Martin Amis: he stamped his style over a generation of writers and readers

“The information is telling me –” wrote Martin Amis in his 1995 novel The Information. “The information is telling me to stop saying hi and to start saying bye.” It was an intimation of mortality typical of Amis, who died on Friday at the age of 73 – as interested in how stylishly the thought was expressed as in what it was expressing.

The Information was published when Amis was 45 years old: for almost half his life he was overwhelmingly interested in the end of life. In London Fields (1989), written in his 30s, he said that “Death gives us something to do. Because it’s a full-time job looking the other way.”

It was an odd preoccupation for a writer whose work, and whose success, was characterised by its liveliness and energy, its bright-eyed and pink-tongued vigour. Amis’s supercharged prose style, all heft and twang, raced past his contemporaries and left them standing.

Amis was “the crown prince of literary hipness” according to the New York Times and “the good-looking bad guy of late 20th-century Eng Lit” (Melvyn Bragg) who, some felt, was marked for success from birth. As the son of novelist Kingsley Amis, he joked, it was “just like taking over the family pub”.

Kingsley Amis and Martin Amis at the Guildhall in London for the 1991 Booker prize awards. Photograph: Rebecca Naden/PA

It’s true, Amis accepted, that “however bad” his first novel had been, “it probably would have been published out of mercenary curiosity”. But his debut, The Rachel Papers, published in 1973 when Amis was 24 years old, showed that Amis had the talent to support the promise, and its sales and acclaim (it won the Somerset Maugham prize, the first and last major prize Amis would win for his novels) proved he had the ear of a generation.

In his debut there were elements that would never leave Amis. There was the post-Dickensian naming of characters (“My name is Charles Highway, though you wouldn’t think it to look at me. It’s such a rangy, well-travelled, big-cocked name, and to look at I am none of these things”). There was the springy, comic prose, and the interest in sex and the opposite of sex. “Kleenex well away from the bed: having them actually on the bedside chair is tantamount to a poster reading ‘The big thing about me is that I wank a devil of a lot’.”

As he wrote his way through his 20s, Amis seemed happy to turn out more of these scabrous slices of comic fiction with a taste for the gruesome, where bad things happen to worse people – Dead Babies, Success – though he argued that complaining about “nastiness” in novels was an “extra-literary response”. The prose was all.

But even the more ambitious fourth novel Other People (1981) didn’t prepare us for the exceptional run through the rest of the 1980s and 90s – the period on which Amis’s legacy as a novelist rests – starting with 1984’s Money.

Amis’s supreme confidence delighted fans as much as it rubbed others up the wrong way

Money was a fat, funny masterpiece, a 400+-page bulldozer – part rant, part cry for help – of hectic riffs from movie producer and money man John Self (“I’m called John Self. But who isn’t?”). Self was “200 pounds of yob genes, booze, snout and fast food”, addicted to the 20th century, who spoke in semi-articulate slugs and farts but thought in purest Amis-isms. With Money, Amis, as Geoff Dyer put it, “transformed a voltage that originated in America” – slangy, garrulous, rhythmic: Bellow-ish and Roth-esque.

But the introduction of the author as a character in the book – a clear attempt by Amis to distance himself from Self’s worst behaviour – went too far for some readers, including his father Kingsley. “Breaking the rules, buggering about with the reader, drawing attention to himself,” Amis Sr called it.

This refusal to leave himself out of his fiction – stamping his style over every page was not enough – was an example of Amis’s supreme confidence that delighted fans as much as it rubbed others up the wrong way. And it was indicative of his weakness for the big and loud: “I’m not subtle; I like extremes,” he said in one interview. “Someone once said of my work … that I deal with banalities delivered with tremendous force,” adding (a little unconvincingly): “That’s fine by me.”

Amis rejected what he called “vow-of-poverty prose. No, give me the king in his counting-house.” This, combined with the length of his subsequent major works London Fields (1989) and The Information, meant that reading Amis at his best was an intoxicating, overwhelming experience – “someone is tickling my heart with delicate fingers”, wrote the narrator of London Fields – making the reader an enthralled witness to prose high on its own power.

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The Information, a brutal, brilliant comedy about a novelist who experiences the worst horror of all – his best friend becomes a bestselling author – was perhaps the ur-Amis text. It hit a jackpot of his motifs: twins, tennis, self-referentiality, height (“I have no complaints, any more, about five-feet-six”, wrote the “titch-in-chief”), yobs, time, men called Keith, and of course London, the city “like the insides of an old plug”. Amis was by now so famous (the first paperback of The Information had neither author nor title on the front cover) that the publication was news, too. The half-million-pound advance, the breakup with his longtime agent (and wife of his friend Julian Barnes) – even the work done on his famously terrible teeth – made headlines.

Indeed, the headlines often overshadowed the work, especially when Amis with each new book obligingly delivered a “foolish and mischievous” observation in the publicity rounds: proposing “euthanasia booths”, say, or declaring that “if I had a serious brain injury I might write a children’s book”. The darkest form of this impulse came when his comments about feeling an “urge”, post-7/7, to say “the Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order” led to accusations of Islamophobia.

At the same time, Amis had developed an appetite for his work to move beyond what Sameer Rahim called “mere brilliance” – to find a subject worthy of his super-evolved style, and move beyond what in the autobiographical Inside Story (2020) he called the “smirk novel … a novel of self-congratulation”. Sure, London Fields had ecological catastrophe (“gigawatt thunderstorms, multimegaton hurricanes”) and The Information had existential dread. But Amis had to go further – and won his only Booker shortlisting – for Time’s Arrow (1991), the story of the life of a Nazi war criminal told backwards. “When is the world going to start making sense? Yet it is out there. It is rushing toward me over the uneven ground.”

The best of Amis’s fiction in the new millennium followed this history-based approach: he returned to totalitarian regimes with the gulag romance House of Meetings (2006) and the Auschwitz-set The Zone of Interest (2014). Elsewhere, with sex comedy The Pregnant Widow (2010), yob satire Lionel Asbo (2012) and triptych of contorted masculinity Yellow Dog (2003), Amis’s late fiction pursued diminishing returns. “There comes a point when you think, it’s not like that any more,” he acknowledged. “A social change in the collective consciousness has happened and you feel you are not seeing it.”

If some had long felt that Amis was out of step – London Fields was blocked from the Booker shortlist by two of the judges, Maggie Gee and Helen McNeil, because of its portrayal of “murderee” Nicola Six – it was impossible to deny his influence on a generation of younger writers, from Zadie Smith (who considered London Fields a “direct” influence on White Teeth) to Nicola Barker, for whom he was “an inspiration. He is mettlesome, spunky, troublesome. He is the Big Man.” Irish novelist and critic Kevin Power said, “He showed me that literary language could be equal to the chaos and stupidity of contemporary life. That originality and energy still represents a standard I look for in prose and don’t often find.” (Terence Blacker satirised the shadow Amis cast over modern English fiction in his 2000 novel Kill Your Darlings, where the Amis-obsessed narrator tried to find out if his hero’s bedroom technique matched his prose: “the hectic, self-absorbed preening, the stuttering tough-guy swagger.”)

But for many, Amis’s legacy would lie not in his fiction, but in his non-fiction: the memoir Experience, the essays, reportage and interviews. None of the journalism was phoned-in or “written with the left hand”: you were just as likely to be stopped by a brilliant line there as you were in the novels. His review of Thomas Harris’s Hannibal (a “harpoon of unqualified kitsch”), his interview with a confused Truman Capote (“‘The name’s Tony, isn’t it?’ he croaked. ‘No, Martin,’ I said, trying to make Martin sound quite like Tony”) and his account of the death of his father (“two people go into that room and only one comes out”) may be read as long as the novels are.

That might have comforted him, the writer who believed the only thing that mattered was still being read after you’re gone. “You’ve got to stand the test of time, which is the only test there is.” But time was always a test for Amis, as those precocious intimations of mortality showed. As age accumulates, he wrote in The Pregnant Widow, your life thins out. “And you sometimes say to yourself: That went a bit quick. That went a bit quick.” And sometimes, he added, “you may want to put it more forcefully” – that is, more Amis-ly. “As in: OY!! THAT went a BIT FUCKING QUICK!!!”