Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
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2019 April 19 • Friday

Martin Amis is only one person but he has for so long been received in so many different ways by so many different people for so many different reasons that you could make a case that are a few Martin Amises out there.

A recent collection of Martin Amis short non-fiction pieces, The Rub of Time: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump: Essays and Reportage, 1994–2017, is by the Martin Amis that I like best, the Martin Amis for whom I try to be a better reader than usual.

There's much here about literature and politics and there are some sections with the heading "Personal". For literature Amis offers further examinations of writers important to him. Nobody has ever written more usefully about Nabokov than Amis does, and one of Amis's many strengths as a reader and a critic is to dive into the swift currents of love and awe for genius without being swept away.

(Amis often deploys two comma-divided nouns within parentheses in what I believe to be a conscious display of Nabokov's influence, a sharing of a gift with readers who know their Lolita.)

Alas, while Amis's enthusiasm and insight for Nabokov are thrilling, I have never been able to follow him on his hikes up the mountains of Bellow and Roth. But I doggedly read every word he has to say on those subjects, because everything in this book is worth reading.

A few pieces on tennis from the 1990s stand out for not being the equal of everything else here. And this despite my having a considerable personal interest in the sport. Part of the problem might be that they were written for The New Yorker, a periodical that so favors a tone of weary condescension thatit might as well be the official house style.

But Amis's short, non-fiction pieces have gradually been circling something that's stated here almost explicitly, a kind of artistic and humanistic and intensely verbal morality.

Something like this: "The foundational literary principle is decorum, which means something like the opposite of its dictionary definition: 'behavior in keeping with good taste and propriety' (i.e., submission to an ovine consensus). In literature, decorum means the concurrence of style and content—together with a third element which I can only vaguely express as earning the right."

This is the crux. And the principles contained within it can be expanded to include just about anything.

Later, when Amis describes Saul Bellow's biographer Zachary Leader as "respectful but unintimidated, balanced but never anodyne", whose "literary criticism, like his prose, is unfailingly stylish and acute", he could be fairly describing himself.

One of the strongest pieces in this collection shows Amis the explorer making a foray into the porn film industry in California. It could so easily be a condescending item about the grotesqueries of various "others" and shock value in abundance on low hanging branches.

But Amis encounters a truly remarkable porn star, a woman he finds to be admirable and worthy of respect, moreso than most people described in this book. She describes herself as a prostitute, because she looked the word up in the dictionary and recognized her profession: exchanging sex for money.

At the end of his journey, however, Amis decides, "not quite. Prostitution is the oldest profession; and market-driven porno is, perhaps, the newest profession. You are more like a gladiator: a contemporary gladiator. Of course, the gladiators were slaves—but some of them won their freedom. And you, I think, will win yours".

This is a rallying cry not so much for the reader but for the subject; though I expect readers also to feel elevated and inspired by it.

And this is why these particular Amis books are so rewarding. He travels the world and considers people whose lives and existence I hadn't even had notions of. He can bring a sympathetic eye to a Trump rally, a movie star, a destitute, paralyzed mass-murderer in a South American slum.

But he's never swept away. Just as Nabokov's genius won't blind his critical vision, his understanding of the reasons people might commit horrible acts does not lead him to a placid acceptance of those actions.

We can disagree with Amis about anything. But I never doubt his effort, his sincerity and his honesty. He makes large swathes of the world and its denizens understandable because he makes himself understandable.

Does that sound like an easy thing to do? I don't think it is. We all stand to gain by trying it, though, and this is a dazzling result of that process.