The rub of time Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump: essays and reportage, 1994-2017

Review by New York Times Review

Picture This: Scrolling through Pinterest one day, Tomi Adeyemi saw something that would change her life: "a digital illustration of a black girl with bright green hair." The image, which burrowed into her subconscious, "was so stunning and magical" that it inspired her to begin an epic fantasy trilogy that draws equally from current events and African culture. The first volume, "Children of Blood and Bone," which enters the Young Adult list at No. 1, "is an epic West African adventure," Adeyemi explains, "but layered within each page is an allegory for the modern black experience. Every obstacle my characters face, no matter how big or small, is tied to an obstacle black people are fighting today or have fought as recently as 30 years ago." Drawing Fire: Did you know that the United States Army has an artist-in-residence program? No? Neither did the novelist Brad Meitzer, who discovered it while he was filming an episode of his cable TV show, "Lost History," at Fort Belvoir in Virginia. "They were giving me a tour and showing me their art collection," he says. "I kept thinking, 'Why does the Army have all this art?' " Meitzer, an enthusiastic researcher, soon discovered that "since World War I, the Army has assigned at least one person - an actual artist - whom they send out in the field to, well... paint what couldn't otherwise be seen. They go, they see, and they paint and catalog victories and mistakes, from the dead on D-Day to the injured at Mogadishu." The idea for "The Escape Artist" - which debuts this week at No. 1 on the hardcover fiction list - soon sprang into his head. "Imagine an artistsoldier whose real skill was finding the weakness in anything. 'The Escape Artist' started right there," he says. Other research for the book sent Meitzer to Dover Air Force Base, which houses "the mortuary for the U.S. government's most top-secret and high-profile cases. I became obsessed with it. In this world, where so much of the government is a mess, Dover is the one place that does it absolutely right," Meitzer says. "It is the one no-fail mission in the military. When a soldier's body comes home, you don't mess it up." The most interesting thing he learned there, which he obviously incorporated into the novel, was also the oddest: "When your plane is going down and about to crash, if you write a farewell note and eat it, the liquids in your stomach can help the note survive the crash. It has really happened. Next time you're on a plane and hit turbulence, you're going to be thinking of me." ? 'Layered within each page is an allegory for the modern black experience.'

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [March 25, 2018]

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Review by Booklist Review

In his second major essay collection, which dovetails with The War against Cliché: Essays and Reviews, 1971-2000 (2001), master novelist Amis refers to Bellow and Nabokov as his Twin Peaks, writers he reveres. When he asserts that Bellow will emerge as the supreme American novelist, he looks, in part, to the verbal surface, to the instrument, to the prose, cuing us to do the same when reading this vital, heady, landmark compendium. Amis writes with buoyant and cutting authority. His vocabulary, cross-pollinated by his trans-Atlantic reading and life, is pinpoint and peppery; his syntax supple and ensnaring. The pleasure Amis takes in observation, cogitation, and composition is palpable, and he is acidly funny. His literary analysis, including of Don DeLillo, the laureate of terror, is commanding and enlightening, while he brings his novelist's sensibility to politics, especially in his unnervingly prescient assessment of Trump's wobbly mental health during the 2016 campaign. In considering Vegas, tennis, Jane Austen films, and personal milestones, Amis writes with agility, spirit, artistry, and a shrewd sense of the deepest implications.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2018 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

The essays and journalism in this wide-ranging, rewarding collection take Amis (The Zone of Interest) from a pornographer's mansion to the U.S. presidential campaign trail and consider the output of such writers as Don DeLillo and Philip Larkin. Over the 23-year period that the essays span, Amis is infallibly a lucid, linguistically precise commentator. Writing about Jane Austen, Saul Bellow, Iris Murdoch, and Vladimir Nabokov, he is admiring but not idolatrous; his coverage of poker tournaments and soccer matches is lively; his judgments on film range from a sympathetic, considered profile of John Travolta (in the wake of the actor's comeback in Pulp Fiction) to amused horror at Four Weddings and a Funeral: "I was filled with a yearning to be doing something else." Amis is an inimitable, devoted observer: tennis instructors "flowed toward [the ball] with leisurely economy"; John Updike, observing fellow patients in a hospital cafeteria, is a "NORAD of data gathering and microinspection." Occasionally, on politics and art, Amis can be critically uninspired: in an essay on J.G. Ballard, he writes that Steven Spielberg is an "essentially optimistic artist" and that David Cronenberg is "a much darker artist." But largely, nonfiction Amis is a witty, welcome presence: a practitioner of "burnished technique and... sober delectation." Agent: Andrew Wylie, Wylie Agency. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

In this collection of previously published newspaper and magazine work by novelist, essayist, and critic Amis (The Rachel Papers; Money; London Fields), the author comes across as a close and sensitive reader of literature and culture, his language erudite and complex. A significant portion of this volume features Amis's book reviews and responses to literature, and he returns multiple times to several touchstones, including John Updike, Philip Larkin, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, and Vladimir -Nabokov. It is a testament to his writing that these pieces remain approachable, even if the works under examination have not all been themselves read. In addition to the literary work, another standout is Amis's popular culture reportage, which shines a bright light on America and celebrity. His profile of John Travolta, efforts to compete in the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas, and critical reading of President Donald Trump's books The Art of the Deal and Crippled America, published prior to the election, are all especially good. -VERDICT Amis is a savvy, biting writer who still manages an engaging, conversational tone. Any reader seeking an introduction to the books he spends time with, or a new perspective on our sometimes chaotic culture, will enjoy this collection. [See Prepub Alert, 8/28/17.]-Doug Diesenhaus, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

A sharp, witty collection from the prolific writer of fiction, memoir, and acerbic essays.In his latest work of nonfiction, Amis (The Zone of Interest, 2014, etc.) gathers an enticing miscellany of short piecesreportage, political and cultural commentary, book reviews, and personal reflectionspublished during the past 30 years, amended with occasional footnotes and postscripts and, writes the author, given "a great deal of polishing." In an affectionate piece on The King's English, his father's last book, on language and usage, Amis quotes a reviewer who admired the "tense, sly quality" of Kingsley Amis's prose. Certainly that slyness and linguistic precision has been inherited by Amis fils, whether he is praising the "invigorating intelligence" of Jane Austen or skewering the bumbling Rick Perry, recalling debonair Saul Bellow or denigrating narcissistic Donald Trump. Describing himself as "pallidly left-of-center," Amis reported on the Republican Party for Newsweek in 2011 and 2012 (calling Romney "an astoundingly proficient technocrat"). In 2016, he weighed in on Trump's ascension for Harper's, deeming his campaign manifesto, Crippled America, "emotionally primitive and intellectually barbaric"; and Trump himself, "insecurity incarnate" and, like the majority of Republicans, "a xenophobe and proud of it." Trump's "idiolect," writes the author, would serve as "an adventure playground for any proscriptive linguist." Among essays on writers, Amis warmly remembers the brilliant, eccentric Iris Murdoch, "the preeminent female English novelist of her generation," and poet Philip Larkin, "more than memorable. He is instantly unforgettable." Amis also offers a tender eulogy for Princess Diana, whose death, he writes, felt "so savage." Diana had a particular talent "for love. She felt that she could inspire it, transmit it, increase its general sum," and she both humanized and, finally, cracked the veneer of the monarchy. John Travolta, Philip Roth, Christopher Hitchens, and Jeremy Corbyn all come under Amis' sharp-eyed gaze. Several essays are disarmingly autobiographical; a few pieces compile brief, and sometimes-snarky, replies to readers' questions.Literate, perspicacious, and thoroughly entertaining. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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AUTHOR'S NOTE The Natural Sin of Language In the process of its composition, a lyric poem or a very short short story can reach the point where it ceases to be capable of improvement. Anything longer than a couple of pages - as John Updike will later remind us, in a phrase of T. S. Eliot's - will soon succumb to 'the natural sin of language', and will demand much concentrated work. By the natural 'sin' of language I take Eliot to be referring a) to its indocility (how it constantly and writhingly resists even the most practised hands), and b) to its promiscuity: in nearly all of its dealings language is as indiscriminate as currency, and gathers much incidental grit and sweat. Poets are familiar with the sudden surmise that their revisions had better be discontinued (and quickly too), that their so-called improvements are starting to do real harm. Even the novelist shares this fear: you are nervously tampering with an inspiration that is going dead on you. Northrop Frye, a literary philosopher-king to whom I owe fealty, said that the begetter of a poem or a novel is more like a midwife than a mother: the aim is to get the child into the world with as little damage as possible - and if the creature is alive it will scream to be liberated from 'the navel strings and feeding tubes of the ego'. Discursive prose, on the other hand (essays and reportage of the kind represented between these covers), cannot be cleansed of the ego, and is in any case limitlessly improvable. So I have done some cutting, quite a bit of adding (footnotes, postscripts), a lot of elaborating, and a great deal of polishing. Very often I am simply trying to make myself clearer, less ambiguous, and more precise - but not more prescient (I haven't massaged my political prophecies, which tend, as is usual with such things, to be instantly dismayed by events). There are some repetitions and duplications; I have let them stand, because I assume that most readers will pick and choose along the way in accordance with their own enthusiasms (only the reviewer, the proofreader, and of course the author will ever be obliged to read the whole thing straight through). Also, rather to my surprise, I have done some bowdlerising, making war not against the 'improper or offensive' so much as against the over-colloquial: those turns of phrase that seem shop-soiled almost as soon as they are committed to paper. The natural sin of language is cumulative and unavoidable; but we can at least expel the frailties of mere transience. BY WAY OF AN INTRODUCTION He's Leaving Home   Once upon a time, in a kingdom called England, literary fiction was an obscure and blameless pursuit. It was more respectable than angelology, true, and more esteemed than the study of phosphorescent mold; but it was without question a minority-interest sphere. In 1972, I submitted my first novel: I typed it out on a second-hand Olivetti and sent it in from the sub-editorial office I shared at the Times Literary Supplement . The print run was 1,000 (and the advance was 250 pounds). It was published, and reviewed, and that was that. There was no launch party and no book tour; there were no interviews, no profiles, no photo shoots, no signings, no readings, no panels, no on-stage conversations, no Woodstocks of the Mind in Hay-on-Wye, in Toledo, in Mantova, in Parati, in Cartagena, in Jaipur, in Dubai; and there was no radio and no television. The same went for my second novel (1975) and my third (1978). By the time of my fourth novel (1981), nearly all the collateral activities were in place, and writers, in effect, had been transferred from vanity press to Vanity Fair . What happened in the interim? We can safely say that as the 1970s became the 1980s there was no spontaneous flowering of enthusiasm for the psychological nuance, the artful simile, and the curlicued sentence. The phenomenon, as I now see it, was entirely media-borne. To put it crudely, the newspapers had been getting fatter and fatter (first the Sundays, then the Saturdays, then all the days in between), and what filled these extra pages was not additional news but additional features. And the featurists were running out of people to write about--running out of alcoholic actors, ne'er-do-well royals, depressive comedians, jailed rock stars, defecting ballet dancers, reclusive film directors, hysterical fashion models, indigent marquises, adulterous golfers, wife-beating footballers, and rapist boxers. The dragnet went on widening until journalists, often to their patent dismay, were writing about writers: literary writers. This modest and perhaps temporary change in status involved a number of costs and benefits. A storyteller is nothing without a listener, and the novelists started getting what they can't help but covet: not more sales necessarily, but more readers. And it was gratifying to find that many people were indeed quite intrigued by the business of creating fiction: to prove the point, one need only adduce the fact that every last acre of the planet is now the scene of a boisterous literary festival. With its interplay of the conscious and the unconscious, the novel involves a process that no writers, and no critics, really understand. Nor can they quite see why it arouses such curiosity. ("Do you write in longhand?" "How hard do you press on the paper?") All the same, as J.G. Ballard once said, readers and listeners "are your supporters--urging on this one-man team." They release you from your habitual solitude, and they give you heart. So far, so good: these are the benefits. Now we come to the costs, which, I suppose, are the usual costs of conspicuousness. Needless to say, the enlarging and emboldening of the mass-communications sector was not confined to the United Kingdom. And "visibility," as Americans call it, was no doubt granted to writers in all the advanced democracies--with variations determined by national character. In my home country, the situation is, as always, paradoxical. Despite the existence of a literary tradition of unparalleled magnificence (presided over by the world's only obvious authorial divinity), writers are regarded with a studied scepticism--not by the English public, but by the English commentariat. It sometimes seems that a curious circularity is at work. If it is true that writers owe their ascendancy to the media, then the media has promoted the very people that irritate them most: a crowd of pretentious--and by now quite prosperous--egomaniacs. When writers complain about this, or about anything else, they are accused of self-pity ("celebrity whinge"). But the unspoken gravamen is not self-pity. It is ingratitude. Nor should we neglect a profound peculiarity of fiction and the column inches that attend it: a fortuitous consanguinity. The appraisal of an exhibition does not involve the use of an easel and a palette; the appraisal of a ballet does not involve the use of a pair of slippers and a tutu. And the same goes for all but one of the written arts: you don't review poetry by writing verse (unless you're a jerk), and you don't review plays by writing dialogue (unless you're a jerk); novels, though, come in the form of prose narrative - and so does journalism. This odd affinity causes no great tension in other countries, but it sits less well, perhaps, with certain traits of the Albionic Fourth Estate--emulousness, a kind of cruising belligerence, and an instinctive proprietoriality. Conspicuous persons, in my motherland, are most seriously advised to lead a private life denuded of all color and complication. They should also, if they are prudent, have as little as possible to do with America--seen as the world HQ of arrogance and glitz. When I and my wife, who is a New Yorker, entrained the epic project of moving house, from Camden Town in London to Cobble Hill in Brooklyn, I took every public opportunity to make it clear that our reasons for doing so were exclusively personal and familial, and had nothing to do with any supposed dissatisfaction with England or the English people (whom, as I truthfully stressed, I have always admired for their tolerance, generosity, and wit). Backed up by lavish misquotes together with satirical impersonations ("cod" interviews and the like), the impression given was that I was leaving because of a vicious hatred of my native land and because I could no longer endure the well-aimed barbs of patriotic journalists. "I wish I weren't English": of all the fake tags affixed to my name, this is the one I greet with the deepest moan of inanition. I suggest that the remark--and its equivalent in any language or any alphabet--is unutterable by anyone whose IQ reaches double figures. "I wish I weren't North Korean" might make a bit of sense, assuming the existence of a North Korean sufficiently well-informed and intrepid to give voice to it. Otherwise and elsewhere, the sentiment is inconceivably null. And for a writer to say it of England--the country of Dickens, George Eliot, Blake, Milton, and, yes, William Shakespeare--isn't even perverse. It is merely fey. The term "American exceptionalism" was coined in 1929 by none other than Josef Stalin, who condemned it as a "heresy" (he meant that America, like everywhere else, was subject to the iron laws of Karl Marx.) If that much-mocked notion still means anything, we should apply it to America's exceptionally hospitable attitude to outsiders (and America has certainly been exceptionally hospitable to me and my family). All friends of the stars and stripes are pained to see that this unique and noble tradition is now under threat, and from all sides; but America remains, definingly, an immigrant society, vast and formless; writers have always occupied an unresented place in it, because everyone subliminally understood that writers would play a part in construing its protean immensity. Remarkably, the "American Century" (to take another semi-wowserism) is due to last exactly that long--with China scheduled for prepotence in about 2045. The role of the writers, for the time being, is at least clear enough. They will be taking America's temperature, and tenderly checking its pulse, as the New World follows the old country down the long road of decline. ( The New Republic 2012) Excerpted from The Rub of Time by Martin Amis All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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