War Against Cliche: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

Martin Amis doesn't write for you. He doesn't write for himself. He doesn't write for his wife, or his kids. He doesn't even write for his publisher, or the various periodicals to which he contributes. Martin Amis writes for Vladimir Nabokov. Well, maybe for Kingsley, too, but mostly for Nabokov. You can see it in every labyrinthine sentence, in the complex prose, in the wit, the intellect, and the iconoclastic tendencies that reign over this stunning collection of literary reviews, taken from the last 30 years of Amis' writing career.

Okay, he's not only writing for Nabokov. So who is Amis' ideal reader? One who has an "imagination, memory, a dictionary, and some artistic sense." Amis searches to challenge you, but also to entertain. And that passing remark about the dictionary was not made in jest. Amis is the one author whose logocentrism forces me to the dictionary with pleasure. Nearly every paragraph.

The collection's title comes from Amis' belief that "all writing is a campaign against cliche", not just in a literary sense, but also in a human sense. He takes his role in this campaign very seriously, as an author, stating that we should expect artists "to stand as critics not just of their particular milieu but of their society, and of their age". Even so, he regrets the advent of the artist-critic, i.e. novelists 'feeling' their way through criticism, rather than using the tools of theory to review literature. Instead, Amis, who could easily have traded on his name and fallen in step with these artist-critics, uses a background of unabashed joy in the face of literary theory to give his reviews weight.

If the above makes the collection sound pedantic and tiresome, don't worry. It isn't. Amis may be serious about his job, but he sure can have some fun. In a piece on Hillary Clinton's child-rearing instructional, Amis grumbles about her quaint but queasy neologisms: "'Stomachachy'... is not a campaign stop on the way to Poughkeepsie but Hillary's epithet for a pain in the gut." Later, in a piece on soccer (ahem, football), he begins cheekily: "Readers... who like football probably like football so much that, having begun the present article, they will be obliged to finish it." The rest of the paragraph is spent teasing the reader, threatening to never get to the meat of the article, with full knowledge that the reader isn't going anywhere.

In discussing why Cyril Connolly only wrote one novel ("The Rock Pool"), Amis notes that Connolly was "ruined by too much fiction-reviewing: he knew all the larks, and he knew them all too well." Amis, prolific novelist and critic, doesn't fall into this trap. He is able to keep his fiction out of his reviewing. I'm thankful, because I love Amis' fiction. But his reviewing is still loaded with the kind of samurai imagery that Amis is so adept at. Discussing Elmore Leonard's penchant for rejecting the imperfect/present/historic tense, in favour of "a kind of marijuana tense, ... creamy, wandering, weak-verbed." I just loved that when I ran across it: "the marijuana tense". Amis' reviews are alive, vital, and vivid.

They are also quite obsessive; his obsessions can be seen quite clearly. Repeatedly, he references: the affective fallacy, the intentional fallacy, the artist manque; his pet peeves concerning writers, which include their lack of talent, their inability to control syntax, their ignorant repetition, and, of course, their use of cliches; his own canon of literary greatness, against which all is to be measured, that includes Saul Bellow, John Updike (with reservations at times), Philip Larkin, J.G. Ballard, and literature's "'complete' player" Vladimir Nabokov.

The Nabokov obsession may one day ruin Amis. He just can't get the great Russian writer out of his head. A quick check of the index shows that references to Nabokov appear on 51(!) of the book's 490 pages. He notes on one hand that the word 'Kafkaesque' is losing meaning due to overuse, but with the other hand he does the same thing to the word 'Nabokovian'. It should be no surprise, then, that the collection's last and longest piece is a deconstruction of "Lolita" so brilliant that it almost made me want to read that distressing book once more.

I adore Amis. His writing is challenging and thought-provoking, while providing a portal to the world of this curmudgeonly, crusty, snobby author (those are all compliments, I assure you). He's opinionated, and more than able to draft persuasive arguments to prove his opinions correct. And last, but certainly not least, he loves writers and he loves readers. If you are a serious member of either club, I'll bet that you'll love Amis too.

Martin Amis is the son of the late Kingsley Amis. Half of England's literary critics consider Amis pere to be one of the greatest English novelists of the last half of the previous century. The other half don't disagree, they just find that fact enormously depressing. Martin Amis is the author of several novels which, highly influenced by Nabokov, are very funny, extremely mordant and much better than his father's. Martin Amis is also a skillful and intelligent and amusing journalist, as well as an accomplished memoirist. So surely this collection of literary criticism and essays should belong on the same high shelves with Christopher Hitchens' For the Sake of Argument, Dwight Macdonald's Against the American Grain, Alexander Cockburn's Corruptions of Empire, Conor Cruise O'Brien's Writers and Politics, Alan Bennett's Writing Home, James Wood's The Broken Estate or even Tom Paulin's Ireland and the English Crisis.

Yet there is something a bit off about collection. We start off with a collection of reviews on masculinity, looking at Iron John, Hillary Clinton, Nuclear War and Pornography. Then it's on to a collection of reviews of English writers, then to an extended defence of his father's closest friend, the poet Philip Larkin. We proceed to reviews of more canonical writers, then a review of popular novels, then a whole section on Vladimir Nabokov. We then go on to a section on American writers, a section labelled "obsessions and curiosities", a whole section devoted to John Updike, another section that is mostly about V.S. Naipaul and then five concluding essays on great novels. Surely there is much for everyone to enjoy.

It's not that Amis isn't amusing. Consider this passage on Michael Crichton's The Lost World: "Out there, beyond the foliage, you see herds of cliches, roaming free. You will listen in 'stunned silence' to an 'unearthly cry' or a 'deafening roar'. Raptors are 'rapacious'. Reptiles are 'reptilian'. Pain is 'searing'." Or consider this comment on George Steiner's book on the 1972 Fisher-Spassky match: "Yet one of the more attractive things about Steiner's new book is how refreshingly unSteineresque it is...Page after page goes by without any reference to Auschwitz." All this is well and good, but something about is palls. Perhaps there is something too easy in making fun about a book as unrelievedly wretched as Richard Rhodes' book on sex life. One can't help by comparing it to Katha Pollitt's review of the same book in the New Republic to note that something is off.

Sometimes Amis' attacks suffer from the passage of time. Did people really think two decades ago that John Fowles was one of the great living English novelists, and that D.M. Thomas was one of the most promising writers around? Good of Amis to recognize that wasn't true, but his criticisms lack the stylistic brilliance and moral indignation that marks Dwight Macdonald's polemic against James Gould Cozzens. And what is the point of writing four reviews about Iris Murdoch if at the end she is not perforated like a pincushion, but leaves her to write still more novels? Amis despises bad writing but he is kinder than his hero Nabokov to the offenders. But one does not sense a genuine sense of outrage at the sight of a literature slowly poisoned by the middlebrow and the bland. Karl Kraus's writings were once praised to be like "public executions." Amis' own comments are surprisingly genteel in contrast.

Other thoughts? There is a review of an anthology of modern humor that promises to be very cruel against the poor editor, the late Mordecai Richeler. But by the end of it Amis' review seems to have turned into an example of what he is criticizing. And one of his examples of bad humour, a passage by Stephen Leacock, undermines everything by showing signs of being amusing. The defence of Larkin does benefit from the fact that saying Larkin was one the last half-century's great English poets is less depressing that saying Kingsley Amis was one of the last-half century's great English novelists. But it is striking that Larkin and Amis sr were among the last people on earth who would look beyond the ungenerous, self-pitying and spiteful surface and praise the poetry. Can't imagine them being so nice about Brecht and Neruda, but then Brecht and Neruda had the misfortune of being dedicated Communist and superior poets. And I think Amis is quite wrong to think Martin Seymour-Smith unusually exotic and esoteric to consider Pirandello the last century's greatest writer of short stories. The praise for Ulysses does remind us of Joyce's considerable talent for the striking image. But literature is more than a series of brilliant metaphors and striking images. Amis does not really confront those like Dreiser, but also Dostoyevsky, whose style does not match Nabokov's peerless sheen but whose achievement is so much greater. At least Martin Amis appreciates Kafka, which is more than you can say for his father.

Martin Amis is one of those rare writers who found his voice staggeringly early in life (one of his greatest novels, the Rachel Papers came out when he was only 23) and has remained on a largely mercurial track to become one of Britain's most celebrated author-critics.

The Introduction to 'The War Against Cliche' is a retrospective commentary on the decline of literary criticism from its 60s and 70s heyday: 'In the 60s you could live on ten shillings a week: you slept on people's floors and sponged off your friends and sang for your supper - about literary criticism'. Then the oil crises hiked up prices, democracy unleashed its dynamic forces against elite forms of culture and criticism became a dispensible frippery of the educated middle classes. Now, in the era of the internet, everyone in a sense has become a literary critic - witness the tens of thousands of reviews posted on this website. Amis ultimately isn't adverse to this. He likens Literature to a 'great garden', trampled extensively by public participation. But this is Eden, it is unfallen, therefore the ignorant and the illiterate cannot undermine what lies at the root of great literature: talent.

The essays in this book can be linked by a desire on the part of the writer to pinpoint and appreciate talented writing amongst the millions of words that have been scribed in English Literature. Amis ultimately finds it in the writings of the great American authors of the late 20th Century - Bellow, Updike and, most notably, Nabokov. But the journey to uncover these deities of the literary scene is laden with wrong turns and amusing digressions. Thus Amis presents us with an amusing consideration of a Hillary Clinton book on childrearing: ''Village' is a portrait of a First Lady who deserves a second change. And a second term. This is not the unsmiling feminist, the ballbreaking ambulance-chaser who came to Washington a few years ago', witty send ups of the likes of Thomas Harris - Amis considers 'Hannibal' to be a 'harpoon of unqualified kitsch'. Essays on subjects as diverse as chess, nuclear weapons and football are included amongst other things. Longer, more quintissentially literary essays focus on interesting themes such as the nihilistic perversity of J.G. Ballard, why Cyril Connolly only managed to produce one novel, and a mediocre one at that - he was corrupted by too much reviewing apparently, and why novels such as Don Quixote and Ulyssees can be considered to be undisputed masterpieces and, at the same time, unreadable.

Amis is no fawning, simpering reviewer, willing to massage the fragile egos of writers and publishers alike. His prose is characteristically juicy, acerbic, witty and, at times, viciously damning. He has little time for writers who can't even master the nuts and bolts of English prose - see, for instance, his comments on the fallacy of the Elegant Variation in a biography of Lincoln. Some books he patently finds the very notion of rediculous, such as a Who's Who in Twentieth Century Literature giving everyone, no matter how esoteric, a spot in the anthology. It is evident reading through these essays that Amis is a serious reader who likes his prose to be original, well crafted and, above all, the product of a talented pen.

Because the War Against Cliche incorporates essays from almost a thirty year timescale, it is interesting to note the maturity of Amis's reviewing style as he ages. His early reviews, penned whilst he was in his twenties are brash and cocky. His 1971 review of the Guinnes Book of Records displays several of the hallmarks of a youthful critic- the smirking cynicism, the sneering sarcasm and the inclusion of jokes because they are clever and funny, not necessarily because they are incisive or relevant. By the 1990s, Amis's voice has matured into that of the statesmanlike purveyor of literary outlooks - mature, authoratitive and crackling with the opinions of a writer who really knows what he is talking about when it comes to literature.

This collection of essays by Amis serves as a fine reminder of why we read books and what we should look for when we do so - namely talent and originality. Pretty much synonyms as his beloved Nabokov pointed out. An invitation to us all to find our own literary role models who strive to create something along these lines. Salman Rushdie described this quest as a writers attempt to 'stretch the universe' of the reader's mind a little. Amis calls it the war on cliche. Whatever it's title, this pursuit is an important one, and this is some of the very best reviewing you will find articulating this viewpoint.