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2.0étoiles sur 5
One of a great writer's worst, Nov. 14 2001
I have read almost everything by Amis (M., that is), and I think that this was just about the worst (the very bottom spot is reserved for Night Train). The language is, as always, very good, but the story seems to have no real heart, direction, or overarching idea. This happens to Amis occassionally, and typically ends in a smugly vindictive showing-up of all society's supposed squalor. Amis has an inveterate inability to see much good in society and, being a writer, this usually serves him quite well. It needs to be tempered, though, with a plot, or a lot of humor, or a point. Maybe I didn't read this book carefully enough, but I certainly didn't find any of these things on ready display here.Interestingly, Amis here seems to commit many of the same mistakes as Orwell did in Clergyman's Daughter, which has a somewhat similar plot (there is at least one incredibly strong parallel--the amnesiac woman awaking and being taken in by two tramps and their moll). It is unstylized cynicism. There certainly is a lot of great M. Amis stuff out there, though: Money, The Information, London Fields, Time's Arrow (his most successfully moral book), Moronic Inferno, Visiting Mrs. Nabokov...Success was pretty good. Dead Babies was almost as bad as Other People, but not quite. It is only fair to say that there are a few very funny scenes, and some descriptions worth remembering. If you could read it in one afternoon, I suppose it wouldn't be a waste of time. Overall, though, it proves what Amis says about book titles in his review of Joseph Heller's God Knows: a great title is an almost sure sign of mediocrity.
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