The most fashionable thing to say on the sad death of Martin Amis earlier this month is that he was a better critic and essayist than novelist. Which novels have the large number of critics asserting this read one wonders? It’s not just the virtuosic so-called ‘London trilogy’ (Amis did not so-call it). The last 15 years showed an author tackling a really huge range of topics, registers, styles. Many have commented on the tragic irony of Jonathan Glazer’s film of ‘The Zone of Interest’ being premiered on the day Amis’s death was announced. It sounds as if the film will be quite different from the book, but nevertheless that fecundity of invention and the vision and the technical ability to see the inspiration through to a work of literature, which has compelling narrative and characterisation as well as a prose style unmatched by any English living author make ‘The Zone of Interest’ as well as ‘The Pregnant Widow’ and ‘Inside Story’ essential books of the last decade.
So, Amis as ‘literary critic’ had better be pretty damned good. Is the test that he could have had at least as distinguished a career writing about mostly about books without the novels? If so then I’m actually not quite sure. He may be consistently more entertaining than say James Wood but I would say equally the consistency of insight is not as strong as Wood. In any case, the other lazy assertion that was constantly made last weekend and in the days that followed was that not only Amis the critic more worthwhile than the fiction writer, but that this was his best book. Again one has to ask which other Amis compilations people saying that have bothered to read.
The problem I think with ‘The War on Cliché’ is that it straddles that part of Amis’s career when he was reviewing books either for Sunday newspapers in the UK or for other publications which were not at that stage prepared to give him carte blanche to write the longer articles where his critical faculties seem to blossom. So here the two best essays in the book are pieces of reasonable length on the rubbishing of Philip Larkin’s reputation by way of a review of the Andrew Motion biography (Amis and not a sub-editor clearly gave the article its brilliant title ‘Don Juan in Hull’ and allowed Shavians a chuckle) and an absolutely brilliant piece for The Atlantic on ‘Lolita’. Too much of the rest of the book is either on subjects which editors clearly thought it would be amusing to get a review from Amis on (for example, Robert Bly’’s Iron John’, Hillary Clinton’s ‘It Takes a Village’, Hugo Young’s book on Thatcher’, One of Us’) and all *are* amusing in an ephemeral way, or are too short for Amis to hit his stride on (the Anthony Burgess chapter is an unsatisfactory sort of incongruent medley of short pieces) and/or are restricted by the books in question (so the VS Pritchett chapter is not half as interesting as one suspects it could be because it’s of comapartively minor books - and going back to Burgess who has even heard of let alone read Burgess’ ’1985’ these days?).
So this book is not short of attractions but I would say if you want hilarious one-off reads on not necessarily weighty topics, ’The Moronic Inferno’ (published in 1986, some time before ‘The War on Cliché’) is a better choice. If you want to experience Amis’s gifts as an astute and stylish critic then 2017’s ‘The Rob of Time’ is by far his best. Ideally read all three. And the novels first. ( )

Sobre masculinidad y asuntos relacionados, Algo de Prosa inglesa, Del canon, Concurso de popularidad, Vladimir Nabokov, Algo de prosa estadounidense, obsesiones y curiosidades, John Updike, Ultramundano, Grandes libros

> O. M. Martin Amis, Guerre au cliché, Essais et critiques (1971-2000) Paris, Gallimard, 2007, 512 p., 27,50 €
In: Revue Esprit Nouvelle série, No. 335 (6) (Juin 2007), pp. 211-212. … ; (en ligne),
URL : https://esprit.presse.fr/article/thierry-paquot/lewis-mumford-herman-melville-14... ;
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1TZtgR8-UuRvELACfV9KzMIbBKGt_Hk1J/view?usp=shari...

Martin Amis is that rarest of breeds: equally skilled in the worlds of both fiction and non. This collection of essays and book reviews is a great example of a writer using his exhaustive vocabulary to good effect - he chooses precisely the right word for any given situation, and you are never likely to feel that a particular word has been chosen through arrogance. ( )

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