Martin Amis: Between the Influences of Bellow and Nabokov

Abstract

M artin Amis's novels feature heroes of playboy fantasies, unscrupulous upwardly mobile yobs, and charismatic murderers. With a mixture of anxiety and fascination, Amis chronicles cheapening of humanity, a phenomenon he attributes partly to uniquely twentieth-century prospect of total annihilation and partly to fact that much of American (and more lately British) life is dedicated to televised event glamour-a phrase borrowed from Amis's mentor, Saul Bellow. Both writers maintain that popular sporting/religious extravaganzas give a false sense of collective life experience. Moreover, says Amis, channel-hoppers skip through tabloid journalism shows, cursory reports of sex scandals and riots, and mini-series on serial killers, delighting only in unsavory special effects. It's a distracted age, Amis notes gravely; the narrative line in human life is gone, and with it, he suggests, human decency. Because decline of West is Amis' s subject, he has earned an unfavorable reputation for playing social critic, or if you prefer, for being a quixotic champion of bygone values. Amis's end-of-themillennium novel, London Fields (1989), tries but fails to explain how nuclear threat has led to a disintegration of human decency, and Money: A Suicide Note (1984) tries but fails to prove that distracting influences of fast food, pornography, and capitalism contribute to increases in gratuitous crime. Trying to provide one's readers with advice on life may be a rather puerile inclination. Nevertheless, his statement regarding the narrative line, of which vicious and moronic are supposedly deprived,