Amis, Martin. (b. 1949).

L i f e

- son of Kingsley Amis

W o r k

- a novelist, short story writer, and literary critic

- concern: the absurdity of the post-modern condition, the excesses of late-capitalist Western society, and the grotesque of its caricatures

- style: a characteristic ‘terrible compulsive vividness’ (K. Amis), reinforced by his use of a violent slang

E a rl y  D e k a d e n t  F i c t i o n :

- satires on the modern-day metropolitan torpor and cultural trendiness

Dead Babies (1975):

- concerned with a house full of characters abusing various substances

- established a number of his characteristics: a mordant black humour, obsession with the zeitgeist (= German for ‘the spirit of the time’), authorial invention, defiant casualness, and characters subjected to sadistically humorous misfortunes and humiliations

Other People (1981):

- a fragmented and nightmarish psychological thriller

Einstein’s Monsters (1986):

- a collection of short stories on nuclear destruction

M a t u r e  F i c t i o n  M a s t e r p i e c e s :

Money: A Suicide Note (1984):

- a gross and excessive comedy

- concern: a successful director of commercials arrives to New York to shoot his first feature film, loses all his money, but is still able to laugh at himself

London Fields (1989):

- a dystopian novel in a Gothic manner

- concern: a woman on her way to the inevitable violent death

- set in a London underworld, in a not far away future in a collapsing world

Time’s Arrow: Or the Nature of the Offense (1991):

- an autobiography of a doctor who helped torture and murder Jews in the Nazi death camps during the Holocaust

- time runs backwards during the entire novel, including the actual dialogue being spoken backwards => due to the backward narration the doctor returns the dead to life

N o n - F i c t i o n :

The Moronic Inferno (1986):

- a collection of essays on contemporary America