Amis, Martin 1949- (Martin Louis Amis)

PERSONAL:

Born August 25, 1949, in Oxford, England; son of Kingsley William (a writer) and Hilary Amis; married Antonia Phillips, 1984 (divorced); married Isabel Fonseca, c: 1996; children: (from an affair with Lamorna Heath) Delilah Seale, (first marriage) Louis and Jacob, (second marriage) Fernanda and Clio. Education: Exeter College, Oxford, B.A. (with honors), 1971.

ADDRESSES:

Home—London, England; Uruguay. Agent—The Wylie Agency, 250 W. 57th St., Ste. 2114, New York, NY 10107.

CAREER:

Writer, novelist, and essayist. Times Literary Supplement, London, England, editorial assistant, 1972-75, fiction and poetry editor, 1974; New Statesman, London, assistant literary editor, 1975-77, literary editor, 1977-79; writer, 1980—; Observer, London, special writer, 1980—. University of Manchester, England, professor of creative writing, 2007—. Actor in the film A High Wind in Jamaica, 1965.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Somerset Maugham Award, National Book League, 1974, for The Rachel Papers; James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography, 2000, for Experience; National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism category, 2001, for The War against Cliché: Essays and Reviews, 1971-2000; longlisted for Booker Prize, 2003, for Yellow Dog.

WRITINGS:

FICTION

The Rachel Papers (novel), J. Cape (London, England), 1973, Knopf (New York, NY), 1974.

Dead Babies (novel), J. Cape (London, England), 1975, published as Dark Secrets, Panther, 1977.

Success (novel), J. Cape (London, England), 1978.

Other People: A Mystery Story (novel), J. Cape (London, England), 1981.

Money: A Suicide Note (novel), J. Cape (London, England), 1984, Viking (New York, NY), 1985.

London Fields (novel), J. Cape (London, England), 1989.

Time's Arrow; or, The Nature of the Offence, Harmony Books (New York, NY), 1991.

The Information (novel), Harmony Books (New York, NY), 1995.

Night Train (novel), Harmony Books (New York, NY), 1998.

Heavy Water and Other Stories, Harmony Books (New York, NY), 1999.

Yellow Dog, Talk Miramax Books (New York, NY), 2003.

Vintage Amis (various past writings and excerpts and new short story), Vintage (New York, NY), 2004.

House of Meetings (novel), J. Cape (London, England), 2006, Alfred A. Knopf (New York, NY), 2007.

The Pregnant Widow, (novel), J. Cape (London, England), 2007.

Contributor to anthologies, including My Oxford, edited and introduced by Ann Thwaite, Robson Books (London, England), 1977, revised edition, 1986; and Winter's Tales 25, edited by Caroline Hobhouse, Macmillan (London, England), 1979, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1980; Also author of screenplays Mixed Doubles, 1979, and Saturn 3, 1980. Contributor of short stories to Encounter, Penthouse, Granta 13, London Review of Books, and Literary Review. Contributor of articles and reviews to numerous periodicals, including Times Literary Supplement, Observer, New Statesman, New York Times, and Sunday Telegraph.

NONFICTION

Invasion of the Space Invaders (autobiographical), with an introduction by Stephen Spielberg, Hutchinson (London, England), 1982.

The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America (articles, reviews and interviews), Harcourt (New York, NY), 1986.

Einstein's Monsters (essay and short stories), Harmony (New York, NY), 1987.

Visiting Mrs. Nabokov and Other Excursions (essays), J. Cape (London, England), 1993, Harmony Books (New York, NY), 1994.

Experience (memoirs), Talk Miramax Books (New York, NY), 2000.

The War against Cliché: Essays and Reviews, 1971-2000, J. Cape (London, England), 2001.

Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million, Talk Miramax Books (New York, NY), 2002.

SIDELIGHTS:

With the publication of The Rachel Papers at age twenty-four, Martin Amis established himself as one of the leading British writers of the late-twentieth century. Regularly compared to works by writers such as Vladimir Nabokov and Saul Bellow, Amis's books are often self-conscious works of fiction filled with wordplay. Saul Bellow compared Amis's stylistic skills to Gustave Flaubert and James Joyce in a New York Times Magazine profile. Amis's biting, yet moralistic satire has also drawn comparisons to the work of Jonathan Swift and Angus Wilson.

Inevitably, Amis has also been compared to his father, Kingsley Amis, the late British comedic novelist of the post-World War II generation. "Both father and son write of intellectual phonies and pretenders, assorted degenerates and a rotted-out youth in an England of depraved popular culture and not the slightest social or moral structure," wrote Richard Eder in the Los Angeles Times Book Review. Eder continued that, like his father, "Martin Amis is dark, satirical and gifted with irascibility. But what we get under the satire is not a sense of protest but of contempt." In many ways, Amis's works occupy a place well beyond the imposing shadow of his father's works.

In 1973 Amis entered the British literary scene with The Rachel Papers, a novel that "caused a stir in Britain—and, it may be, a dreadful thrill of excitement at what may by some be regarded as the spectacle of a crusadingly nasty adolescent unburdening himself in print," wrote Karl Miller in the New York Review of Books. In the New Leader, Pearl K. Bell elaborated: "The Rachel Papers offers a candid, groin-level view of teen-age sex, circa 1970, in Swinging Britain. Amis' hero, Charles Highway, is no slouch at telling us exactly what-he-did-and-then-she-did. But since he is also a precocious and totally self-absorbed intellectual, this indefatigable swordsman is more interested in what he thought, pretended, felt, and above all what he wrote in his journal about his sexual happenings, than he is in the act itself." Assessments of the novel's faults take up limited space in reviews that recognize Amis's uncannily mature comic talent. Clive Jordan, for instance, remarked in Encounter that "Amis directs a determined, dead-pan stare at his chosen patch of the lush teenage jungle, teeming with characters who are about as appealing as bacilli on a face flannel, described with the detached, excessively detailed physicality common to satirists down the ages. What holds the attention are not these limited characters, but the author's verbally inventive scrutiny of them." Many U.S. readers first became aware of Amis when his novel The Rachel Papers was shown to have been plagiarized by U.S. novelist Jacob Epstein in Epstein's Wild Oats.

Amis's novel Success is the "first of three fictions, a series of turmoils, in which orphan and double meet," observed Karl Miller in Doubles: Studies in Literary History. Terry Service, bereft of his father—a man who murdered his own wife and baby daughter—sets himself against his upper-class foster brother, Gregory Riding. As they begin with opposite fortunes, so they end, Gregory having fallen from what seemed to be a charmed position of wealth and sexual opportunity, Terry rising to a higher level of success. "At the crossing-point of their two lives lies the smashed body of Ursula, Gregory's sister, successful at the second attempt in a suicide nurtured in an incestuous childhood with Gregory, and triggered by a more recent relationship with Terry," Neil Hepburn noted in the Listener. "The malice these brothers level at women is nearly equal to their hatred of themselves," Jay Parini wrote in the New York Times Book Review.

A profusion of doubles complicates Amis's second turmoil, Other People: A Mystery Story. Mary Lamb, an amnesiac, faintly recalls her past as bad girl Amy Hide, who nearly died after being attacked by a sadistic psychopath. Two voices tell her story; its ending suggests a return to the beginning for a second take. Mary's social worker may be sincere, or may be her abductor, setting her up for more abuse. Numerous ambiguities throughout the book make the mystery hard to solve, according to some reviewers. Amis provides the answer to this long riddle in literary allusions too subtle for some readers to decipher, but Encounter contributor Alan Brownjohn recognized the voice of Amis throughout, musing on his own godlike power to manipulate his characters." When read this way, Other People appears to be an analysis of the process of making fiction." Extending the analogy, Charles Nichol declared in the Saturday Review: "Not all readers will agree with Martin Amis that writing a novel is necessarily a sadomasochistic process, but the force and brilliance of his speculation are undeniable."

Amis elicits sympathy for another unlikely character in Money: A Suicide Note. Narrator John Self lost his mother when he was seven years of age and later received a bill from his father to cover the cost of his upbringing. Obsessed with money and overcome by his appetites, Self, noted John Gross in the New York Times, "embodies … just about everything your mother told you not to play with." Jonathon Yardley elaborated in the Washington Post that Money "is one long drinking bout, interrupted only briefly by a period of relative sobriety; it contains incessant sexual activity, much of it onanistic; it has a generous supply of sordid language … and it has an unkind word for just about every race, creed or nationality known to exist." According to Time reviewer R.Z. Sheppard, Self demonstrates that "a culture geared to profit from the immediate gratification of egos and nerve endings is not a culture at all, but an addiction. As an addict, he discovers that bad habits and ignorance are the bars of self-imprisonment." Listener contributor Angela Huth deemed Money "a grim book; a black study of the humiliations and degradations of an alcoholic, a warning of the corruptibility of money and the emptiness of a life with no culture to fall back on." In any other novel, Self's indecencies might cause offense, noted Yardley, but in this case, Amis "has created a central character of consummate vulgarity and irresistible charm."

The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America shows the same fascinated disdain Amis holds for U.S. culture through essays, reviews, and interviews about and with American writers. Reviewers mentioned the negative slant of these pieces, most of which first appeared in the London Observer. Perhaps anticipating charges of anti-Americanism, Amis claims in the introduction to his book that the cultural ailment diagnosed in The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America is not "a peculiarly American condition. It is global and perhaps eternal." His America is "primarily a metaphor … for mass, gross, ever-distracting human infamy."

Einstein's Monsters is a collection of short stories centered on the danger of a nuclear holocaust. "In addition to high verbal energy and flashes of satiric genius, the stories hum with resentment and loathing of a man who fears for his natural patrimony, the earth, the sky and time itself," R.Z. Sheppard wrote in a Time article. Bruce Cook, writing in the Washington Post Book World, commented on the author's emotional intensity: "Usually a writer with a cool, commanding manner (utterly unflappable in … The Moronic Inferno) he comes unglued before us here, attributing his high excitement over the nuclear issue to his impending fatherhood and to a relatively late reading of Jonathan Schell's The Fate of the Earth."

Amis's London Fields is "a mordant allegory of fin de millenaire entropy in the post-Thatcherite toilet" of late 1990s Great Britain, according to Graham Fuller in the Village Voice. "The London of this novel … is heading toward some undefined but seemingly inevitable apocalypse." Amis's characters are all headed toward a more personal apocalypse. Nicola Six is a beautiful, self-destructive, thirty-four-year-old woman who, having foreseen that she will be murdered on her thirty-fifth birthday, sets out to be killed on her own terms. She lures two married men, Keith and Guy, into a bizarre sex triangle. Keith is a coarse pub regular with no morals, but with the ambition to be a champion at darts. Guy is a handsome, wealthy British gentleman. One of these two men will kill Nicola; the other will be taken along for a ride. A third man, Sam, a Jewish-American writer who is dying of an incurable disease, is attracted to the triangle for its story value.

As a novel, London Fields received mixed critical attention. For some, Amis was to be commended for capturing a decaying world on the edge of destruction and raising it up as a mirror to our own times. "London Fields is a virtuoso depiction of a wild and lustful society," commented Bette Pesetsky in the New York Times Book Review. "In an age of attenuated fiction, this is a large book of comic and satirical invention." According to Jonathan Yardley in the Washington Post Book World: "Amis plunges like Dickens reincarnate into the life of the city, wallowing in its messiness and nastiness and desperation." Yet, as Martyn Harris suggested in New Statesman, in his preoccupation with creating a setting and scenes of decay and decadence, the author slights some of the other elements of his novel: "Amis isn't interested in character, plot, motivation." Harris also wrote: "In denying motive Amis denies his characters the capacity for change, which in turn rules out the manipulation of reader sympathy—the strongest lever in fiction." Harris continued: "Instead of character the book offers chronocentrism—the conceit that your own age is more special, more scary, more apocalyptic than any other."

The Information reflects a change in Amis's perspective as a writer. It is a novel about two middle-aged friends and how their careers, each headed in a different direction, affect them and their friendship. Richard Tull and Gwyn Barry are middle-aged writers. In addition to looking at their stage of life, the book is also about how writers react to success and failure. According to Vanity Fair contributor Michael Shnayerson, "The Information lampoons a publishing world driven by vacuous best-sellers and foolish prizes; for all the grim fun it makes of male midlife confusion, the literary crisis is real, Amis is saying, and must be met."

In the novel, failing author Tull has written two experimental novels which received only an inkling of critical attention, while his four more-recent works remain unpublished. His most recent work places such demands on its readers that the few who have attempted it have been rendered physically ill. Barry, on the other hand, has of late achieved fame, wealth, and critical acclaim with a best-selling novel. Tull does not take his friend's good fortune well. In fact, he begins to plot Barry's downfall. Through a variety of far-fetched schemes, Tull attempts to destroy Barry's career, his marriage, and his life.

The Information "drags a bit around the middle," commented Christopher Buckley in the New York Times Book Review, "but you're never out of reach of a sparkly phrase, stiletto metaphor or drop-dead insight into the human condition. And there is the humor; Mr. Amis goes where other humorists fear to tread." "The Information is quite good," wrote Washington Post Book World contributor David Nicholson. "There is, however, a wonderful sidesplitting smaller book trapped inside it. The Information would have been far better had Amis allowed it to come out." New York Times contributor Michiko Kakutani found in the novel "Amis's own idiosyncratic vision and his ability to articulate that vision in wonderfully edgy, street-smart prose." Kakutani suggested that Amis "has written just the sort of novel his bumbling hero dreams in vain of writing: an uncompromising and highly ambitious novel that should also be a big popular hit."

For some reviewers, the strength of The Information went beyond its style and humor. Kakutani also contended that the novel "marks a giant leap forward in Mr. Amis's career. Here, in a tale of middle-aged angst and literary desperation, all the themes and stylistic experiments of Mr. Amis's earlier fiction come together in a symphonic whole." Amis's "Nabokovian devices are not only employed to frame the story of a failed novelist," added Kakutani, "but are also cunningly used to open out his hilarious tale of envy and revenge into a glittering meditation on the nervous interface between the real world and the world of art." Chris Heath also saw the book in a larger context. In Details, he noted: "Only in the smallest way is The Information about what happens when Richard Tull and Gwyn Barry start scheming around each other. It's about messier, more troubling matters: competitiveness and jealousy and vanity, the vacuum of middle age, the need to be remembered, the ways we corrupt innocence. It is also, in all its side alleys, simply about describing the modern world in all its vain, grotesque minutiae."

Reviewed in the New York Times Book Review by Patrick McGrath, Night Train refers to suicide as a one-way train ride "speeding your way to darkness." Comparing this work to earlier novels such as Money and London Fields, McGrath believed that in his 1998 book Amis "probes deep into the question of human motivation," a refinement of his views on suicide. In Night Train the narrator is "tough and battered" female cop Mike Hoolihan, who is called in to investigate the apparent suicide of Jennifer Rockwell, the daughter of a former boss. Dan DeLuca in the Philadelphia Inquirer considered Night Train a "disappointing" novel, concluding: "By the end … we may know who killed Jennifer Rockwell, but we still don't know who she is, why she died, or why we should care." On the other hand, Mike Hanna in the Denver Post viewed the novel more favorably, writing that people like Rockwell "conceal their problems so well that no one notices until it is too late."

Amis's novel Yellow Dog delves into sex, violence, gender, and the media via the story of Xan Meo. An ideal husband, Meo suffers a serious head injury that transforms him into an abusive, primitive man filled with rage and uncontrollable lust. In the novelist's view, this primitive outlook on life and sex exists just beneath the surface of all men, and Meo is not the only example Amis provides to make his point. His satiric, comic novel includes other Jekyll-and-Hyde characters which Meo meets throughout the course of his uncivilized adventures: Clint Smoker, a tabloid journalist, writes about illicit sex and outrageous scandal, while the king of England has a Chinese mistress and works to keep a pornographic video of his fifteen-year-old daughter off the Internet. In an interview with Kimberly Cutter for Women's Wear Daily, Amis noted: "I think the real duty of a novelist is to interpret how the world feels at a particular point. And that's what I've done here."

Characteristically, Yellow Dog met with a wide variety of responses from reviewers. Nation contributor Keith Gessen wrote that the novel features "a rogues' gallery of disappointing predictability" and contended that the second half of the novel falls apart. Sean McCann, writing in Book, wrote that the second part of the novel "takes a header into a series of contrived plot devices," although Library Journal contributor David Hellman commented: "All of these disparate plots connect in an intelligent and hilarious fashion." Many reviewers also found Yellow Dog's structure awkward and convoluted and without a satisfying conclusion. Writing in Time, Lev Grossman noted: "It tries to be structurally clever, but several of its strands either get tangled up with another or fail to tangle up properly." Nevertheless, Grossman added: "through it all one feels that Amis writes the way he does not to show that he can, but because what he has to say is just too important for prose that is less than painfully acerbic, relentlessly intelligent, and pitilessly funny." Donna Seaman, writing in Booklist, commented of Yellow Dog: "A sloppy, maddening, hilarious, and oddly touching amalgam of Evelyn Waugh and John Waters, Amis' wicked burlesque evinces his disgust with the herd mentality and surprisingly tender regard for women." While George Walden, writing in New Statesman, noted that the novel has some problems, including Amis's "obtrusive style," the critic noted: "When Amis is really swinging, who cares about the obtrusion?"

Published five years after the death of his father, the memoir Experience focuses not only on the Kingsley-Martin relationship, but also on the younger Amis's connections with relatives, spouses, children, friends, and associates. Many topics get his attention, from the tragic examination of the grisly murder of his cousin to the bemusing British press's apparent fascination with Amis's lengthy and expensive dental work.

Experience takes a nonlinear view of the author's life. "One moment he's six, the next he's twenty-six," an Economist contributor quipped. "Here his parents are divorced, an article later married. The point is the parallels and connections. His book is cross-hatched with them, running across from fathers to sons and back; between marriages and books, between books and books, between births and deaths." The best part of the memoir, continued the critic, "is Kingsley Amis, or rather Martin-and-Kingsley Amis." The author "captures his father's pettiness and phobias, his searing intelligence and wit, his chaste erotic dreams" about Queen Elizabeth II, noted National Review contributor Joyce Hackett. At the same time, Hackett felt "his asides to the un-famous, especially the women in his life, fall utterly flat."

As the author reveals the complex bond between two generations of fiery writers, the son's understanding of his father, even in the elder man's failing health, "comes across movingly," noted the Economist contributor. To the critic, Amis's look at his father's last days in the hospital "are the most sustained, the least ‘stop-go’ in the book." Indeed, in his portrayals of his father, mother, sister, and other close family members, the reviewer noted: "Martin Amis, the bad boy, turns out to be an exemplary family man."

In two separate New York Times reviews, John Leonard and Michiko Kakutani took different views of Amis's recollections. On the negative side, Leonard labeled Experience "a portmanteau of personal history, ancestor worship and promiscuous opinionizing, … a piñata of literary gossip that Amis beats with a stick, causing many names to drop." Kakutani had fewer such reservations, calling Experience "remarkable" as a coming-of-age chronicle, as well as the author's "most fully realized book yet—a book that fuses his humor, intellect and daring with a new gravitas and warmth, a book that stands, at once, as a loving tribute to his father and as a fulfillment of his own abundant talents as a writer."

In addition to his fiction and general essays, Amis has worked as a literary critic. Almost three decades of reviews, as well as essays ranging from poker and chess to the sexual allure of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, are collected in the The War against Cliché: Essays and Reviews, 1971-2000. Much of Amis's critical literary focus is reflected in the book's title. Amis places a heavy emphasis on style and berates cliché; even so, for Amis cliché means more than style. As noted by a contributor to the Economist: "Cliché, he holds, is not just fossilized language, it is any sort of stock response—emotional, political or literary. It is, in short, thoughtlessness, and the avoidance of cliché is therefore not just a requirement for a stylist, but a duty for the moralist." Robert L. Kelly, writing in the Library Journal, noted: "His evaluations are lively, scholarly, and, on rare occasion, numbing—though probably less so for those few who know as much about literature as Amis." Booklist contributor Donna Seaman called the collection "a great feast for serious readers." Writing in World Literature Today, William Hutchings summarized: "The War against Cliché will survive repeated readings well."

In Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million Amis continues in the nonfiction mode as he ponders the life and the atrocities of the late Soviet dictator Josef Stalin and recalls his own father's affiliation with communism in the 1930s. Stalin exterminated millions of people, massacring those he believed to be dissidents. Amis writes at length about the life of "Koba," the nickname given to Stalin and taken from a Robin Hood-like hero in a Russian folk tale. The core of the book focuses on the many horrors Stalin oversaw as leader of the former Soviet Union. Amis also devotes considerable time to pondering why his father, like many other intellectuals, was enamored with communism when, says Amis, it became relatively clear early on that Soviet-style communism had evolved into a murderous regime. According to Peter Wilby in the New Statesman, Amis addresses another bothersome question: "And why, even now, are so many on the left reluctant to acknowledge how flawed and monstrous it was?" In trying to answer this question, Amis also delves into why there appears to be less stigma or personal remorse expressed regarding those associated with Stalin and the KGB than those who supported Hitler and the Nazis. This discrepancy led to the book's subtitle Laughter and the Twenty Million, by which Amis means that it has been possible for many to joke about Stalin and the USSR but never about Hitler and the Holocaust.

Several reviewers noted that Amis's treatise on Stalin contains factual errors, such as mistakenly identifying Ivan IV as the first Russian leader to take the title czar when it was Ivan III. A contributor to Bookseller noted, however, that such mistakes are less important because the book is not really a work of history. "Koba the Dread is a historical meditation, avowedly using secondary sources," the contributor noted. "Historical accuracy is not Mr. Amis' primary concern; and nor, one may guess, was it that of his editor, who would have been occupied largely with the literary quality of the work." As for Amis's prose, David Pryce-Jones wrote in Commentary: "Amis also has his own way of postponing the truth, in his case by means of overblown language. To speak, for example, of the ‘glandular sensuality’ of Stalin's malevolence, or to describe Stalin as a ‘bellowed rebuttal’ of some Marxist thesis, is to blur meaning." Writing in Maclean's, Sue Ferguson had a more favorable view of Amis's style, commenting: "What Amis brings to the subject is a rambling prose that, at points, captures in creative, penetrating ways the sheer immensity of Stalin's crimes." A Publishers Weekly contributor noted that many readers may not be interested in the author's "private quarrels, but in the bulk of the book he relates passionately a story that needs to be told." In a review in Library Journal, Robert H. Johnston called the book "passionate and intensely personal" and also noted that "it will appeal to admirers of Amis's literary panache."

Amis turns his attention to Russia once again with his novel House of Meetings. The novel takes place primarily in Stalin-era Russia and features two love stories, one a tale of romantic love while the other looks at sibling relationships as told in flashbacks by an unnamed narrator. The narrator is sentenced to ten years in a Siberian labor camp following World War II along with his brother, Lev, a poet and pacifist. The narrator, who admits that he spent much of World War II raping his way through Europe, spends much of his time protecting the nonviolent Lev. Despite his brother's love and protection, Lev also realizes that his brother probably would like him dead because he married the woman the narrator loves. Intermixed with the story is the narrator's perceptions of modern-day Russia as he travels back to his homeland for a visit from America, where he is now a citizen and an old man.

New Yorker contributor Joan Acocella noted that its "shining virtue … is its old-fashioned psychological realism." Acocella added that "the surprise is that he finds today's Russia as appalling as the old one. Many of the events in the novel are keyed to upheavals in Russian history, and the narrator's return to Siberia is made to coincide with the Beslan massacre of September, 2004, in which Chechen terrorists took over a school in North Ossetia." In an interview with Lev Grossman on the Time Magazine on CNN Web site, Amis discussed his writing about Russia so relatively soon after penning the nonfiction Koba the Dread. "What often happens is that you look into something as an amateur historian, or a journalist, and a couple of years later you find it's trickled down into the bit the novels come from," Amis said. "The unconscious. A different ventricle of the heart. Generically fiction is a more intimate form, so you're going to get—perhaps you hope to get—closer to the essence of it, the human essence. Because history is from above, and fiction's from below. It's closer in, more immediate."

For the most part, House of Meetings received widespread critical approval. John Banville, writing in the New York Review of Books, noted: "House of Meetings is short, the prose is controlled, the humor sparse, while the characters strike us as real, or at least possible, people. It is a remarkable achievement, a version of the great Russian novel done in miniature, with echoes throughout of its mighty predecessors." In a review in the New Statesman, Stephanie Merritt wrote: "For admirers who feared, after his last novel, Yellow Dog, that Amis's nonfiction endeavours had leached the force of life from his fiction, House of Meetings should be a reassurance; taken alone, it is a compelling work of fiction in which learning and imagination are beautifully counterpoised."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Amis, Martin, Experience, Talk Miramax Books (New York, NY), 2000.

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 4, 1975, Volume 9, 1978, Volume 38, 1987, Volume 62, 1992.

Dern, John A., Martians, Monsters, and Madonna: Fiction and Form in the World of Martin Amis, Peter Lang (New York, NY), 1999.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 14: British Novelists since 1960, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1983.

Diedrick, James, Understanding Martin Amis, University of South Carolina Press (Columbia, SC), 1995.

Miller, Karl, Doubles: Studies in Literary History, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1985.

PERIODICALS

Book, November-December, 2003, Sean McCann, review of Yellow Dog, p. 69.

Booklist, January 1, 1999, Jim O'aughlin, review of Heavy Water and Other Stories, p. 827; June 1, 2000, Brad Hooper, review of Experience, p. 1795; November 15, 2001, Donna Seaman, review of The War against Cliché: Essays and Reviews, 1971-2000, p. 540; May 1, 2002, Brad Hooper, review of Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million, p. 1442; September 15, 2003, Donna Seaman, review of Yellow Dog, p. 179; November 15, 2006, Keir Graff, review of House of Meetings, p. 6.

Commentary, October, 2002, David Pryce-Jones, review of Koba the Dread, p. 71.

Denver Post, March 9, 1998, Mike Hanna, review of Night Train.

Details, June, 1995, Chris Heath, review of The Information, p. 92.

Economist, May 27, 2000, review of Experience, p. 88; May 26, 2001, review of The War against Cliché, p. 5.

Encounter, February, 1974, Clive Jordan, review of The Rachel Papers, p. 64; September, 1978, review of Success, p. 74; May, 1981, Alan Brownjohn, review of Other People: A Mystery Story, p. 89.

Entertainment Weekly, January 19, 2007, Jeff Giles, review of House of Meetings, p. 84.

Esquire, February, 1999, Sven Birkerts, "The Twentieth Century Speaks," p. 64.

Guardian (London, England), September 30, 2006, review of House of Meetings.

History Today, November, 2002, S.A. Smith, review of Koba the Dread, p. 89.

Library Journal, October 1, 2001, Robert L. Kelly, review of The War against Cliché, p. 96; June 1, 2002, Robert H. Johnston, review of Koba the Dread, p. 169; October 15, 2003, David Hellman, review of Yellow Dog, p. 95.

Listener, April 13, 1978, Neil Hepburn, review of Success, p. 482; September 27, 1984, Angela Huth, review of Money, p. 32.

Los Angeles Times, June 28, 1987, review of Einstein's Monster, p. 13.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, March 31, 1985, Richard Eder, review of Money, p. 3.

Maclean's, June 26, 2000, Barry Came, "Look Back in Love," p. 48; August 19, 2002, Sue Ferguson, review of Koba the Dread, p. 52.

Nation, December 8, 2003, Keith Gessen, review of Yellow Dog, p. 50.

National Review, August 28, 2000, Joyce Hackett, review of Experience; April 16, 2007, Paul Hollander, "Inside the Nightmare," review of House of Meetings, p. 49.

New Leader, May 13, 1974, Pearl K. Bell, review of The Rachel Papers.

New Republic, August 28, 2000, review of Experience, p. 45.

New Statesman, September 22, 1989, Martyn Harris, review of London Fields, p. 34; September 27, 1991, p. 55; September 2, 2002, Peter Wilby, review of Koba the Dread, p. 14; September 8, 2003, George Walden, review of Yellow Dog, p. 48; October 2, 2006, Stephanie Merritt, review of House of Meetings.

Newsweek, June 26, 2000, "Growing Up with Kingsley," p. 66.

Newsweek International, November 6, 2006, Sylvia Spring, "Goading the Enemy" (interview with author).

New Yorker, January 15, 2007, Joan Acocella, "Prisoners," review of House of Meetings, p. 83.

New York Observer, January 14, 2007, Adam Begley, review of House of Meetings.

New York Review of Books, July 18, 1974, Karl Miller, review of The Rachel Papers, p. 24; March 1, 2007, John Banville, review of House of Meetings.

New York Times, March 15, 1985, John Gross, review of Money: A Suicide Note, p. 22; May 2, 1995, Michiko Kakutani, review of The Information, p. C17; May 23, 2000, Michiko Kakutani, review of Experience; May 28, 2000, John Leonard, review of Experience; January 9, 2007, Michiko Kakutani, review of House of Meetings; January 14, 2007, Liesel Schillinger, review of House of Meetings.

New York Times Book Review, September 6, 1987, Jay Parini, review of Success, p. 8; March 4, 1990, Bette Pesetsky, review of London Fields, p. 1; April 23, 1995, Christopher Buckley, "The Inflammation," review of The Information, p. 1; February 1, 1998, Patrick McGrath, review of Night Train, p. 6; January 31, 1999, A.O. Scott, "Trans-Atlantic Flights," p. 5.

New York Times Magazine, February 4, 1990, Saul Bellow, profile of author, p. 32.

Observer (London, England), October 1, 2006, Toby Lichtig, review of House of Meetings.

Philadelphia Inquirer, February 1, 1998, Dan DeLuca, review of Night Train.

Publishers Weekly, May 22, 2000, review of Experience, p. 81; May 20, 2002, review of Koba the Dread, p. 55; October 13, 2003, review of Yellow Dog, p. 55.

Saturday Review, June, 1981, Charles Nichol, review of Other People.

Sunday Times, October 1, 2006, Robert MacFarlane, review of House of Meetings.

Sydney Morning Herald, October 2, 2006, Anthony Macris, review of House of Meetings; October 9, 2006, James Button, "Into the Head of a Terrorist."

Time, March 11, 1985, R.Z. Sheppard, review of Money, p. 70; June 22, 1987, R.Z. Sheppard, review of Einstein's Monsters, p. 74; February 26, 1990, R.Z. Sheppard, review of London Fields, p. 71; May 1, 1995, R.Z. Sheppard, review of The Information, p. 90; February 8, 1999, R.Z. Sheppard, "Bitter Sweets," p. 70; November 3, 2003, Lev Grossman, review of Yellow Dog, p. 76.

Vanity Fair, May, 1995, Michael Shnayerson, review of The Information, p. 132.

Village Voice, April 24, 1990, Graham Fuller, review of London Fields, p. 75.

Washington Post Book World, March 24, 1985, Jonathan Yardley, review of Money, p. 3; July 5, 1987, review of Einstein's Monster, p. 4; June 5, 1988, Bruce Cook, review of The Moronic Infernoand Other Visits to America, p. 12; February 18, 1990, Jonathan Yardley, review of London Fields, p. 3; May 7, 1995, David Nicholson, review of The Information, p. 3.

Women's Wear Daily, October 21, 2003, Kimberly Cutter, "Amis Amiss," p. 4; March 12, 2007, Rosemary Feitelberg, "Famous Amis" (profile of author), p. 4.

World Literature Today, winter, 2001, Daniel R. Bronson, review of Experience, p. 126; summer-autumn, 2002, William Hutchings, review of The War against Cliché, p. 77.

ONLINE

Australian Broadcasting Corporation,http://www.abc.net.au/ (January 11, 2006), Tony Jones, "Tony Jones Speaks to Martin Amis."

Boston.com,http://www.boston.com/ (May 7, 2006), James Parker, "Forever and a Day: Martin Amis's Sept. 11."

Independent,http://news.independent.co.uk/ (January 15, 2007), "Martin Amis: You Ask The Questions."

London Review of Books,http://www.lrb.co.uk/ (July 30, 2007), Daniel Soar, review of House of Meetings.

Martin Amis Web site,http://www.martinamisweb.com (July 30, 2007).

Morning News,http://www.themorningnews.org/ (July 30, 2007), Robert Birnbaum, interview with author.

New York Magazine,http://nymag.com/ (July 30, 2007), Sam Anderson, review of House of Meetings.

PEN American Center,http://www.pen.org/ (July 30, 2007), brief profile of author.

Radar,http://radaronline.com/ (July 30, 2007), interview with author.

Salon.com,http://www.salon.com/ (February 10, 1998), Laura Miller, "The Sadistic Muse" (interview with author).

Scotsman on Sunday,http://scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com/ (October 1, 2006), Peter Burnett, review of House of Meetings.

Slate,http://www.slate.com/ (February 6, 2007), Keith Gessen, review of House of Meetings.

Telegraph,http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ (April 8, 2003), Tibor Fischer, "Someone Needs to Have a Word with Amis."

Time Magazine on CNN,http://www.time.com (February 5, 2007), Lev Grossman, "Q&A with Martin Amis."

Time Out Magazine,http://www.timeout.com/ (October 2, 2006), John Lewis, review of House of Meetings.

Times Online,http://tls.timesonline.co.uk/ (September 27, 2006), Bharat Tandon, review of House of Meetings.

WSJ.com Opinion Journal,http://www.opinionjournal.com/ (April 25, 2007), Amy Finnerty, "Famous Amis" (profile of author).