From Amazon
In Martin Amis's War Against Cliché, a selection of critical essays and reviews published between 1971 and 2000, he establishes himself as one of the fiercest critics and commentators on the literature and culture of the late 20th century. (He has already established himself as one of the most controversial and original novelists writing in English with novels such as Money and Time's Arrow.) In his foreword to the book Amis ruefully admits that his earlier reviews reveal a rather humorless attitude towards the "Literature and Society" debate of the time. Yet this only adds to the fascination of the collection, as Amis gradually finds his critical voice in the 1980s, confirming his passionate belief that "all writing is a campaign against cliché."
In the subsequent sections of the book, this war leads to some wonderfully cutting and amusing responses to whatever crosses his path, from books on chess and nuclear proliferation to Cervantes' Don Quixote and the novels of his hero Vladimir Nabokov. Praise for his literary heroes is often fulsome: J.G. Ballard's High-Rise "is an intense and vivid bestiary, which lingers in the mind and chronically disquiets it." But his literary wrath is also devastating in its incisiveness: Thomas Harris's Hannibal is dismissed as "a novel of such profound and virtuoso vulgarity," while John Fowles is attacked because "he sweetens the pill: but the pill was saccharine all along." Often frank in its reappraisals (Amis concedes to being too hard on Ballard's Crash when reviewing the film many years later), some of the best writing is reserved for his journalism on sex manuals, chess, and his beloved football. The War Against Cliché will provoke strong reactions, but that only seems to confirm, rather than deny, the value of Amis's writing. --Jerry Brotton, Amazon.co.uk --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.
From Library Journal
Amis's critiques cover wide-ranging topics and are well worth reading, particularly when the erudition on display is liberated by humor, regarding not only the subject under examination but often the examiner himself. Amis, best known for his novels (e.g., London Fields, The Information), recognizes an authorial foible, then pounces on it not without grace, not without vigor. His evaluations are lively, scholarly, and, on rare occasion, numbing though probably less so for those few who know as much about literature as Amis. Requiring less literary background are his essays on poker or chess, Elvis Presley, or the sexual allure of Margaret Thatcher. The Amis view is at its best or at least at its most readable when he is chatting up such standards as Don Quixote, Pride and Prejudice, Ulysses, and Lolita. His lengthy commentary on Nabokov, Larkin, and Updike certainly informs, as do shorter pieces on Roth, Burroughs, Capote, Burgess, and Vidal. To paraphrase Vidal, the best writing allows the reader to participate. Without question, Amis appreciates this concept and puts it into practice in his most accomplished criticisms. Recommended for academic libraries. Robert L. Kelly, Fort Wayne Community Schs., IN
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.
From Booklist
What makes a literary critic great? A deep involvement with literature, a genuine respect for writers, and the knowledge and confidence that enable the critic to take both micro and macro views of any given book. A vigorous, graceful, and witty prose style is essential, as is the piece de resistance, imagination. Amis, a literary journalist for nearly 30 years, possesses all these qualities, as well as a healthy eclecticism, and to top it off, he's British. Some of the shrewdest and funniest of his incisive reviews skewer American presumptions and naivete, starting with a hilarious takedown of Robert Bly's Iron John. Amis has a keen historical sense, writing brilliant assessments of books about nuclear weapons in which he savagely debunked the SDI fantasy in 1988. But the lion's share of this animated volume, a great feast for serious readers, is his book-after-book reviews of the work of Murdoch, Burgess, and Ballard; his penetrating essays on Nabokov and Larkin; his piquant appraisals of Elmore Leonard and Tom Wolfe; and his annoyance that Roth writes so well. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.
Review
"Martin Amis is truly one of a kind." — Ottawa Citizen
"A stone-solid genius...a dazzling star of wit and insight." — The Wall Street Journal
"One of the most gifted writers of his generation." — Time
“More than a job well done, Amis can turn his reviews into such fetching objects — with his wit expensively bound in rich, calfskin diction — that the results put us mere hacks on notice…Amis’s abiding gift - and the collection’s chief boast — is his ability to jum the track and head off in an unexpected direction…Funny, unflinching and near-undupable, Amis never misses a chance to frisk a book to within an inch of its pretensions…[a] compulsively readable book…I’m ready to call for an all-out Amisification of literary criticism. Wanted: pundits willing to write not just for the penny remuneration, but for the sheer, spendthrift joy of the act.” —Carmine Starnino, National Post
"A stone-solid genius...a dazzling star of wit and insight." — The Wall Street Journal
"One of the most gifted writers of his generation." — Time
“More than a job well done, Amis can turn his reviews into such fetching objects — with his wit expensively bound in rich, calfskin diction — that the results put us mere hacks on notice…Amis’s abiding gift - and the collection’s chief boast — is his ability to jum the track and head off in an unexpected direction…Funny, unflinching and near-undupable, Amis never misses a chance to frisk a book to within an inch of its pretensions…[a] compulsively readable book…I’m ready to call for an all-out Amisification of literary criticism. Wanted: pundits willing to write not just for the penny remuneration, but for the sheer, spendthrift joy of the act.” —Carmine Starnino, National Post
Book Description
Like John Updike, Martin Amis is the preeminent novelist-critic of his generation. Always entertaining, with a razor-sharp wit and inimitable judgment, he expounds on a dazzling range of topics from chess, nuclear weapons, masculinity, screen censorship, to Andy Warhol, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Margaret Thatcher. The very best of his essays and reviews from the past twenty-five years are brought together in this substantial and wide-ranging collection, including pieces on Cervantes, Milton, Donne, Coleridge, Jane Austen, Dickens, Kafka, Philip Larkin, Joyce, Evelyn Waugh, Malcolm Lowry, Nabokov, William Burroughs, Anthony Burgess, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Shiva and V.S. Naipaul, Kurt Vonnegut, Iris Murdoch, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, Don DeLillo, Elmore Leonard, Michael Crichton,V.S. Pritchett and John Updike.
From the Back Cover
"Martin Amis is truly one of a kind." — Ottawa Citizen
"A stone-solid genius...a dazzling star of wit and insight." — The Wall Street Journal
"One of the most gifted writers of his generation." — Time
“More than a job well done, Amis can turn his reviews into such fetching objects — with his wit expensively bound in rich, calfskin diction — that the results put us mere hacks on notice…Amis’s abiding gift - and the collection’s chief boast — is his ability to jum the track and head off in an unexpected direction…Funny, unflinching and near-undupable, Amis never misses a chance to frisk a book to within an inch of its pretensions…[a] compulsively readable book…I’m ready to call for an all-out Amisification of literary criticism. Wanted: pundits willing to write not just for the penny remuneration, but for the sheer, spendthrift joy of the act.” —Carmine Starnino, National Post
"A stone-solid genius...a dazzling star of wit and insight." — The Wall Street Journal
"One of the most gifted writers of his generation." — Time
“More than a job well done, Amis can turn his reviews into such fetching objects — with his wit expensively bound in rich, calfskin diction — that the results put us mere hacks on notice…Amis’s abiding gift - and the collection’s chief boast — is his ability to jum the track and head off in an unexpected direction…Funny, unflinching and near-undupable, Amis never misses a chance to frisk a book to within an inch of its pretensions…[a] compulsively readable book…I’m ready to call for an all-out Amisification of literary criticism. Wanted: pundits willing to write not just for the penny remuneration, but for the sheer, spendthrift joy of the act.” —Carmine Starnino, National Post
About the Author
Martin Amis is the author of nine novels, two collections of stories, four works of non-fiction and a memoir. He lives in London.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
While complacently planning this volume in my mind I always thought I would include a nice little section called — let us say — 'Literature and Society', where I would assemble my pieces on literature and society (pieces on F.R. Leavis and Lionel Trilling, and on lesser figures like Ian Robinson an Denis Donoghue). 'Literature and society' was, at one time, a phrase so much on everyone's lips that it earned itself an abbreviation: Lit & Soc. And Lit & Soc, I seemed to remember, had been for me a long-running enthusiasm. But when I leafed through the massed manuscripts I found only a handful of essays, all of them written, rather ominously, in the early Seventies (when I was in my early twenties). Having reread them, I toyed with the idea of calling my nice little section something like 'Literature and Society: The Vanished Debate'. Then I decided that my debate had better vanish too. The pieces themselves I considered earnest, overweening, and contentedly dull. More decisively, though, Lit & Soc, and indeed literary criticism, felt dead and gone.
That time now seems unrecognizably remote. I had a day job at the Times Literary Supplement. Even then I sensed discrepancy, as I joined an editorial conference (to help prepare, perhaps, a special number on Literature and Society), wearing shoulder-length hair, a flower shirt, and knee-high tricoloured boots (well-concealed, it is true, by the twin tepees of my flared trousers). My private life was middle-bohemian — hippyish and hedonistic, if not candidly debauched; but I was very moral when it came to literary criticism. I read it all the time, in the tub, on the tube; I always had about me my Edmund Wilson — or my William Empson. I took it seriously. We all did. We hung around the place talking about literary criticism. We sat in pubs and coffee bars talking about W.K. Wimsatt and G. Wilson Knight, about Richard Hoggart and Northrop Frye, about Richard Poirier, Tony Tanner and George Steiner. It might have been in such a locale that my friend and colleague Clive James first formulated his view that, while literary criticism is not essential to literature, both are essential to civilization. Everyone concurred. Literature, we felt, was the core discipline; criticism explored and popularized the significance of that centrality, creating a space around literature and thereby further exalting it. The early Seventies, I should add, saw the great controversy about the Two Cultures: Art v. Science (or F.R. Leavis v. C.P. Snow). Perhaps the most fantastic thing about this cultural moment was that Art seemed to be winning.
Literary historians know it as the Age of Criticism. It began, let us suggest, in 1948, with the publication of Eliot's Notes Towards the Definition of Culture and Leavis's The Great Tradition. What ended it? The brutalist answer would consist of a singe four-letter word: OPEC. In the Sixties you could live on ten shillings a week: you slept on people's floors and sponged off your friends and sang for your supper — about literary criticism. Then, abruptly, a bus fare cost ten shillings. The oil hike, and inflation, and then stagflation, revealed literary criticism as one of the many leisure-class fripperies we would have to get along without. Well, that's how it felt. But it now seems clear that literary criticism was inherently doomed. Explicitly or otherwise it had based itself on a structure of echelons and hierarchies; it was about the talent elite. And the structure atomized as soon as the forces of democratization gave their next concerted push.
Those forces — incomparably the most potent in our culture — have gone on pushing. And they are now running up against a natural barrier. Some citadels, true, have proved stormable. You can become rich without having any talent (via the scratchcard and the rollover jackpot). You can become famous without having any talent (by abasing yourself on some TV nerdothon: a clear improvement on the older method of simply killing a celebrity and inheriting the aura). But you cannot become talented without having any talent. Therefore, talent must go.
Literary criticism, now almost entirely confined to the universities, thus moves against talent by moving against the canon. Academic preferment will not come from a respectful study of Wordsworth's poetic; it will come from a challenging study of his politics — his attitude to the poor, say, or his unconscious 'valorization' of Napoleon; and it will come still faster if you ignore Wordsworth and elevate some (justly) neglected contemporary, by which process the canon may be quietly and steadily sapped. A brief consultation of the Internet will show that meanwhile, at the other end of the business, everyone has become a literary critic — or at least a book-reviewer. Democratization has made one inalienable gain: equality of the sentiments. I think Gore Vidal said this first, and he said it, not quite with mockery, but with lively scepticism. He said that, nowadays, nobody's feelings are more authentic, and thus more important, than anybody else's. This is the new credo, the new privilege. It is a privilege much exercised in the contemporary book-review, whether on the Web or in the literary pages. The reviewer calmly tolerates the arrival of the new novel or slim volume, defensively settles into it, and then sees which way it rubs him up. the right way or the wrong way. The results of this contact will form the data of the review, without any reference to the thing behind. And the thing behind, I am afraid, is talent, and the canon, and the body of knowledge we call literature.
That time now seems unrecognizably remote. I had a day job at the Times Literary Supplement. Even then I sensed discrepancy, as I joined an editorial conference (to help prepare, perhaps, a special number on Literature and Society), wearing shoulder-length hair, a flower shirt, and knee-high tricoloured boots (well-concealed, it is true, by the twin tepees of my flared trousers). My private life was middle-bohemian — hippyish and hedonistic, if not candidly debauched; but I was very moral when it came to literary criticism. I read it all the time, in the tub, on the tube; I always had about me my Edmund Wilson — or my William Empson. I took it seriously. We all did. We hung around the place talking about literary criticism. We sat in pubs and coffee bars talking about W.K. Wimsatt and G. Wilson Knight, about Richard Hoggart and Northrop Frye, about Richard Poirier, Tony Tanner and George Steiner. It might have been in such a locale that my friend and colleague Clive James first formulated his view that, while literary criticism is not essential to literature, both are essential to civilization. Everyone concurred. Literature, we felt, was the core discipline; criticism explored and popularized the significance of that centrality, creating a space around literature and thereby further exalting it. The early Seventies, I should add, saw the great controversy about the Two Cultures: Art v. Science (or F.R. Leavis v. C.P. Snow). Perhaps the most fantastic thing about this cultural moment was that Art seemed to be winning.
Literary historians know it as the Age of Criticism. It began, let us suggest, in 1948, with the publication of Eliot's Notes Towards the Definition of Culture and Leavis's The Great Tradition. What ended it? The brutalist answer would consist of a singe four-letter word: OPEC. In the Sixties you could live on ten shillings a week: you slept on people's floors and sponged off your friends and sang for your supper — about literary criticism. Then, abruptly, a bus fare cost ten shillings. The oil hike, and inflation, and then stagflation, revealed literary criticism as one of the many leisure-class fripperies we would have to get along without. Well, that's how it felt. But it now seems clear that literary criticism was inherently doomed. Explicitly or otherwise it had based itself on a structure of echelons and hierarchies; it was about the talent elite. And the structure atomized as soon as the forces of democratization gave their next concerted push.
Those forces — incomparably the most potent in our culture — have gone on pushing. And they are now running up against a natural barrier. Some citadels, true, have proved stormable. You can become rich without having any talent (via the scratchcard and the rollover jackpot). You can become famous without having any talent (by abasing yourself on some TV nerdothon: a clear improvement on the older method of simply killing a celebrity and inheriting the aura). But you cannot become talented without having any talent. Therefore, talent must go.
Literary criticism, now almost entirely confined to the universities, thus moves against talent by moving against the canon. Academic preferment will not come from a respectful study of Wordsworth's poetic; it will come from a challenging study of his politics — his attitude to the poor, say, or his unconscious 'valorization' of Napoleon; and it will come still faster if you ignore Wordsworth and elevate some (justly) neglected contemporary, by which process the canon may be quietly and steadily sapped. A brief consultation of the Internet will show that meanwhile, at the other end of the business, everyone has become a literary critic — or at least a book-reviewer. Democratization has made one inalienable gain: equality of the sentiments. I think Gore Vidal said this first, and he said it, not quite with mockery, but with lively scepticism. He said that, nowadays, nobody's feelings are more authentic, and thus more important, than anybody else's. This is the new credo, the new privilege. It is a privilege much exercised in the contemporary book-review, whether on the Web or in the literary pages. The reviewer calmly tolerates the arrival of the new novel or slim volume, defensively settles into it, and then sees which way it rubs him up. the right way or the wrong way. The results of this contact will form the data of the review, without any reference to the thing behind. And the thing behind, I am afraid, is talent, and the canon, and the body of knowledge we call literature.
