Martin Amis appeared on the Today programme yesterday morning and Newsnight yesterday evening promoting his new novel Lionel Asbo. Supposedly a creative and inventive thinker, the author used the same lines in each of the two interviews, which were more or less the same (“when you get to the age of sixty you realise this is not going to end well” etc). Not for the first time I thought the man was a fraud.
I have not read Lionel Asbo, but I have read Dead Babies which was so unpleasant it decided me against reading any more Martin Amis novels (Dead Babies also undermines his claim that he has not written any novels about the middle classes).
Normally with an author I have stopped reading, and a body of work I do not care about, no further comment would be necessary.
However Lionel Asbo has so intruded itself into the media that it is difficult to ignore. Especially as the subject matter seems to be an exercise in chav-hate (chav-hate as satire; chav-hate as sophisticated literary metaphor; chav-hate as hate – these impressions gained via the media). In that respect I feel I need to record my objection to this novel, insofar as I am allowed to object to a book I have not read and do not intend to read.
Part of the problem seems to be the unthinking way in which Martin Amis is accorded a high status by critics and commentators.
Is it unreasonable of me to suggest that Martin Amis only gets attention because his father was Kingsley Amis? Is it possible that without a famous literary father his books would sink without trace and the chav-hating novel Lionel Asbo would never have appeared in print? He condemns people who are “famous for being famous” but is this not the exact same category in which we need to place Martin Amis himself?
Isn’t Martin Amis just another over-privileged person from comfortable family wealth and an Oxbridge education whose mediocre output is taken seriously because of his father’s (deserved) literary reputation?
And is it not possible that Martin Amis realises he is an over-hyped over-privileged Oxbridge waster? That he hates himself for being an over-hyped over-privileged Oxbridge waster? And that he has sublimated his self-hate into hatred of the defenceless “chavs” (possibly suspecting that many of the “asbo” class he satirises would out-class him were they given the right educational opportunities and chances in life)?
I have not read Lionel Asbo, but I have read Dead Babies which was so unpleasant it decided me against reading any more Martin Amis novels (Dead Babies also undermines his claim that he has not written any novels about the middle classes).
Normally with an author I have stopped reading, and a body of work I do not care about, no further comment would be necessary.
However Lionel Asbo has so intruded itself into the media that it is difficult to ignore. Especially as the subject matter seems to be an exercise in chav-hate (chav-hate as satire; chav-hate as sophisticated literary metaphor; chav-hate as hate – these impressions gained via the media). In that respect I feel I need to record my objection to this novel, insofar as I am allowed to object to a book I have not read and do not intend to read.
Part of the problem seems to be the unthinking way in which Martin Amis is accorded a high status by critics and commentators.
Is it unreasonable of me to suggest that Martin Amis only gets attention because his father was Kingsley Amis? Is it possible that without a famous literary father his books would sink without trace and the chav-hating novel Lionel Asbo would never have appeared in print? He condemns people who are “famous for being famous” but is this not the exact same category in which we need to place Martin Amis himself?
Isn’t Martin Amis just another over-privileged person from comfortable family wealth and an Oxbridge education whose mediocre output is taken seriously because of his father’s (deserved) literary reputation?
And is it not possible that Martin Amis realises he is an over-hyped over-privileged Oxbridge waster? That he hates himself for being an over-hyped over-privileged Oxbridge waster? And that he has sublimated his self-hate into hatred of the defenceless “chavs” (possibly suspecting that many of the “asbo” class he satirises would out-class him were they given the right educational opportunities and chances in life)?
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