What are we to do with Martin Amis? The jury is still out; Experience was a fine book, but Amis is (or so I had always assumed) primarily a novelist, and The Information and Night Train were hard work; and the almost universal hostility and derision that has greeted Yellow Dog makes it difficult, given the length of time it takes me to read a novel these days, to justify any kind of commitment to it (unfair, I know, but decisions to read / not read have to be based on something). Meanwhile I would appear to have moved on to David Mitchell – maybe a changing of the guard?
Well anyway, I have just been reading "In the Palace of the End", Amis's most recent New Yorker short story. How can someone who is capable of such wonderful images as "the room was ... an aviary of mobile phones" follow it a paragraph or two later with something as clunky as "the tendency to the tender"? And the story itself, while based on a very Martin Amis kind of idea (taking the notion of Saddam Hussein's body doubles and pushing that notion to extremes beyond which it would only be possible to look away), could hardly be said to warrant inclusion ahead of any other recent piece of New Yorker fiction (and suffers – as would anybody – from the unhappy chronology of appearing the week before Alice Munro), and I can think of at least three in the past 18 months that stand head and shoulders above it – and all by hitherto unknown (to me) writers.
Okay, almost nobody is better at words than Martin Amis, but words need to be employed in the service of something bigger, lest they become a dictionary. I have invested a lot of emotional energy in the past in my dedication to Amis's work, and I am not yet inclined to throw all of that away. But the tea leaves don't read well.
