It’s Hell Out There

Martin Amis

The Rachel Papers, Dead Babies, Success, Other People, The Moronic Inferno, Time’s Arrow, Visiting Mrs. Nabokov, Night Train, Heavy Water and Other Stories, Experience, The War Against Cliché, Koba the Dread and The Second Plane by Martin Amis

Success, a fairly early novel by Martin Amis, begins as a novel of contrasts. There are two bothers. One is charming, brilliant, handsome, a social butterfly. Men and women alike fall at his feet. Any of them he could choose to be his companion of an evening. He dresses well. Perhaps he wears a cape. He has money, money he throws around. Life is good to him and he, with cruel good looks and cruel intentions, is not unsparing in his treatment of life. Life, after all, always wanted a good kicking. It is merely his job to supply it, which he does with some relish.

The other brother, by contrast, is a squat and hellish thing. He discovers the new depths to which he has sunk daily in the mirror each morning. New eruptions on his skin. His teeth are abysmal, broken up rocks, craters. His body is a source of horror and fear and repulsion. No one wants to talk to him. He has no friends. He can do nothing right. And when he does anything at all, he gets in his brother’s way, or does something so socially embarrassing it’s a wonder he does not expire on the spot. Naturally, he has no money. And in this world where the currency of esteem is still fiat currency, he is nothing, he has nothing, he will be nothing. Dust returning to dust: that is all he is, and in a hurry.

We all feel like the latter character on occasion, often when we are young. What the novels and essays of Martin Amis say, if anything, is that the disgraceful, the grotesque, the unlucky – these are the real people. And those who seem put together and capable and able to find things ever so funny, they are liars, or they are so lucky they’re not in the same universe as us terrible specimens, us human-shaped wreckage, us indelible, improvable freaks who blot the face of the earth.

Some of us are below average height. Some of us move ungainly. Some of us cannot speak, cannot be in the same room, as the objects of our desires. Some of us have bad teeth that give us terrible trouble.

Yet the one thing an Amis novel generally includes is a slight comeuppance for the lucky ones, for the beautiful people, for the glamour boys. They get it in the end, as of course they do in real life. Can’t be lucky for ever! Amis practically shouts. Can’t be lucky every day! And of course this is true, although what consolation it really represents, I cannot say.

The Rachel Papers is about overcoming handicaps of appearance and attitude and somehow getting what you want, and then realising it’s meaningless, that there are no rewards in this game, there’s no victory. What is Dead Babies but a catalogue of human-imposed horrors? Other People proves what monsters those other people happily are. Night Train shows the bizarre breaking down of a genre. Like Time’s Arrow, it’s an interesting experiment, but not one I could recommend to anyone other than a real devotee. There are parts of Heavy Water I’d happily recommend. But what do they most effectively show: that life is cruel and unfair, that people are in their hearts bad, that evil and grotesquerie and the real depths to which people can sink are plainly visible on the surface, as visibly awful as John Self’s deflating physique and car-accident face in Money?

But that’s just talking about life. Life’s bad. We all know it. And there are other things worth a writer’s attention.

In fiction, Amis believes in universal damnation, the absolute final equality of misery and pain. On the page, however, Amis is an elitist, almost a eugenicist. Good writing is so deep it’s in the blood, the bones, the nerves. It can almost be bred. Amis believes in talent. Not quite capital ‘t’ talent. He believes in hierarchy and, to an extent, a stable order. There are some who are good writers, writers who matter, writers who should indeed have bothered. And there are others. People who don’t try, people who are careless and laboured and without style. And style is important. It’s not just the plasterer’s work, something you slap on afterwards to get the accolades. It matters very deeply. It has an almost moral character.

Bad writing is a moral sin. It is a waste of paper and ink and glue and it is also a waste of time. A writer who put out a bad book has hurt you incalculably. He has done you wrong. In a just world you’d get compensation; in a just world punishment would be severe.

Amis’s essays are as praising of success as they are damning of failure. And Amis is a very funny writer – extremely funny. Often very enjoyable to read. Success is wonderful. The early essay collections, and Experience and The War Against Cliché, are wonderful. So much of his work is worth your time.

But here’s the irony. Most of those writers Amis most admired, Roth, Bellow – early Updike. What do they show? Only that life is a cauldron. That happiness, no matter your moral foundation, is an illusion. That only by grasping the worst things you might imagine can you see life as it really is, in all its seething strangeness.

There is no hierarchy of the talents in hell. It would be foolish to believe in anything else.