How Great Is Martin Amis?

Assessing the legacy of a comic master who grasps for seriousness

- By James Parker

Posterity, you bitch. What are you going to say about Martin Amis? When the winnowing’s done, and the windbags and the mediocrities have all been blown out the side of the thresher, what will your verdict be? Will you hail him as a Bellovian/ DeLillovian seer-novelist, bestriding the millennium with his mega-thoughts? Will you shake your head and say that he was a great comic talent misused, a prancing master wit who tripped himself up on the winding stair, the stony spiral, to seriousness and significance? Or will you be a bit confused about him, as we are, here in the clumsy, unfiltered present?

Inside Story is the most confusing of the 14 novels, two short-story collections, one memoir, and seven works of journalism and history that Amis, 71, has written. It’s a summit of confusion— appropriately enough because, he shares with us rather airily, it’s his last big book. Or his last “full-length fiction.” Listen to this: “There are a good few short stories I mean to get done (most of them about race in America), and I have in mind a third fiction about the Third Reich—a modest novella.” Is he teasing us? Taking the piss, as we say in England? Or is that a genuine flash of his still-opulent literary ambition? I’ve read all his books, I’ve loved most of them—I know him, tonally, pretty well— and I have no idea. This is sometimes the way with the older Amis.