Ink Chorus: The War Against Cliche!

Our book today is The War Against Cliche, the bottomlessly entertaining 2001 collection of many of the for-hire literary essays and book reviews the novelist Martin Amis wrote between 1971 and 2000, and taken as a snapshot of the working life of a semi-faineant freelancer (I’d wager that Amis actually only needed the paycheck – or, in the good old days, the pawnable review copy – for the very earliest of these pieces; once the novel-money was steadily coming in, he’d have been more sought-after than seeking), the book, in addition to being enormously re-readable, acts as a protracted comment on the marketplace. Amis reviews plenty of books for plenty of venues, but he’s exclusively a fiction-critic, the poor sot – no wonder he developed such a hang-dog expression so early.

When reviewing Anthony Burgess’s great big masterpiece Earthly Powers (for The New York Times Book Review in 1980), Amis, perhaps pressed for time, resorts to the old “there are two kinds” crutch, only he rescues it via his usual expedient of grabby prose:

There are two kinds of long novel. Long novels of the first kind are short novels that go on for a long time. Most long novels are this kind of long novel, especially in America – where writers routinely devastate acres of woodland for their spy thrillers, space operas, family sagas, and so on. Long novels of the second kind, on the other hand, are long because they have to be, earning their amplitude by the complexity of the demands they make on writer and reader alike.

And if we were to turn the gimmick around, we could make a case that there are two kinds of book-reviewers. Most book reviewers (especially if the numberless reviews on Amazon are factored in) are insurance assessors: they faithfully lay out the case for their clients, and then they objectively weigh the pros and cons. But a few book reviewers are scene-stealers: they lure you in with the promise of reviewing that new book you’re thinking of reading, but once they’ve got an audience in front of them, their inner ham takes over and they start performing. The first kind of book-reviewer is reliable and reliably dull; the second kind is more enjoyable but can be less useful (the best of the second kind make a conscientious effort to work a book review into their palavering, I should rather abashedly add – it needn’t all be limelight-hogging). Sometimes, for sternly monetary reasons, the second kind is forced to behave like the first kind (as a tattered book editor for the old Chicago Tribune book section used to scream, “No razzle-dazzle – or you can kiss your thirty bucks goodbye!”), but thanks to a stellar run of editors virtually everywhere he took his wares, Amis almost never had to do that. He was the second type, the scene-stealer, and proud of it.

Or maybe it just boils down to writers who have a lot to say. Certainly I get that impression when re-reading The War Against Cliche; I may know as an objective fact that the majority of these pieces were banged out in thirty minutes on the north slope of their deadlines, but not only does Amis himself incorporate every well-worn gimmick he knows in order to soften that impression (his favorite being the paragraph constructed around the conceit of him living with the book he’s reviewing, carrying it around everywhere, consulting it, really steeping himself in it; anyone who’s ever reviewed books for a living will hoot in open derision at this nonsense, but it definitely adds a certain Pride and Prejudice gentility to the proceedings when it’s done this smoothly), but the results – however achieved – are so uniformly catchy that you quickly stop caring how they were achieved. Take this little aside about the nuts and bolts of V. S. Pritchett’s prose, from a marvelous soup-to-nuts assessment Amis did for the London Review of Books in 1980:

Pritchett’s prose, too, is quirky and nostalgic in its devices. He continues to write in a style that has not noticed the regularizing, the tidying-up that accompanied the concerted push towards naturalism in the middle of the century. His punctuation is tangled, hectic and Victorian. He sometimes uses semi-colons the way Dickens did – as brackets; and he is a hardened exponent of the pause-for-breath comma that is being steadily driven out of English prose…

Or his backhand appreciation of the staggering prolixity of the aforementioned Burgess, talking about Little Wilson and Big God for the Observer in 1987: “The first volume of the Burgess autobiography is only 450 pages long. Accordingly, one would expect it to end when the author is about five.”

For the reviewing rank-and-file who don’t have London Fields royalty checks to look forward to, dutifully reviewing the latest damn Iris Murdoch novel year after year can be grindingly tiring and therefore antithetical to wit. But in Amis there are zingers aplenty; writing in The New Statesmani in 1971 about a new Coleridge biography, he quips, “Inside John Cornwell’s 400-page critical biography of Coleridge there is a 200-page uncritical one trying not nearly hard enough to get out,” for instance, and when he reviews Thomas Harris’s novel Hannibal for Talk in 1999, he immortally calls it a “harpoon of unqualified kitsch” and then turns his scorn on members of his own profession:

The publication of Hannibal back in June cut the ribbon on a festival of stupidity. In the US the critical consensus was no more than disgracefully lenient. In the UK, though, the reviews comprised a veritable dunciad. There were exceptions, most of them (significantly, I think) written by women. Elsewhere the book pages all rolled over for Dr Lecter … The eager gullibility felt sinisterly unanimous. Is this the next thing? Philistine hip? The New Inanity?

He can be maddeningly academic in some of his more posh pronouncements, as when, writing in the Observer in 1983 about A. N. Wilson’s new biography of Milton that the book is “by any standards, remarkably headstrong, beleaguered and quaint.” (Is there a need to open things up to any standards here? Is there a way to be un-remarkably headstrong, beleaguered or quaint?) But in piece after piece, he counter-balances this with the wail of the true believer. On the one hand, he can write about a reprint of Brideshead Revisited: “Waugh wrote Brideshead with great speed, unfamiliar excitement, and a deep conviction of its excellence. Lasting schlock, the really good bad book, cannot be written otherwise.” But on the other hand, he can confess with startling honesty to a basically moralistic frustration with the book:

There is something barefaced, even aggressive, in the programmatic way the novel arranges for its three most unregenerate characters – Sebastian, Lord Marchmain and Julia – to claim the highest spiritual honours. Sebastian, whose life has been impartially dedicated to shiftlessness, whimsy and drink, becomes a holy fool, shuffling among lepers and sleeping in his ‘monk’s cell’. Lord Marchmain, who likewise has done nothing in his seventy years but follow his own hackneyed inclinations, snatches salvation in the last seconds of his existence. ‘I’ve known worse cases make beautiful deaths,’ says the priest, rubbing his hands after Marchmain has jeered him from the sick room. And Julia …

And no matter how successful he is in other fields, and no matter how busy, he studiously retains the most essential and refreshing quality of any book-reviewer: his ability to be surprised. Among other things, it makes his 1995 review of Gore Vidal’s Palimpsest surely among the finest tributes that fine book ever received:

I thought I was wise to all his moves. I knew Vidal would have me frowning and nodding and smiling and smirking – with admiration, and exasperation, and scandlized dissent. I never dreamed Vidal would have me piping my eyes, and staring wanly out of the window, and emitting strange sighs (many of them frail and elderly in timber). Approaching seventy, Vidal now takes cognisance of the human heart, and reveals that he has one. Palimpsest is a tremendous read from start to finish. It is also a proud and serious and truthful book.

As readers of Stevereads will know, I dislike Martin Amis the novelist with a bored irritation that he has scarcely managed to dim in thirty years (a notable exception being The Zone of Interest). But Martin Amis the book critic I like more with every passing year. In fact, a much-enlarged new edition of The War Against Cliche is a book I’d actually buy.