JOSEPH SCOTCHIE

jscotchie@antonmediagroup.com

Martin Amis, the British-born author and Brooklyn resident, who died last month at age 73, was the most ambitious novelist of his generation. From the beginning, he was a man with something to prove. The son of Kingsley Amis, the legendary author of Lucky Jim , a comic novel that was the right tonic for a post-imperial Britain now living under the American thumb, Amis knew that his first novel, The Rachel Papers (1974), would be published on the strength of his father’s fame alone.

The man wanted more. Amis revered such masters as Jane Austen and Philip Larkin. However, he mostly found inspiration from the post-World War II American giants: Saul Bellow, Vladimir Nabokov, John Updike, Philip Roth, and Norman Mailer.

Amis set his fiction in a now-multicultural England. He made his home in Brooklyn and wrote incessantly on the American scene. The 19th century belonged the United Kingdom and so it had the novelists Dickens, Trollop, Hardy, Austen, and the Bronte sisters. The twentieth was the American century. That meant Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Steinbeck, and Thomas Wolfe, but also the gentlemen listed above. Amis wanted to be where the action was.

Amis followed his lifelong friend, Christopher Hitchens, to America. Both admired Bellow. Amis was a novelist, and his style followed the Chicagoan. Amis began his career with short, tight novels, both The Rachel Papers and Success (1978). Money , a 1984 picturesque novel, was his breakout effort.

As with The Bonfire of The Vanities , it was a cash and wild lifestyle novel perfect for the go-go Reagan-Thatcher decade.

Forgoing an academic career and publishing reams of journalism, Amis, inspired here by Updike, preferred the daily drudgery of the workaday novelist: At the writing desk at 9 a.m. each morning, knocking those 1,000 to 1,500 words per day. With the 1995 publication of The Information, about a literary rivalry, Amis moved to the top ranks of novelists writing in English. The successor to Bellow and Updike was not an American, but an America-loving Brit. Amis loved America. But did he fully know it? As with Hitchens, his America consisted of New York, Washington, with a nod to the West Coast. His 2017 report on a Donald Trump rally in Youngstown, Ohio illustrated how painfully out of touch the man was with so-called flyover country. Youngstown, a modest-sized city in northwest Ohio, was once a leading steel producer, standing with such giants as Chicago, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh. Originally built for 200,000, the population by the time of Amis’s visit was all of 40,000. In 1977, the city’s major employer, Sheet and Tube steel works, closed, creating an angry scar that has never healed.

Northeast Ohio might be the angriest place in America. Trump could not bring back lost jobs, but his denunciations of free trade turned purple Ohio into a red state. Amis should have conducted some research.

It’s just one essay out of many. Here, the man resembled Mailer in that his reportage from destinations near and far will bring hours of intense reading.

A particularly powerful piece was Amis’s 2001 essay “The Second Plane,” the title also of a 2008 collection. The man got to the point. Prior to Sept. 11, 2001, parents were positive that they could protect their children. The terrorist attacks forever shattered such illusions. Amis didn’t say so, but the meaning of that day was clear: It’s every man for himself.

It was the advent of the second plane, sharking in low over the Statue of Liberty: that was the defining moment. Until then, America thought she was witnessing nothing more serious than the worst aviation disaster in history; now she had a sense of the fantastic vehemence ranged against her. I have never seen a generically familiar object so transformed by affect (“emotion and desire as influencing behavior”). That second plane looked eagerly alive, and galvanized with malice, and wholly alien. For those thousands in the South Tower, the second plane meant the end of everything. For us, its glint was the worldflash of a coming future.

Terrorism is political communication by other means. The message of September 11 ran as follows: America, it is time you learned how implacably you are hated. United Airlines Flight 175 was an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile, launched in Afghanistan, and aimed at her innocence.

Of his many novels, I’ll choose 2010’s The Pregnant Widow . When something as barbaric as the passing of a 4,000-year-old civilization takes place (see the recent rioting in France), the politician, the statesman, the journalist, the businessman and the average citizen can keep quiet. The novelist doesn’t have that luxury. He must step into the breach. The Pregnant Widow updates the lives of three young decadent Brits who spend the summer of 1970 in Italy. Is there life beyond a sexual revolution?

So here was Rita: the mouth, the jaw, the powerful bones were all there, but her biomass had increased by about a factor of three. She was looking for various playroom accoutrements to send to Pansy’s first granddaughter.

Keith said, “And you, did you have your ten? One a year?”

“I never did. No babies…I never did.”

And he hugged the new slab of her body as she started to weep, among the breadbins and fleeces, the Thermoses and abacuses.

“I sort of forgot to.” She kept trying to wipe her nose. “I just seemed to miss it.”

He quite often met women his age who had just seemed to miss it.

Devastating. No more devastating lines have appeared in modern fiction. With the average feminist having but one child, it is not Christian Europe that would disappear (that is long gone), but the paradise of secular Europe as well. Amis was part of that generation. He rebounded to become a husband, father, and grandparent. Art was not the story of the man’s life.