The writer Martin Amis, who has died aged 73 of oesophageal cancer, delighted, provoked, inspired and outraged readers of his fiction, reportage and memoirs across a literary career that set off like a rocket and went on to dazzle, streak and burn for almost 50 years. His scintillating verbal artistry, satirical audacity and sheer imaginative verve at every level from word-choice to plot-shape announced a blazing, once-in-a-generation talent.
He seldom disagreed with Christopher Hitchens, the journalist and essayist who was his soulmate and intellectual lodestar. But when Hitchens published a tepid review of a book by the American novelist Saul Bellow – Amis’s literary idol and mentor, who ranked equally high in his affections – Amis rebuked his friend for ignoring “all the pleasure he gave you”. Amis stirred envy and emulation, ignited controversy, courted scandal. Above all, though, he gave pleasure.
He paid tribute to his father, the novelist Kingsley Amis, by praising his “superhumour: the great engine of his comedy”. However grave its themes – later years saw him preoccupied with losses, partings, and deaths – “superhumour” likewise fuelled the zest of Amis junior’s prose. For him, “seriousness – and morality, and indeed sanity – cannot exist without humour”. His gift of laughter followed him even into Auschwitz (in his 2014 novel The Zone of Interest). Critics could find its presence an embarrassment. Admirers never did.
He published 15 novels, from The Rachel Papers in 1973 to the hybrid Inside Story – which enfolds fiction into memoirs and essays – in 2020. His essays and journalism stretch from an account of arcade video games, through literary studies and critiques of pop culture, to a meditation on Stalin’s crimes: Koba the Dread (2002).
Until a quieter last decade, spent largely in New York, he combined fertility and versatility with a reluctant role as a writer-celebrity who epitomised literary fame in an age of glitz, hype and frenzied prurience. Keystone novels of the 1980s and 90s such as Money, London Fields and The Information channel the raucous urges of their time, and kick against them in dismay.
To a degree, he played the celebrity game: he dissected showbiz phenomena in witty articles, often for the Observer. But he found, in his case, that others played with laxer rules or none at all. For decades, the life, loves and family of a gossip-fed tabloid entity known as “Martin Amis” ran in parallel with the career of the hard-working author of that name. His fiction abounds in games of doubles, pairs and twins. In his own life, too, Amis struggled to negotiate the gap between the mask forged by fame and the true face of a serious writer.
Being the son of Kingsley might have sent him early warnings of the bill that a stellar career in literature can present. Martin was born in Oxford a year after his brother, Philip. His mother was Hilly (Hilary, nee Bardwell), whom Kingsley had met while she was studying at the Ruskin School of Art. Their third child, Sally, followed in 1954.
Hilly recalled the young Martin, bright and amiable, as “a child born under a lucky star”. The spectacular success of Kingsley’s debut, Lucky Jim (1954), brought prosperity but torpedoed family life. Kingsley’s many affairs, and his mother’s distress, became the background hum of Martin’s youth.
As his renown grew, Kingsley moved with his family to Princeton, New Jersey, for a year. Martin loved America: its speech rhythms rooted in his prose. In England, his father’s best friend – the melancholic poet Philip Larkin – supplied not only paltry gifts of a few pence to Martin, but a dire example of literary greatness allied to emotional squalor. The siblings spent happier times with their cousins, David and Lucy Partington. Lucy’s vanishing in 1973, and the final confirmation more than 20 years later of her murder by the serial killer Fred West, spread an ineradicable shadow over Amis’s later writing.
In 1961, Kingsley took up a teaching fellowship at Peterhouse, Cambridge. A rambling house on the city’s edge served as the rules-free, bohemian backdrop to the shipwreck of the Amis marriage. It ended in 1963 when Hilly moved to Mallorca while Kingsley began living with his lover, the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard. Disharmony at home disrupted Martin’s education: he bounced idly from school to school. Relief came in the Caribbean when (for £50 per week) he acted in the film of Richard Hughes’s novel A High Wind in Jamaica.
As teenagers, Martin and Phil lived mostly in Maida Vale, west London, with Jane and Kingsley. They scoured Kings Road, Chelsea, for girls, and kept drugs in the fridge. Kingsley, lord of misrule, once bought his sons a gross of condoms. Jane, the much-admired “wicked stepmother”, finally presented the “semi-literate truant and waster” Martin with a reading list that ran from Jane Austen to Muriel Spark. She sent him to a Brighton crammer, where he thrived. Martin duly studied English at Exeter College, Oxford, with an “exhibition”: a scholarship, though of a minor kind.
After graduation, in 1971, he joined the Times Literary Supplement as an assistant, then as fiction editor. Starting with The Rachel Papers, his own apprentice fiction – smart, knowing, super-cool – flowed with little fuss. For Amis fils, “nothing is more ordinary to you than what your dad does all day”. In 1974, he moved from the TLS to the New Statesman: as deputy to the literary editor Claire Tomalin, then (until 1979), as books editor himself.
The Rachel Papers won a Somerset Maugham award. And the model for the “Rachel” fictionalised in his debut – his first love – introduced him to the Jewish themes that would draw him with increasing force. For a while, though, his fiction declined to grow up. Dead Babies (1975) performs stylistic somersaults around a country-house parody, although the warring foster-brothers of Success (1978) inaugurate the trademark Amis play of pairs.
Two sides of the Amis myth, or mask, solidified. With male chums – always Hitchens, often the poets James Fenton, Ian Hamilton and Clive James, or the novelists Julian Barnes and Ian McEwan – he adorned a sort of kebab-and-chips literary salon. They derided the old guard and lauded brave new voices. Yet Kingsley, old guard incarnate, remained an always honoured guest. Amis’s deep affection for his father, despite political and artistic clashes (Kingsley scorned his boy’s fancy technique, and reputedly chucked Money across the room), surprised and impressed their friends.
Like his father, Amis also picked up a reputation as an eager if inconstant lover. By his own account, he was a slow starter until the future magazine editor Tina Brown “rode into town and rescued me from Larkinland”. Soon, columnists began to chronicle – or fantasise – the romantic life of this literary wunderkind. Tomalin herself, Brown, Emma Soames, Julie Kavanagh: his liaisons with high-achieving women were mediated by salacious reporting, attracted awestruck gazes but also evil eyes. (His longest early relationship, with the photographer Angela Gorgas, left fewer media traces.)
Too short, too clever, too entitled, too rich: Amis became the author-ogre many loved to hate. Even his father remonstrated to Larkin when, in 1978, the son earned £38,000: “Little shit. 29, he is. Little shit.” Yet companions from that time recall no sneery seducer but a sweet, funny, sympathetic friend.
Come the early 80s, Amis as writer moved into higher gears. Other People (1981) heralded a mature interest in other minds and how to represent them. In 1984, the pyrotechnic satire and narrative trickery of the sensational Money both skewered an era of greed and glitz and, typically, embodied its appeal in the razzle-dazzle of its prose. The golden boy shone with a deeper lustre. His presence on Granta magazine’s 1983 roll-call of Best of Young British Novelists sealed his position on the crest of a new, media-savvy and PR-friendly, literary wave.
Also in 1984, the writer who had fretted that “childlessness will condemn you to childishness” married the American-born academic Antonia Phillips. Their son Louis arrived the same year, followed in 1986 by Jacob. With parenthood came an investment in the planet’s fate expressed in the bomb-shadowed stories of Einstein’s Monsters (1987), and the apocalyptic weather that roils around the large-scale comic dystopia of London Fields (1989). That book’s doomed antiheroine, Nicola Six, focused criticism of Amis as a serial fabricator of stereotypically damaged femmes fatales. The complaint, and the grounds for it, would persist.
At the same time, the comic craft that forged that novel’s darts-obsessed low-life Keith Talent could still make readers fall off their chairs with laughter. Visitors to the Amis work-flat in Westbourne Park loved to report on the blokeish impedimenta of dartboard and pinball machine. Fewer clocked the neat editions of Bellow and Nabokov, twin touchstones of his art, on the shelves. The Holocaust motif and reverse narration of Time’s Arrow (1991) – shortlisted for the Booker prize – spoke of lofty formal ambitions, not laddish fun.
In journalism and fiction, Amis magnetised mimics and fan-boys (fewer girls) by the score. The essays gathered first in The War Against Cliché (2001) and, later, in 2017, The Rub of Time, recruited a tribe of wannabes – which rather missed their point. Hubris was ascribed to him, not espoused by him. Envious back-biters feasted on his every mishap or misstep.
The 90s saw his dental problems become a bizarre media fixation: he retaliated, gloriously, with the all-you-can-eat dentist-surgery horrors of his 2000 memoir Experience. Less reparable, his marriage broke up. He married Isabel Fonseca, an American-Uruguayan journalist and author, in 1996. Their daughters, Fernanda and Clio, were born in 1997 and 1999.
The media onslaught intensified with Amis’s most elaborate novel of doubles and rivals: the death-haunted, long-winded literary satire of The Information (1994). Its large advance drew sniper fire. So did Amis’s split from his agent Pat Kavanagh – and from her husband, Barnes – in favour of Andrew Wylie. Kingsley’s decline, after his parting from Jane, darkened his son’s horizons and turned Amis’s mind to “the information” (about mortality) that struck as a “negative eureka moment” in his 40s. What Amis called, after Kingsley’s death in 1995, the “passage to the main event” now suffused his work. He found death “always in my thoughts, like an unwanted song”.
In 2000, his sister, Sally, died, aged 46, after periods of depression and alcoholism. Griefs accumulated: the 1994 revelation of Lucy’s fate throws a pall over the superb Experience that wit can hardly lift. Still, in the mid-90s, Amis met his eldest child. Delilah was born in 1976 while her mother, Lamorna – who later killed herself – was married to the journalist-historian Patrick Seale. Larkin’s bleak emotional wilderness had terrified Amis. If anything, he overcompensated: so much life, so much love, but so much loss as well.
Amis, Isabel and their daughters set up home in London, at the other end of the Primrose Hill road where Kingsley had finally gone back to live with Hilly and her third husband. Post-millennium, his writing took a more political turn. Hitchens had always figured for Amis as the ideal type of the public intellectual. Now, the virtuoso storyteller – who identified as a centre-left gradualist – craved a slice of that gravitas himself. In Koba the Dread, Amis’s account of Stalin’s atrocities paid homage too to Kingsley and the ardent anti-communism of his circle: notably, the historian Robert Conquest.
It was 9/11 and its aftermath that propelled Amis into front-line polemics. Islamist terrorism revived a catastrophist strain in his work: the concept of entropy haunts earlier books. In the topical essays collected as The Second Plane in 2008, it threatened to elevate political foes into metaphysical demons. Rash interview statements prompted charges of Islamophobia. More soberly, Inside Story concludes that “the real danger of terrorism lies not in what it inflicts but what it provokes”. Still, the op-ed pundit Amis could drop his verbal, even moral, compass.
By the later 2000s, Amis began to look fragile, with the stiff gait of a veteran tennis player (he enjoyed the game, and wrote well on it). His mid-2000s fiction – Yellow Dog, House of Meetings – revisited old haunts: celebrity excess and tabloid depravity in the former; the lingering horror of Soviet atrocity in the latter. Calm spells with his family in seaside Uruguay raised spirits, as for a while did stints as a creative-writing professor at Manchester University.
With The Pregnant Widow (2010), his ambitions climbed again. Within its uproarious, comic-pastoral mode, the novel counts the costs of the sexual revolution that, for Amis, had devoured his vulnerable sister. To Amis, no longer a gleeful beneficiary of post-60s erotic liberation but its appalled historian, “the boys could just go on being boys. It was the girls who had to choose.”
In 2010, the Amis family began the process of moving from London to New York: Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. In Amis’s telling, the need to live near his elderly mother-in-law hastened the move. British media read it as a snub to his celebrity-mad homeland and its jeering fourth estate. Lionel Asbo (2012), with its scattergun satire on lottery-winning oiks in a plebeian nightmare, rather confirmed that view.
Amis enjoyed the Brooklyn weather, the freedom from spiteful gossip, his welcome on New York’s literary scene. But he missed British backchat: his west London patch, from the pub quiz-machines of Portobello Road to the sports clubs of Paddington, had served well as scruffy muse.
Thanks to Fonseca’s heritage, Amis now had Jewish daughters. Jewish histories, fears and hopes felt nearer than ever. Yet his concentration-camp novel The Zone of Interest affirmed that, for Amis, nothing stood beyond a joke. “How can you presume to laugh at Hitlerism?” asked a German critic. For Amis, how could he not? Any depiction of Nazi evil that overlooked its farcical absurdity lent it weight and credit it did not deserve.
His two wisest jokers had exited: Bellow, with dementia, in 2005; Hitchens, from cancer, in 2011. The loss of a virtual father and a virtual brother whetted fears of death but also (with Hitchens) sharpened the appetite for life: “the delight of sentience”. Kingsley had called a late novel The Anti-Death League, but Martin would never have signed up. “Without death there is no art,” he wrote. Bellow’s and Hitchens’s passing fed tremendous elegiac passages amid the multiform miscellany of Inside Story, where tricksy “autofiction” sits beside heartfelt, no-frills memoir.
With its musings on “how busy death always is, and what great plans it has for us”, Inside Story felt like a valediction. If so, it was one in which Amis’s acrobatic wit defied both gravity and solemnity. He wrote with discipline and dedication, and wrestled with all the anguish of his age. Yet that pleasure-giving principle makes his long shelf of books feel playfully, buoyantly light.
He is survived by Isabel and his children.
