John Haffenden
Domestic Burlesque
Interview: Martin Amis
Some journalists, it seems, like to see in Martin Amis the public bumptiousness they find in his father, as though they can hardly bear to believe in his filial attack of major literary talent. When I met him, he was sighing with disbelief at the shamelessly silly profile that appeared in a recent issue of Time Out.
He lives with his girlfriend Antonia, but runs a working pad – a flat in a solid and gabled Victorian edifice – in Westbourne Park, that outland of North Kensington, a crow’s mid-course between Wormwood Scrubs and Paddington. Outside the front door a small but thriving fig-tree obtrudes Martian-green tongues; upstairs, the flat has the appearance of having been burgled (‘I paid my cleaning lady £70, and she’s gone off on holiday’). An ‘Eye of the Tiger’ pinball machine rears in a corner of the kitchen; the curtainless sitting-room houses a wall of hardback novels, TV set, video, a scroll-armed sofa, the heavily and nearly revised typescript of a new story entitled ‘The Thin Sickness’, and here and in the study a transport of working books and papers (others bulk in the bidet). Local kids scream in a playground next door: ‘Riot lessons,’ my host jokes, and fetches me coffee and a generous drop of the hard stuff. He is kitted out for tennis, and after all too short a time, virtually in mid-sentence, rushes out to his car – a small, black, beaten-looking model – to meet the match suggested by his gear; so the interview takes two afternoons, not one.
His novels, with their witty treatment of a sick society, arouse as much hot critical debate as the personality fostered by the media. The Rachel Papers (1973; winner of the Somerset Maugham Award), Dead Babies (1975; reissued in paperback with the less satisfactory title Dark Secrets), Success (1978), Other People:
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
It is a triumph @arthistorynews and my review @Lit_Review is here!
In just thirteen years, George Villiers rose from plain squire to become the only duke in England and the most powerful politician in the land. Does a new biography finally unravel the secrets of his success?
John Adamson investigates.
John Adamson - Love Island with Ruffs
John Adamson: Love Island with Ruffs - The Scapegoat: The Brilliant Brief Life of the Duke of Buckingham by Lucy Hughes-Hallett
literaryreview.co.uk
During the 1930s, Winston Churchill retired to Chartwell, his Tudor-style country house in Kent, where he plotted a return to power.
Richard Vinen asks whether it’s time to rename the decade long regarded as Churchill’s ‘wilderness years’.
Richard Vinen - Croquet & Conspiracy
Richard Vinen: Croquet & Conspiracy - Churchill’s Citadel: Chartwell and the Gatherings Before the Storm by Katherine Carter
literaryreview.co.uk