of Islamophobia – claims she staunchly rejected.
She said in 2018, “I not only think of myself as a feminist but also as a gynocrat.”
His 2003 novel “Yellow Dog” made the Booker Prize longlist, but was largely ridiculed by another British novelist, Tibor Fischer, who said in a newspaper review that it was as bad as “your Favorite uncle caught masturbating in the school playground”.
Amis and Fonseca, who had two daughters, settled in Brooklyn, New York, where they bought their home in 2010 for $2.5 million. He also had homes in London and Uruguay.
As well as a series of novels, Amis wrote two collections of short stories, six non-fiction books and a memoir.
But, for many fans, the sharp brilliance of “Money” makes it his standout novel, perhaps reflecting Amis’s own views on the waning powers of the older writer.
“Age wears down the author,” he wrote in a 2009 newspaper review of a John Updike book.
“The most dreadful fate of all is to lose the ability to give life to your creations.”
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)