Martin Amis, whose scathing, scholarly and darkly funny novels redefined British fiction in the 1980s and 1990s with their fierce celebration of tabloid culture and excess consumption, and whose personal life made himself tabloid fodder, died Friday at his Lake Worth home , Fla. He was 73.
His wife, writer Isabel Fonseca, said the cause was esophageal cancer — the same disease that killed his close friend and co-author Christopher Hitchens in 2011.
Mr. Amis has published 15 novels, one critically acclaimed memoir (“Experience” in 2000), nonfiction, and collections of essays and short stories. In his later work, he examined Stalin’s atrocities, the war on terror, and the legacy of the Holocaust.
He is best known for his so-called London trilogy of novels — Money: A Suicide Note (1985), London Fields (1990), and The Information (1995) — which, along with his memoirs, remain his most representative and most enduring admired work.
The tone of these novels was light, rough and profane. “What I’ve tried to do is create a high style to describe low things: the whole world of fast food, sex shows, nude magazines,” Mr. Amis said in a 1985 interview with the New York Times Book Review. “I’m often accused of focusing on the scathing, unwelcoming side of life in my books, but I feel like I’m being sentimental about it. Anyone who reads the tabloids is met with far greater horrors than I am describing.”
Mr. Amis’s literary heroes – he called them his “Twin Peaks” – were Vladimir Nabokov and Saul Bellow, and critics recognized in his work both Nabokov’s gift for wordplay and playfulness and Bellow’s exuberance and panache.
Like the narrator of Mr. Bellow’s novel The Actual, Mr. Amis was “a first-rate observer.”
“I think all writers are Martians,” he said in an interview with the Paris Review. “They come and say, ‘You haven’t seen this place properly.'”
father and son
Mr. Amis’ misanthropic wit sometimes made his voice resemble that of his father, Kingsley Amis. Kingsley, who died in 1995, was one of Britain’s working- and middle-class novelists of the 1950s, known as Angry Young Men, and is best known for the success of his comic masterpiece Lucky Jim (1954).
Father and son were close, but they disagreed on many things. Kingsley Amis drifted to the right with the rise of Margaret Thatcher; He once publicly described his son’s left-leaning political views as “howling nonsense.”
Their alleged rivalry attracted a great deal of interest in Britain. When the National Portrait Gallery invited father and son to pose together, Kingsley’s thin-skinned refusal made the front page of the Sunday Telegraph. He later regretted the excitement, said the younger Mr. Amis.
Being the child of a well-known writer was both a blessing and a curse for Mr. Amis. It helped get him known earlier than he might otherwise have made it. It made him familiar with the London greenhouse publishing world at an early age. It also helped make him a figure of fascination, resentment, and envy.
“I would be in a very different situation now if my father had been a teacher,” Mr Amis told the London-based Sunday Times in 2014. He added, “I was delegitimized by inheritance.” In the 1970s, people understood that I was a writer’s son. You are not being sympathetic at all now because it looks like nepotism.”
Mr. Amis’s talent was undeniable: he was the most dazzling stylist in post-war British literature. As well as his swagger and good looks like Byronic. He had well-documented connections with some of the most watched young women of his time. According to media reports, he wore velvet jackets, Cuban-heeled boots and tailored shirts. He stared ominously into the paparazzi’s lenses.
His boisterous lunches with friends and fellow writers such as Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes, Salman Rushdie, Clive James, James Fenton and Mr Hitchens were reported in the press and made other writers feel like they were on the outside looking in. He seemed to be having more fun than other people. His critics saw him less as a bad boy and more as a spoiled brat.
Mr. Amis’s fame peaked in the mid-1990s. One “scandal”, as described in English tabloids such as The Chron, followed the next.
In 1994 he dumped his longtime agent Pat Kavanagh, wife of his friend Mr Barnes, in favor of rival agent Andrew Wylie, dubbed ‘the Jackal’ by the British press, and a larger advance on a novel. The amount claimed by Mr. Amis, allegedly $794,500 (about $1.6 million today), was deemed unreasonable. The episode ended his friendship with Mr. Barnes, although a decade later Mr. Amis said they had reconciled.
Also in 1994, Mr Amis left his first wife, Antonia Phillips, for Mrs Fonseca, a younger woman who Mr Hitchens said in an interview was being pursued by Mr Rushdie, among others. The press covered the details, particularly about the expensive dental work Mr. Amis had, although he saw it as an acute medical necessity.
Mr. Amis attracted attention in later decades for the interviews he gave in connection with the publication of his novels. These tended to be far-reaching and opinionated; He fired from the hip. Often enough they got him into trouble.
In a 2006 interview, Mr Amis hinted that Britain’s Muslim community may have to “suffer until it puts its order in order” after British-born Muslims foiled a bombing of transatlantic flights departing from Heathrow Airport. He suggested that this could mean a restriction of freedoms.
The comments were condemned by many, including English literary critic Terry Eagleton, who called them “gut-wrenching” and said they resembled those of a “British National Party thug”. Mr Amis apologized, calling the comments “categorically wrong” and “stupid”.
During the 2000s and 2010s, Mr. Amis’ work became more political, historical and serious in tone. Critics often found these later books lacking, and reviews could be scathing.
He was confident about these attacks. He told an interviewer: “For every author there is a one-word narrative. For Hitchens it was “contrary”. For me it’s ‘decline’.”
A well-travelled youth
Martin Louis Amis was born on August 25, 1949 in Oxford, England. He had an older brother, Philip, and a younger sister, Sally, who died in 2000. His mother was Hilary A. Bardwell, the daughter of an official in the Department of Agriculture.
Due to his father’s academic travels following the success of Lucky Jim, Martin attended more than a dozen schools in the 1950s and 1960s. The constant need to make new friends made him funny, he said. The Amis family spent a year in Princeton, New Jersey, a stay that introduced Martin to America, for which he maintained a lifelong fascination.
The Amis household was permissive. Mr. Amis, in a 1990 interview with The New York Times Magazine, likened it to “something from the early updike, couples’ flirtations, and quite a lot of alcohol.” It would have gone unnoticed, he wrote in his memoir, if he was at five o’clock lit a cigarette under the Christmas tree.
At age 12, he was devastated by his parents’ divorce. He mostly read comics and was “fairly illiterate” until he was 17, as he put it. Then his stepmother, the writer Elizabeth Jane Howard, urged him to read Jane Austen. He pushed to be admitted to Exeter College, Oxford, where he graduated with honors in English in 1971.
After leaving Oxford, Mr Amis held a number of journalistic and literary jobs in London. In 1972 he became an assistant editor at The Times Literary Supplement and two years later its fiction and poetry editor. In 1975 he joined the editorial board of The New Statesman magazine and became its literary editor about a year later at the age of 27. It was there that his long friendship with Mr. Hitchens began.
In his 2010 memoir Hitch-22, Mr Hitchens recalled Mr Amis in the early years of their acquaintance and noted that the Rolling Stones came to mind when Clive James described Mr Amis as “a burly jagger”. designated. ”
“He was blonder than Jagger and actually a bit shorter,” Mr. Hitchens wrote, “but his sensual lower lip was a defining feature” and “you would always know when he had entered the room.”
Mr. Amis wrote his first novel, The Rachel Papers, published in England in 1973, at nights and weekends. He gave himself a year to complete it. If it hadn’t worked out, he might have considered an academic career, he said.
The Rachel Papers is autobiographical and one of his most traditional in form. It’s about a bright, sardonic, sexually obsessed young man (“erections, as we all know, come to the plate with teenagers”) and his girlfriend Rachel while he studies for his college exams.
The novel’s electrifying prose made Mr Amis an important young English writer and won the Somerset Maugham Award for writers under 30. In America, the novel was less successful. The Rachel Papers was panned in the New York Times book review by Grace Glueck, who called it “a crotch-and-armpit saga of late adolescence,” and in the Times newspaper by Anatole Broyard, who wrote, “Considering of the benefits He did it, Martin didn’t cover himself in glory.”
Mr. Amis followed The Rachel Papers with Dead Babies (1976), a black humor novel about drug use and sex among a group of young people in a country house in a single weekend, and Success, published in England in 1978, a Swift satire about sibling rivalry and foster brothers from different social backgrounds.
Mr. Amis’s novels found an immediate readership in Britain. In the United States, he was slower to gain acceptance. “Success” only found an American publisher in 1987.
Many Americans first heard the name Martin Amis because of a plagiarism scandal. In 1980, Mr. Amis accused Jacob Epstein – the son of Barbara Epstein, a founder of The New York Review of Books – of taking several passages from The Rachel Papers and inserting them into his own first novel, Wild Oats. Mr Amis wrote: “Epstein was not influenced by ‘The Rachel Papers’, he had left it flat next to his typewriter.” Mr Epstein later admitted to copying passages and apologized.
For almost three decades, Mr. Amis’s books went unreviewed in the NYRB, one of the most important intellectual organs in the English language.
“Money” and more success
In 1984, Mr. Amis married Ms. Phillips, a widowed philosophy teacher from Boston. They had two sons, Louis and Jacob. That year, Mr. Amis published Money, a novel that Time Magazine included in its list of the “100 Best English Language Novels From 1923 to the Present.”
“Money” is narrated by John Self, a commercial director who becomes involved in a film project. The self is a drunk, a hedonist and a sour observer of life. In a metafictional twist, Mr. Amis enrolled in “Money” as one of Self’s confidants. Moments like these in his novels, he said, made the more traditional-minded Kingsley Amis throw his son’s books across the room.
More than a decade of successful and critically acclaimed novels followed. London Fields is set amid fears of a climate-related apocalypse. The events of “Time’s Arrow” (1991) are reversed: an American doctor is getting younger and works in the medical department of Auschwitz. The Information (1995) is about two friends, both writers, who become antagonists after one becomes famous and rich.
Reviewing The Information in The Times, Michiko Kakutani wrote that “all the themes and stylistic experiments in Mr. Amis’ earlier fiction come together in a symphonic whole.” In The Washington Post, Jonathan Yardley called Mr. Amis “a force of his own.” of his generation now writing fiction in English,” adding, “There’s just no one like him.”
Following his divorce from Ms Phillips, Mr Amis married Ms Fonseca in 1998. Ms. Fonseca, a Uruguayan-American writer, is the author of Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey (1995). The couple had two daughters, Fernanda and Clio.
What could be described as the latter half of Mr. Amis’s career began around 2000. He still published occasional sharp novels about lecherous men and falling standards; These included Yellow Dog (2003), his worst-reviewed book, and Lionel Asbo: State of England (2012).
He also proved in the reviews and essays collected in The War Against Cliché (2001) that he was among the sharpest and most intelligent literary critics of his time. His reviews were an important part of his reputation.
But on the whole he turned to larger and deeper historical themes and subjects – mixed reviews.
In 2002, Mr. Amis published Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million, a study on the atrocities of the Stalin regime in the Soviet Union. The title alludes to Stalin’s nickname Koba. The word “laugh” in the subtitle refers to Mr. Amis’ morally bewildered realization that while Hitler and the Holocaust are taboo, many see fit to joke about Stalin and the Soviet Union.
In House of Meetings (2006), a novel about two brothers who live in a Soviet gulag in the last decade of Stalin rule and love the same woman, he revisits some of the themes and research from that book.
In 2008, Mr. Amis published The Second Plane, a collection of 12 non-fiction books and two short stories about the western world and terror. “Are you an Islamophobe?” He was asked by British newspaper The Independent while writing the book.
“Of course not,” he replied. “What I am is an anti-Islamism. Or rather, an anti-Islamist, because a “phobia” is an irrational fear, and there is nothing irrational about fearing people who say they want to kill you.” He added: “Anti-Islamism is not like anti-Semitism. There is a reason for that.”
Brooklynite
Mr. Amis and Ms. Fonseca moved to Brooklyn with their daughters in 2011 and bought a five-story brownstone in the trendy Cobble Hill neighborhood. They moved closer to Ms Fonseca’s parents, he said, and also to Mr Hitchens, who died in December of the same year. Mr. Amis gave a moving speech at the memorial service for Mr. Hitchens. They also had a home in Lake Worth, Florida, where Mr. Amis died.
In addition to Ms. Fonseca, Mr. Amis is survived by three daughters, Delilah Jeary, Fernanda Amis and Clio Amis; two sons, Louis and Jacob Amis; four grandchildren; and a brother, James Boyd.
Ms. Jeary was his daughter from a brief affair Mr. Amis had with artist Lamorna Seale in the 1970s. It wasn’t until she was 19 that she found out he was her father.
In 2008, Delilah Seale gave birth to a son, making Mr. Amis a grandfather. At the Hay Festival of Literature & Arts in Wales in the summer of 2010, Mr Amis wryly remarked: “Being a grandfather is like getting a telegram from the morgue.”
In America he liked to escape what he called “the constant hostility” of the English press. In Brooklyn, he became an almost asexual figure who was regularly spotted taking his daughters to school. No longer the upstart, Mr. Amis himself inspired a younger generation of writers, including Zadie Smith and Will Self.
As he got older, he stopped playing tennis, a sport he used to play daily and wrote about often. He also mostly stopped writing criticism. “Offending people in print is a vice of youth,” he said in an interview with The Independent. “Offending middle-aged people is unworthy and looks crazier the further into the twilight you go.”
He never won Britain’s most famous literary prize, the Booker Prize, although many of the novelists with whom he was associated – including Mr McEwan, Mr Rushdie and Mr Barnes – did win it. Mr. Amis was shortlisted for the award in 1991 for “Time’s Arrow” and was longlisted for “Yellow Dog” in 2003.
His last novel, Inside Story, published in 2020, was a “romanized autobiography” that addressed his friendship with Mr. Hitchens and his relationship with his father.
In his writings on Mr. Hitchens, Mr. Amis reveals “a depth of feeling and clarity of language wholly new to his work,” wrote Times critic Parul Sehgal in praising Inside Story. She added, “I’m writing in the spirit of the Americans.”
Mortality has long been a theme in Mr. Amis’ work. In The Information, he wrote, “Every morning we leave more in bed: certainty, strength, past loves.” And hair and skin: dead cells. This ancient rubble nonetheless was a step ahead of you and made its humorless arrangements of its own to rejoin the cosmos.”
He may have been speaking of himself in this novel when he wrote of one of the dueling authors: “He didn’t want to please his readers. He wanted to stretch them until they rang.”
Joshua Needelman contributed coverage.