Martin Amis, whose caustic, erudite and bleakly comic novels redefined British fiction in the 1980s and ’90s with their sharp appraisal of tabloid culture and consumer excess, and whose private lif…
Martin Amis, whose caustic, erudite and bleakly comic novels redefined British fiction in the 1980s and ’90s with their sharp appraisal of tabloid culture and consumer excess, and whose private life made him tabloid fodder himself, died Friday at his home in Lake Worth, Florida. He was 73.
The tone of these novels was bright, bristling and profane. “What I’ve tried to do is to create a high style to describe low things: the whole world of fast food, sex shows, nude mags,” Amis told The New York Times Book Review in a 1985 interview. “I’m often accused of concentrating on the pungent, rebarbative side of life in my books, but I feel I’m rather sentimental about it. Anyone who reads the tabloid papers will rub up against much greater horrors than I describe.
Being the child of a well-known writer was, for Amis, a blessing and a curse. It helped put him on the map earlier than he might otherwise have gotten there. It made him familiar at an early age with London’s hothouse publishing world. It also helped make him a figure of fascination, resentment and envy.
Amis’ fame built to a crescendo in the mid-1990s. One “scandal,” as chronicled in English tabloids such as The Daily Mail, followed the next. In a 2006 interview, after the thwarting of an attempt to bomb trans-Atlantic flights from Heathrow Airport by British-born Muslims, Amis suggested that the Muslim community in England might “have to suffer until it gets its house in order.” He proposed that this might involve the curtailing of freedoms.
Martin attended more than a dozen schools in the 1950s and ’60s as a result of his father’s travels on the academic circuit after the success of “Lucky Jim.” The constant need to make new friends, he said, helped make him funny. The Amis family spent a year in Princeton, New Jersey, a sojourn that introduced Martin to America, with which he maintained a lifelong fascination.
In Hitchens’ 2010 memoir, “Hitch-22,” he recalled Amis in the early years of their acquaintance, noting how the Rolling Stones had come to mind when Clive James referred to Amis as resembling “a stubby Jagger.” The novel’s electric prose established Amis as an important young English writer and won the Somerset Maugham Award for writers under 30. It did less well in America. “The Rachel Papers” was panned in The New York Times Book Review by Grace Glueck, who called it “a crotch-and-armpit saga of late adolescence,” and in the daily Times by Anatole Broyard, who wrote, “Considering the advantages he has had, Martin has not covered himself in glory.
For nearly three decades after, Amis’ books were not reviewed in The New York Review of Books, one of the chief intellectual organs in the English language.Amis married Phillips, a widowed Boston philosophy teacher, in 1984. They had two sons, Louis and Jacob. That year, Amis published “Money,” a novel that Time magazine would include on a list of the “100 best English-language novels from 1923 to the present.
After he and Phillips divorced, Amis married Fonseca in 1998. A Uruguayan American writer, Fonseca is the author of “Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey” . The couple had two daughters, Fernanda and Clio. In 2008, Amis published “The Second Plane,” a collection of 12 pieces of nonfiction and two short stories about the Western world and terror. “Are you an Islamophobe?” he was asked by the British newspaper The Independent while he was writing the book.
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