Martin Amis

Writer

• Born: August 25, 1949
• Birthplace: Oxford, England
• Died: May 19, 2023
• Place of death: Lake Worth Beach, Florida

Biography

Martin Amis became a distinguished contributor to British letters immediately upon his 1971 graduation from the University of Oxford, when he began reviewing books for the Observer. His prizewinning first novel, The Rachel Papers (1973), marked the beginning of a prolific career rivaling that of his father, novelist Kingsley Amis. In contrast to those of his father, however, Amis’s novels are in a style often called postmodern. Heavily influenced by such writers as Vladimir Nabokov, Amis experimented with various postmodern techniques, including the unreliable narrator, direct address to the audience, and a self-consciously playful use of language. By the 1990s, Amis had become one of the premier living British writers, nominated for many prizes and discussed frequently in the literary press, often in a manner that crossed over into gossip.

Amis was born August 25, 1949, in Oxford, England, to Kingsley Amis and Hilary Bardwell. He had an older brother, Philip, born in 1947, and a younger sister, Sally, born in 1954. The family lived for a time in Wales and later in Princeton, New Jersey, for one year, an experience that gave Amis a feeling of connection with the United States.

Amis’s parents separated in 1963, and his mother moved with the children to Majorca for four months. From that point on, Kingsley Amis lived with the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard until their divorce in 1980. During this period, Martin divided his allegiance between two households. His rapport with his father’s second wife, whom he called Jane, was warm, and he credits her for taking charge of his schooling during a tumultuous adolescence. In 1981, Hilary returned with her third husband, Alastair Boyd, the 7th Baron Kilmarnock, to care for Kingsley in his declining years. Kingsley Amis died in 1995.

After three years at Exeter College, Oxford, Amis became a literary journalist and started work on his first novel, The Rachel Papers. His seven-year affiliation with the New Statesman began during this time. There, he worked alongside two men who became his close friends, James Fenton and Christopher Hitchens. The three of them were leading lights of literary London, establishing reputations that remained undiminished for the next several decades.

After leaving the New Statesman in 1980, Amis continued to publish reviews and nonfiction in that periodical and many others in Great Britain and the United States. He was loosely associated with a group of fellow Oxford graduates that also included novelists Ian McEwan and Julian Barnes, critic and biographer Ian Hamilton, and journalist Tina Brown. Most of these people remained friends and associates despite a painful rift in Amis’s friendship with Barnes that occurred in 1994, when Amis severed his professional relationship with Barnes’s wife, Pat Kavanaugh, who had been one of his literary agents.

In 1984, Amis married Antonia Phillips, with whom he had two sons, Jacob (born 1984) and Louis (1985). They were divorced in 1994, and Amis married Isabel Fonseca; they would have two daughters, Fernanda (1997) and Clio (1999). In 1995, Amis discovered that he also had an older daughter, Delilah Seale, whose mother had died when she was two years old and who had been raised believing that another man was her biological father. The reunion of father and daughter proved a happy one and was discussed in Amis’s memoir, Experience (2000).

Experience provides fascinating but profoundly incomplete glimpses into Amis’s life. Certain episodes are recounted in great detail, including the stories of Delilah Seale and Julian Barnes, as well as an account of the prolonged and painful reconstruction of his teeth. Other situations, such as the events leading up to his divorce from Phillips and his marriage to Fonseca, are not described in specific terms. Some of the most compelling sections of the book address Amis’s youth and adolescence, with a particular focus on the period of his father’s second marriage, when he was at school and writing frequently to his father and stepmother.

One particular section of the book has proved controversial. Amis chose to include a long account of the life and death of his cousin, Lucy Partington, who disappeared in 1973 and was discovered in 1994 to have been murdered by serial killers. Having overcome the objections of his aunt, Lucy’s mother, to his writing about the subject, Amis still had to face the criticisms of reviewers who felt he was exploiting a sensational subject. However, the death of a young girl, his relative and friend, had special poignancy for Amis at a time when he felt his connection to his sons being compromised by divorce, while at the same time his life was enriched by the discovery of his nearly adult daughter, Delilah.

After the publication of Experience, Amis suffered another personal shock when his sister, Sally, died after a short illness in 2000. He memorialized her in a portion of his book Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million (2002), about Russia during the age of Stalinism.

As a novelist, Amis has worked with a focused intensity, producing fourteen novels between 1973 and 2014, as well as collections of short writings and literary criticism. His debut novel, The Rachel Papers, won the Somerset Maugham Award for first novels; his father had won the same prize for his debut novel, Lucky Jim (1954). Two of Martin Amis’s subsequent novels have been nominated for the Booker Prize—Time's Arrow; or, The Nature of the Offence (1991), which was short-listed, and Yellow Dog (2003), which made the long list—but since The Rachel Papers, he has not won another major award specifically for his fiction. He did win the UK National Book Award for Outstanding Achievement in 2010, a prize he shared with fantasy author Terry Pratchett. While his novels The Pregnant Widow (2010) and Lionel Asbo (2012) received mixed reviews, critics were more receptive of his 2014 work The Zone of Interest, which returns to an exploration of the Holocaust reminiscent of Time's Arrow.

Amis’s fiction falls into the category of postmodernism, which is to say that his work revises or disregards the expectations of the genres of realistic fiction written by authors of preceding generations, including his father, Kingsley. Postmodernism, as practiced by Amis, is characterized by a heightened consciousness of the precarious nature of existence, particularly burdened by the possibility of nuclear extinction. The events and consequences of World War II, especially the actions of the Nazi regime in Germany, add to the grim coloration in the world of Amis’s novels. Contributing to the dark tone are his obsession with the soul-ravaging effects of increased capitalism and consumerism and his painful portraits of misogynistic and sexually predatory men.

The dark subject matter of Amis’s fiction is made palatable by his frequently comic tone—the term “black comedy” applies here—and by his often-discussed obsession with verbal style. One of his principal literary heroes is Vladimir Nabokov, and, like the Russian-born author of Lolita (1955), Amis does not privilege subject matter over style. The verbal surface of the work is of paramount importance, however problematic and disturbing the subject matter might be.

In addition to Nabokov, a number of other well-known writers have had an enduring effect on Amis’s life, though not necessarily as direct an influence on his fiction. One of these is the poet Philip Larkin, who was a very close friend of Kingsley Amis’s and a frequent guest in his home during Martin’s childhood, particularly when the family lived in Wales. Another is the American novelist Saul Bellow, whom Amis met in 1983 and to whom he formed a father-son-like attachment, extensively documented in Experience.

Amis died from oesophageal cancer at his home in Florida on May 19, 2023.

Author Works

Long Fiction:

The Rachel Papers, 1973

Dead Babies, 1975 (also known as Dark Secrets, 1977)

Success, 1978

Other People: A Mystery Story, 1981

Money: A Suicide Note, 1984

London Fields, 1989

Time’s Arrow: Or, The Nature of the Offense, 1991

The Information, 1995

Night Train, 1997

Yellow Dog, 2003

House of Meetings, 2006

The Pregnant Widow: Inside History, 2010

Lionel Asbo: State of England, 2012

The Zone of Interest, 2014

Short Fiction:

Einstein’s Monsters, 1987

Heavy Water, and Other Stories, 1998

Screenplay:

Saturn 3, 1980

Nonfiction:

Invasion of the Space Invaders, 1982

The Moronic Inferno, and Other Visits to America, 1986

Visiting Mrs. Nabokov, and Other Excursions, 1993

Experience, 2000

The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews, 1971–2000, 2001

Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million, 2002

The Second Plane: September 11; Terror and Boredom, 2008

Bibliography

Adams, Stephen. “Awards Only Go to Boring Books, Says Martin Amis.” Telegraph. Telegraph Media Group, 7 June 2010. Web. 9 Jan. 2015. Discussion centering around Amis's views regarding why he has not received any major literary awards.

Alexander, Victoria N. “Martin Amis: Between the Influences of Bellow and Nabokov.” Antioch Review 52.4 (1994): 580–90. Print. Investigates the links between Amis and two of the authors whom he most reveres, Saul Bellow and Vladimir Nabokov.

Amis, Martin. Experience: A Memoir. New York: Hyperion, 2000. Print. A powerfully written, imaginatively shaped memoir in which one of the aging Young Turks of British writing reflects candidly on his illustrious father, his murdered cousin, and his own controversial life as writer, son, husband, and father.

Ben-Merre, David. “After Words: The Paratexts of Martin Amis's Time's Arrow.” Explicator 71.2 (2013): 117–19. Print. Analyzes Time's Arrow through the lens of narrative structure.

Diedrick, James. Understanding Martin Amis. 2nd ed. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2004. Print. Expansion of the first book-length study of Amis’s fiction and career looks at all aspects of this multifaceted writer, including his criticism. Discusses the novels through Yellow Dog.

Edmondson, Elie H. “Martin Amis Writes Postmodern Man.” Critique 42.2 (2001): 145–54. Print. Explicates the techniques that Amis uses to revise reader expectations of the traditional novel. Focuses particularly on the novel Money.

Finney, Brian. Martin Amis. New York: Routledge, 2008. Print. Provides an introduction to Amis’s novels, with discussion of critical approaches to the work. Includes biographical information.

Finney, Brian. “Narrative and Narrated Homicides in Martin Amis’s Other People and London Fields.” Critique 37.1 (1995): 3–15. Print. Argues that in these two novels, by using manipulative, self-conscious narrators who victimize the other characters, Amis forces his readers to recognize how the characters are both immersed in and outside the action.

Keulks, Gavin. Father and Son: Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis, and the British Novel since 1950. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2003. Print. Ambitious chronicle of a literary dynasty places both father and son within the contexts of their times.

Moyle, David. “Beyond the Black Hole: The Emergence of Science Fiction Themes in the Recent Work of Martin Amis.” Extrapolation 36.4 (1995): 305–15. Print. Shows how Amis adapts traditional science-fiction themes, such as time travel, concern about the end of the world, and a Dr. Frankenstein-like lack of regard for conventional morality, in Time’s Arrow and London Fields.

Oates, Joyce Carol. "The Death Factory." The New Yorker, 29 Sept. 2014, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/29/death-factory. Accessed 25 May 2017. Provides a review of Amis's novel The Zone of Interest, focusing in part on what makes this novel more successful than his two previous efforts.

Stout, Mira. “Martin Amis: Down London’s Mean Streets.” New York Times Magazine 4 Feb. 1990: 32+. Print. Lively feature article in which Amis, prodded by Stout, discusses a range of topics, including London Fields, his interest in the environment, his early life and career, his relationship with his father, the state of the novel as a form, the Thatcher government, middle age, and his daily work routine.

Tredell, Nicolas, ed. The Fiction of Martin Amis: A Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism. New York: Palgrave, 2002. Print. Collection of reviews, critical essays, and other materials presents discussion of a wide range of topics concerning Amis’s fiction, including the author’s use of language and his representation of sexuality.