The War Against Cliche: Essays and Reviews, 1971-2000 [Paperback]

Okay, he's not only writing for Nabokov. So who is Amis' ideal reader? One who has an "imagination, memory, a dictionary, and some artistic sense." Amis searches to challenge you, but also to entertain. And that passing remark about the dictionary was not made in jest. Amis is the one author whose logocentrism forces me to the dictionary with pleasure. Nearly every paragraph.

The collection's title comes from Amis' belief that "all writing is a campaign against cliche", not just in a literary sense, but also in a human sense. He takes his role in this campaign very seriously, as an author, stating that we should expect artists "to stand as critics not just of their particular milieu but of their society, and of their age". Even so, he regrets the advent of the artist-critic, i.e. novelists 'feeling' their way through criticism, rather than using the tools of theory to review literature. Instead, Amis, who could easily have traded on his name and fallen in step with these artist-critics, uses a background of unabashed joy in the face of literary theory to give his reviews weight.

If the above makes the collection sound pedantic and tiresome, don't worry. It isn't. Amis may be serious about his job, but he sure can have some fun. In a piece on Hillary Clinton's child-rearing instructional, Amis grumbles about her quaint but queasy neologisms: "'Stomachachy'... is not a campaign stop on the way to Poughkeepsie but Hillary's epithet for a pain in the gut." Later, in a piece on soccer (ahem, football), he begins cheekily: "Readers... who like football probably like football so much that, having begun the present article, they will be obliged to finish it." The rest of the paragraph is spent teasing the reader, threatening to never get to the meat of the article, with full knowledge that the reader isn't going anywhere.

In discussing why Cyril Connolly only wrote one novel ("The Rock Pool"), Amis notes that Connolly was "ruined by too much fiction-reviewing: he knew all the larks, and he knew them all too well." Amis, prolific novelist and critic, doesn't fall into this trap. He is able to keep his fiction out of his reviewing. I'm thankful, because I love Amis' fiction. But his reviewing is still loaded with the kind of samurai imagery that Amis is so adept at. Discussing Elmore Leonard's penchant for rejecting the imperfect/present/historic tense, in favour of "a kind of marijuana tense, ... creamy, wandering, weak-verbed." I just loved that when I ran across it: "the marijuana tense". Amis' reviews are alive, vital, and vivid.

They are also quite obsessive; his obsessions can be seen quite clearly. Repeatedly, he references: the affective fallacy, the intentional fallacy, the artist manque; his pet peeves concerning writers, which include their lack of talent, their inability to control syntax, their ignorant repetition, and, of course, their use of cliches; his own canon of literary greatness, against which all is to be measured, that includes Saul Bellow, John Updike (with reservations at times), Philip Larkin, J.G. Ballard, and literature's "'complete' player" Vladimir Nabokov.

The Nabokov obsession may one day ruin Amis. He just can't get the great Russian writer out of his head. A quick check of the index shows that references to Nabokov appear on 51(!) of the book's 490 pages. He notes on one hand that the word 'Kafkaesque' is losing meaning due to overuse, but with the other hand he does the same thing to the word 'Nabokovian'. It should be no surprise, then, that the collection's last and longest piece is a deconstruction of "Lolita" so brilliant that it almost made me want to read that distressing book once more.

I adore Amis. His writing is challenging and thought-provoking, while providing a portal to the world of this curmudgeonly, crusty, snobby author (those are all compliments, I assure you). He's opinionated, and more than able to draft persuasive arguments to prove his opinions correct. And last, but certainly not least, he loves writers and he loves readers. If you are a serious member of either club, I'll bet that you'll love Amis too.

Yet there is something a bit off about collection. We start off with a collection of reviews on masculinity, looking at Iron John, Hillary Clinton, Nuclear War and Pornography. Then it's on to a collection of reviews of English writers, then to an extended defence of his father's closest friend, the poet Philip Larkin. We proceed to reviews of more canonical writers, then a review of popular novels, then a whole section on Vladimir Nabokov. We then go on to a section on American writers, a section labelled "obsessions and curiosities", a whole section devoted to John Updike, another section that is mostly about V.S. Naipaul and then five concluding essays on great novels. Surely there is much for everyone to enjoy.

It's not that Amis isn't amusing. Consider this passage on Michael Crichton's The Lost World: "Out there, beyond the foliage, you see herds of cliches, roaming free. You will listen in 'stunned silence' to an 'unearthly cry' or a 'deafening roar'. Raptors are 'rapacious'. Reptiles are 'reptilian'. Pain is 'searing'." Or consider this comment on George Steiner's book on the 1972 Fisher-Spassky match: "Yet one of the more attractive things about Steiner's new book is how refreshingly unSteineresque it is...Page after page goes by without any reference to Auschwitz." All this is well and good, but something about is palls. Perhaps there is something too easy in making fun about a book as unrelievedly wretched as Richard Rhodes' book on sex life. One can't help by comparing it to Katha Pollitt's review of the same book in the New Republic to note that something is off.

Sometimes Amis' attacks suffer from the passage of time. Did people really think two decades ago that John Fowles was one of the great living English novelists, and that D.M. Thomas was one of the most promising writers around? Good of Amis to recognize that wasn't true, but his criticisms lack the stylistic brilliance and moral indignation that marks Dwight Macdonald's polemic against James Gould Cozzens. And what is the point of writing four reviews about Iris Murdoch if at the end she is not perforated like a pincushion, but leaves her to write still more novels? Amis despises bad writing but he is kinder than his hero Nabokov to the offenders. But one does not sense a genuine sense of outrage at the sight of a literature slowly poisoned by the middlebrow and the bland. Karl Kraus's writings were once praised to be like "public executions." Amis' own comments are surprisingly genteel in contrast.

Other thoughts? There is a review of an anthology of modern humor that promises to be very cruel against the poor editor, the late Mordecai Richeler. But by the end of it Amis' review seems to have turned into an example of what he is criticizing. And one of his examples of bad humour, a passage by Stephen Leacock, undermines everything by showing signs of being amusing. The defence of Larkin does benefit from the fact that saying Larkin was one the last half-century's great English poets is less depressing that saying Kingsley Amis was one of the last-half century's great English novelists. But it is striking that Larkin and Amis sr were among the last people on earth who would look beyond the ungenerous, self-pitying and spiteful surface and praise the poetry. Can't imagine them being so nice about Brecht and Neruda, but then Brecht and Neruda had the misfortune of being dedicated Communist and superior poets. And I think Amis is quite wrong to think Martin Seymour-Smith unusually exotic and esoteric to consider Pirandello the last century's greatest writer of short stories. The praise for Ulysses does remind us of Joyce's considerable talent for the striking image. But literature is more than a series of brilliant metaphors and striking images. Amis does not really confront those like Dreiser, but also Dostoyevsky, whose style does not match Nabokov's peerless sheen but whose achievement is so much greater. At least Martin Amis appreciates Kafka, which is more than you can say for his father.