Moronic Inferno And Other Visits To America: Amazon.ca: Martin Amis: Books

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From Library Journal

Using an engaging tone in which disdain and affection appear equally mixed, Amis looks at some of the more glittering facets of American fashionability. About half the essays are on writers (Bellow, Capote, Didion, etc.); the rest, seemingly scatter shots at the American scene, skip from film makers to feminism, from the New Right to AIDS. Although Inferno is a selection of occasional pieces, it is disproportionately weighted to the freakish fringe (Hefner, Claus von Bulow) and thus bestows a symbolic importance on such figures that is simply incommensurate with reality. British readers will make of this what they will; American readers, at the least, can take an amused delight in Amis's performanceespecially in the sequence of arch figure-eights and ironic reverse-spins that he cuts on the glitzy surface of our times. Earl Rovit, English Dept., City Coll . , CUNY
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

“Martin Amis’s America is funny and horrific.”
–The Times

“As a foreign journalist-cum-essayist on America, Mr. Amis has no equal.”
–The Economist --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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6 Reviews

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4.0 out of 5 stars (6 customer reviews)

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5.0 out of 5 stars pressingly prescient, Jan 14 2004

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"dabrains411" (Arizona) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Moronic Inferno And Other Visits To America (Paperback)

Amis's book, The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America, in which he contemplates the U.S. from a distance, has never been more contemporary. He anticipates the force with which the "New Evangelists" (written in 1980) take over American. Although he may never have imagined how the movement would completely hijack American politics.
His observations of Ronald Reagan (1979), echo ominously of Bush Jr. Reagan's lack of curiosity and general dullness seem to Amis mere aberrations, but much to America's detriment, they have recurred.
Many young Americans think they are witnessing history for the first time, but we are doomed to repeat our past (forgive mangled misquote).
This book of essays should be required reading for anyone thinking about what it means to be a citizen of the United States in the 21st century.

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4.0 out of 5 stars The Rapier's Point, April 18 2003

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Daniel Myers (Greenville, SC USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)

This review is from: Moronic Inferno And Other Visits To America (Paperback)

The best recommendation for this book is that it is simply good writing, very good writing. Amis may, in fact, be the premier writer of his time for this type of short, spare-not-the rapier witty style of journalistic writing so common in England: As opposed to America, this collection's ostensible subject, where there is no style, and it is discouraged as bravura. A brief example of this is Amis's crisp, droll assessment of a particular book: "The first thing to say about it is that it's bad: It's bad." - There are other things to say about it, of course, which Amis duly proceeds to do. But it's that stylistic, ironic nuance in the opening that captures the flavour of these pieces. Can anyone imagine an American reviewer or journalist getting away with displaying, heaven forbid, such personal style.

The only fault I find with this book is the one Amis apologizes for in the Introduction, that it is simply a compilation of essays and reviews previously written for English papers. Thus, what we have here is a collection of snapshots, crystal clear, of certain aspects of America and her writers. The "big picture," so to speak, is missing.--But, again, the big picture is not Amis's forte, and you will find yourself delightedly guffawing, in spite of yourself perhaps, at these brilliant flashes of the master of rapier wit.

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5.0 out of 5 stars Enormously rewarding, Nov 30 2001

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Fred Enderby (Seattle, WA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Moronic Inferno And Other Visits To America (Paperback)

This is one of Martin Amis's funniest and most interesting books. The book/author reviews are incredibly good (you'll never read Mailer, Burroughs, Didion, with a completely straight face again), and the social commentary is very well delivered.

As the title indicates, this book is highly critical of America, but it is a criticism tempered and somewhat confounded by Amis's complicated Ameriphilia: Amis's favorite writers are Americans (or at least expatriates who live in America), and Amis is very fond of claiming that he feels himself to be about half American. Yet America is the home and central breeding-ground of most of Amis's most hated evils: obscene wealth, unscrupulous capitalism (whitewashed in American euphamisms), the nuclear warfare industry, braindead religion, banal art &c. In both this book and the same-period novel Money (probably Amis's best), Amis posits pornography as America's economic and cultural nexus.

Amis's tense relationship with America provides for some incredibly good journalism and essays. The style throughout is outstanding, and most of my memories of the book come back in complete phrases. Looking at the early stages of the AIDS epidemic: "'Spend-down' turns out to be one of those cutely hyphenated nightmares of American life. Practically stated, it means that the AIDS victim sells and spends everything before qualifying for Medicare. Duly pauperized..." On Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead: "The novel was impossibly mature. The immaturity was all to come....[later in the article] Mailer's essays from this period--'The Existential Hero,' 'The Philosophy of Hip,' and 'The White Negro'--sum up how Mailer was feeling about himself at the time." "Truman Capote lived the life of an American novelist in condensed form: He was a writer at 9, a drunk at 15, a celebrity at 21, a millionaire at 35, and dead at 59." Almost the whole book is bracingly well-written.

Almost: strangely, only when Amis is writing about his favorite writer (and in a few very short dud pieces), Saul Bellow, does his style seem to go dead. I suppose there's so much adoration involved (adoration which, I have to admit, I don't understand), that he's reduced to helpless quotation.

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Most recent customer reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars Reminiscent of Wilde
This compilation of articles ranges from Capote to the religious right. Amis is very bright and he is an extraordinarily gifted writer. That makes the book very enjoyable. Read more

Published on July 20 2000 by Dave

1.0 out of 5 stars A Fashion Statement
All of the writing & criticism of Martin Amis has as much credibility as his screenplay for the film Saturn 3 with Farrah Fawcett, Kirk Douglas and Harvey Keitel. Read more

Published on Nov 6 1999 by michael05