Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #270866 in Books
• Published on: 2002-07-16
• Released on: 2002-07-16
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 528 pages

From Amazon.com
In Martin Amis's War Against Cliché, a selection of critical essays and reviews published between 1971 and 2000, he establishes himself as one of the fiercest critics and commentators on the literature and culture of the late 20th century. (He has already established himself as one of the most controversial and original novelists writing in English with novels such as Money and Time's Arrow.) In his foreword to the book Amis ruefully admits that his earlier reviews reveal a rather humorless attitude towards the "Literature and Society" debate of the time. Yet this only adds to the fascination of the collection, as Amis gradually finds his critical voice in the 1980s, confirming his passionate belief that "all writing is a campaign against cliché."

In the subsequent sections of the book, this war leads to some wonderfully cutting and amusing responses to whatever crosses his path, from books on chess and nuclear proliferation to Cervantes' Don Quixote and the novels of his hero Vladimir Nabokov. Praise for his literary heroes is often fulsome: J.G. Ballard's High-Rise "is an intense and vivid bestiary, which lingers in the mind and chronically disquiets it." But his literary wrath is also devastating in its incisiveness: Thomas Harris's Hannibal is dismissed as "a novel of such profound and virtuoso vulgarity," while John Fowles is attacked because "he sweetens the pill: but the pill was saccharine all along." Often frank in its reappraisals (Amis concedes to being too hard on Ballard's Crash when reviewing the film many years later), some of the best writing is reserved for his journalism on sex manuals, chess, and his beloved football. The War Against Cliché will provoke strong reactions, but that only seems to confirm, rather than deny, the value of Amis's writing. --Jerry Brotton, Amazon.co.uk

Books in Canada
Spending three or so weeks in Britain each year is more time than I ever need to become irritated, exasperated, and finally bored by English newspapers in all their sections—except for ‘Sports’ where the actual standard of play still gets reported. (If a match was rubbish, they do say so.) Otherwise, the broadsheets are much of a muchness and give columns of opinion precedence over reportage in a way that’s becoming overly-familiar to Canadian readers, thanks to the National Post. A gaggle of self-styled Popes (of the Catholic not the literary variety) pontificates on whatever they find wanting in their Little England or, worse, in their rivals’ opinions. The best that can be said is that these farts in suits express themselves in language that has been acquired as a mother tongue and not as something picked up from the telly and casually propagated by young women named whatever. The ‘Books’ sections are no better as Martin Amis makes plain in his foreword to The War Against Cliché, a collection of his essays and reviews that a duly diligent Professor James Diedrick has compiled from three decades worth of what Mordecai Richler liked to call "scribbling for life-sustaining cigar and cognac money." "Democratization has made one inalienable gain: equality of the sentiments . . . nobody’s feelings are more authentic, and thus more important, than anybody else’s. This is the new credo, the new privilege. It is a privilege much exercised in the contemporary book-review, whether on the Web or in the literary pages. The reviewer calmly tolerates the arrival of the new novel or slim volume, defensively settles into it, and then sees which way it rubs him up. The right way or the wrong way. The results of this contact form the data of the review, without any reference to the thing behind. And the thing behind, I am afraid, is talent, and the canon, and the body of knowledge we call literature."
When Martin Amis began a day job at the Times Literary Supplement in 1971, literary criticism was taken seriously. "Literature, we felt, was the core discipline; criticism explored and popularized the significance of that centrality, creating a space around literature and thereby further exalting it." The intellectual climate has devolved through post-modernism to a post-post-modernist lab-coated "valorization . . . of the (justly) neglected", but Amis knows that literature will resist leveling by herd opinions and social anxieties and will revert to hierarchy: in the meantime, he has gone on, more or less as he began, in a "campaign against cliché. Not just clichés of the pen but clichés of the mind and clichés of the heart."
Those who have followed his journalistic career over the past thirty years (through the New Statesman, the Guardian, the Independent on Sunday and across to the Atlantic Monthly, the New Yorker and other American destinations) know that Amis values "freshness, energy, and reverberation of voice" and "dispraises" their opposites with a capacity for insult that has mellowed with time. "Enjoying being insulting is a youthful corruption of power. You lose your taste for it when you realize how hard people try, how much they mind, and how long they remember." Or, maybe, when you realize how liable to prosecution you are on the same charges? Much that the younger Amis says against Philip Roth ("the perils of having an over-literary mind," "a wooden fidelity to the inconsequential") or Norman Mailer ("this pampered superbrat," "not capable of broad comic design") or Anthony Burgess ("plenty of hollow places beneath . . . busy verbal surface") can be applied as readily to the middle-aged novelist Amis has now become. I remember chortling much-too-loudly in my local library at the fun Amis was having at the expense of our literary elders back in the seventies and early eighties. Rereading these pieces, my humour intact, I still find his deft turning of phrases and droll sentences risible but notice now that Amis was much too busy trying much too hard to win his father’s favour (something his first novels failed to do) by devoting most of his energies to sending-up plots (that require little parody) and drawing attention to infelicities of English usage in the predictably aggressive ways that Kingsley Amis was bound to appreciate. Mind, he didn’t have as much to work against as we then thought: does anybody read Iris Murdoch, Angus Wilson, C.P. Snow, John Fowles and D.M. Thomas any longer? Or even William Burroughs? They were bound to collapse under their own pseudo-weightiness eventually but Amis did give them all a few well-placed kicks that shortened their half-lives. Casting a sideways glance at Murdoch’s The Philosopher’s Pupil, ("It would be futile to summarize the plot. Life is too short. The book is too long."), Amis writes it off brilliantly (and justly) as "a long course of methadone"—a compulsive read that never delivers the kick of the real thing. With a nod to Nabokov, he notes, "the fit reader does not read with his brain or his heart but with his back, waiting for ‘the telltale tingle between the shoulder-blades.’"
When the younger Amis does encounter something tingly, Anthony Burgess’s Earthly Powers, he rises to it grudgingly: Burgess’s theological irony is rightly seen as superior to Graham Greene’s and Evelyn Waugh’s but Amis undercuts the good work he does with the sort of remark that pretentious first year undergraduates make, "As a form, the long novel is inevitably flawed and approximate." Inevitably flawed? Says who? If so, why did Amis then go on to perpetrate The Information, knowing a priori that it couldn’t work? When he encounters something absolutely first rate, Burgess’s memoir and masterpiece, Little Wilson and Big God, all Amis can do is nervously misbehave, turn town gossip, and "connect Burgess’s erotic prowess with his literary heft." The envy he feels in the presence of Burgess’s insatiability should have alerted him to more than the continuing discomfort London publishers find in this book: Little Wilson and Big God is long out-of-print.
The War Against Cliché works against memory in another way. Even aided by a full pad of post-it notes that has my copy as bristled as a hedgehog, it’s difficult to keep score of Amis’s most successful sorties in his campaign against stock responses and off-the-rack anxieties—he and Professor Diedrick have edited just too many distractions into the mix. Divided topically rather than chronologically, this book’s eleven sections include some individual writers (Philip Larkin, Vladimir Nabokov, John Updike), some groups of writers (English, American, World), some great books, canonical works, obsessions (chess, football, poker) and entertainment (crime fiction and masculinity). A projected twelfth section (literature and society) with pieces on F.R. Leavis and Lionel Trilling, Ian Robinson and Denis Donoghue was suppressed as too earnest. More’s the pity. There’s something quite endearing about the earnestness Amis does allow to appear when he reviews literary biographies of Coleridge, Milton, Donne and Dickens. Given his general intention to avoid rubbing up against books as others do, and given the sort of reader this book is likely to attract, did Amis really need to include what he has to say about Elvis, as seen by his kinfolk, or Hillary Clinton, as written into existence by her own hand?
Unlike his great heroes, Martin Amis has little of the ethical rigour of Saul Bellow, a narrower range of classical and musical allusion than James Joyce, none of Nabokov’s scientific discipline and none of Updike’s theological avocations. What he does have is the ability to measure books in terms of "talent, and the canon, and the body of knowledge we call literature." It isn’t enough to simply write off Leavis as "humourless" as he does on half a dozen occasions without falling into a cliché of the mind: Amis knows (or ought to know) that a man who endured what Leavis endured as an ambulance attendant in the First War and then went on to achieve what Leavis achieved in getting the English novel taken seriously as a subject worthy of university study against strong opposition (in the library of Leavis’s own Downing College at Cambridge in the 1930s there was only one novel, New Grub Street, which was admitted as a historical document) should be met with more than a cliché of the heart. Would Amis really rather have us scrutinize what he has to say about poker ("My big poker period was in my teens") or The Guinness Book of Records ("the remarkable believe-it-or-else compulsion of this durable series")? Evidently. Shame on him.
Taking easy money from frivolous editors and using the cosmopolitan daubs as makeweights to bulk this book up over five hundred pages so that it won’t look quite so insubstantial when placed alongside John Updike’s Picked-Up Pieces is more easily forgiven, as these things go, than going soft on the central issues of talent, canon and literary background posed by Updike. Amis simply waves the soiled bed sheets and surrenders too much judgement when he writes of the Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom quartet: "It is as if a double-sized Ulysses had been narrated, not by Stephen, Bloom and Molly, but by one of the surlier underbouncers at Kiernan’s Bar." That’s the sort of silly formulation that comes from drinking Guinness while reading Northrop Frye, two activities of which Professor Frye was himself innocent, I believe. It’s a clever-clever judgement that doesn’t hold up to even a fifteen minute close reading of the texts. Its hyper-inflationary rhetoric is meant to please the subject of the review and polish the reviewer’s reputation, but it leaves the reader in a muddle. Amis sees far more deeply into Updike when, a year earlier (1989), he writes of Self-Consciousness, "Updike is above all an embarrassing writer: it is his recurrent weakness, and his unifying strength. He is always successfully taking you to where you don’t quite care to follow." Exactly. That can’t be put better and if the logic of that perception had been applied to Rabbit at Rest, it would have been some review!
Martin Amis has to be held to a higher standard not just because of the title he gives his book and the claims he makes in the foreword but because he actually does succeed in "creating a space around literature and thereby further exalting it" when moved by passion and pleasure. His judgement of Philip Larkin and his biographer in "The Ending: Don Juan in Hull" first appeared in the New Yorker in July 1993 and is as fresh and moving today as it was then. In twenty pages, Amis does more than most critics can manage in the course of a book to separate the art from the life, and establish its glories, while eliciting genuine regard for the pitiable condition of the artist. It’s a splendid achievement. Alongside it, the most valuable pieces in this collection are the revaluations of Joyce’s Ulysses, Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March and Nabokov’s Lolita that first appeared in the Atlantic Monthly. These each do what literary criticism is meant to do and set off a creative quarrel with the reader.
Martin Amis is a writer’s writer. He’s so consumed by the question of what it is to be a novelist that this reader often wonders if anyone other than family, friends, and a legion of writers, would-be writers and failed writers ever reads him. There’s certainly far too much pain and too little pleasure in most of his invented characters to make them come alive as anything more than cartoons to be manipulated through various technical exercises. But what a virtuoso Amis is in his journalism! Because he is always victorious over dullness in his reviews, The War Against Cliché ought to be enshrined on every reviewer’s desk. The more you study Amis, review by review, the more you’ll be gob-smacked by how much of an author’s vision, cultural tradition, formal innovation, texture of prose and density of humour (or their absences) he manages to squeeze into the space available. He rarely makes the fundamental cognitive mistake that bedights and bedevils so many reviewers of fiction and poetry in this country: a university syllabus is not a canon. A canon is what writers and readers want to keep alive and go on reading. A canon (and whatever might be considered for inclusion) is not to be judged by its teachability, its conformity to classroom dicta and learned responses. If it was, where would Ulysses be? Or Lolita? Or Don Quixote?
Reviewing first time writers poses special problems as does reviewing direct competitors and Amis sidesteps both. If you want a good recent assessment of the current state of the novel in England, you have to turn to A.S. Byatt’s On Histories and Stories (Harvard University Press). If you want to know why and how F.R. Leavis is important in the formation of literary judgements, you really must pick up Ian Robinson’s The English Prophets (Edgeways Books). And if you aren’t a reviewer and don’t already know Martin Amis’s work, you should begin by reading Experience, his memoir of father, family, the writing life, and dentistry. It’s there that he picks his best fights against his worthiest opponents in his unending war against cliché. --T.F. Rigelhof (Books in Canada)

From Library Journal
Amis's critiques cover wide-ranging topics and are well worth reading, particularly when the erudition on display is liberated by humor, regarding not only the subject under examination but often the examiner himself. Amis, best known for his novels (e.g., London Fields, The Information), recognizes an authorial foible, then pounces on it not without grace, not without vigor. His evaluations are lively, scholarly, and, on rare occasion, numbing though probably less so for those few who know as much about literature as Amis. Requiring less literary background are his essays on poker or chess, Elvis Presley, or the sexual allure of Margaret Thatcher. The Amis view is at its best or at least at its most readable when he is chatting up such standards as Don Quixote, Pride and Prejudice, Ulysses, and Lolita. His lengthy commentary on Nabokov, Larkin, and Updike certainly informs, as do shorter pieces on Roth, Burroughs, Capote, Burgess, and Vidal. To paraphrase Vidal, the best writing allows the reader to participate. Without question, Amis appreciates this concept and puts it into practice in his most accomplished criticisms. Recommended for academic libraries. Robert L. Kelly, Fort Wayne Community Schs., IN
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Excellent
perhaps the funniest, most acutely perceptive book i've ever read. Amis is excellent on style, wide-ranging in scope (early on, we have the unforgettable depiction of the new man, nappy in one hand, pack of tarot cards in the other), and amusingly critical of his youthful self (he lambasted a new collection of Coleridge's work without bothering to thoroughly acquaint himself with its contents).

i didn't agree with all of his 'findings'. while Amis makes an excellent case for the undeniable stylistic mastery of Bellow's 'The Adventures of Augie March', he doesn't acknowledge the rambling nature of the book, the great lists of characters that are wheeled on and off all the time so that the reader struggles to remember anyone but the narrator and his brother, the boring avuncular tone.

overall - leaves other literary critics fumbling with their trainers in the starting blocks while he's already run the race, picked up the medal, and is taking his shower in the changing rooms.

Amis, light of my life, fire of my mind
Martin Amis doesn't write for you. He doesn't write for himself. He doesn't write for his wife, or his kids. He doesn't even write for his publisher, or the various periodicals to which he contributes. Martin Amis writes for Vladimir Nabokov. Well, maybe for Kingsley, too, but mostly for Nabokov. You can see it in every labyrinthine sentence, in the complex prose, in the wit, the intellect, and the iconoclastic tendencies that reign over this stunning collection of literary reviews, taken from the last 30 years of Amis' writing career.

Okay, he's not only writing for Nabokov. So who is Amis' ideal reader? One who has an "imagination, memory, a dictionary, and some artistic sense." Amis searches to challenge you, but also to entertain. And that passing remark about the dictionary was not made in jest. Amis is the one author whose logocentrism forces me to the dictionary with pleasure. Nearly every paragraph.

The collection's title comes from Amis' belief that "all writing is a campaign against cliche", not just in a literary sense, but also in a human sense. He takes his role in this campaign very seriously, as an author, stating that we should expect artists "to stand as critics not just of their particular milieu but of their society, and of their age". Even so, he regrets the advent of the artist-critic, i.e. novelists 'feeling' their way through criticism, rather than using the tools of theory to review literature. Instead, Amis, who could easily have traded on his name and fallen in step with these artist-critics, uses a background of unabashed joy in the face of literary theory to give his reviews weight.

If the above makes the collection sound pedantic and tiresome, don't worry. It isn't. Amis may be serious about his job, but he sure can have some fun. In a piece on Hillary Clinton's child-rearing instructional, Amis grumbles about her quaint but queasy neologisms: "'Stomachachy'... is not a campaign stop on the way to Poughkeepsie but Hillary's epithet for a pain in the gut." Later, in a piece on soccer (ahem, football), he begins cheekily: "Readers... who like football probably like football so much that, having begun the present article, they will be obliged to finish it." The rest of the paragraph is spent teasing the reader, threatening to never get to the meat of the article, with full knowledge that the reader isn't going anywhere.

In discussing why Cyril Connolly only wrote one novel ("The Rock Pool"), Amis notes that Connolly was "ruined by too much fiction-reviewing: he knew all the larks, and he knew them all too well." Amis, prolific novelist and critic, doesn't fall into this trap. He is able to keep his fiction out of his reviewing. I'm thankful, because I love Amis' fiction. But his reviewing is still loaded with the kind of samurai imagery that Amis is so adept at. Discussing Elmore Leonard's penchant for rejecting the imperfect/present/historic tense, in favour of "a kind of marijuana tense, ... creamy, wandering, weak-verbed." I just loved that when I ran across it: "the marijuana tense". Amis' reviews are alive, vital, and vivid.

They are also quite obsessive; his obsessions can be seen quite clearly. Repeatedly, he references: the affective fallacy, the intentional fallacy, the artist manque; his pet peeves concerning writers, which include their lack of talent, their inability to control syntax, their ignorant repetition, and, of course, their use of cliches; his own canon of literary greatness, against which all is to be measured, that includes Saul Bellow, John Updike (with reservations at times), Philip Larkin, J.G. Ballard, and literature's "'complete' player" Vladimir Nabokov.

The Nabokov obsession may one day ruin Amis. He just can't get the great Russian writer out of his head. A quick check of the index shows that references to Nabokov appear on 51(!) of the book's 490 pages. He notes on one hand that the word 'Kafkaesque' is losing meaning due to overuse, but with the other hand he does the same thing to the word 'Nabokovian'. It should be no surprise, then, that the collection's last and longest piece is a deconstruction of "Lolita" so brilliant that it almost made me want to read that distressing book once more.

I adore Amis. His writing is challenging and thought-provoking, while providing a portal to the world of this curmudgeonly, crusty, snobby author (those are all compliments, I assure you). He's opinionated, and more than able to draft persuasive arguments to prove his opinions correct. And last, but certainly not least, he loves writers and he loves readers. If you are a serious member of either club, I'll bet that you'll love Amis too.

3.4 Stars, but should be soooo much better
Martin Amis is the son of the late Kingsley Amis. Half of England's literary critics consider Amis pere to be one of the greatest English novelists of the last half of the previous century. The other half don't disagree, they just find that fact enormously depressing. Martin Amis is the author of several novels which, highly influenced by Nabokov, are very funny, extremely mordant and much better than his father's. Martin Amis is also a skillful and intelligent and amusing journalist, as well as an accomplished memoirist. So surely this collection of literary criticism and essays should belong on the same high shelves with Christopher Hitchens' For the Sake of Argument, Dwight Macdonald's Against the American Grain, Alexander Cockburn's Corruptions of Empire, Conor Cruise O'Brien's Writers and Politics, Alan Bennett's Writing Home, James Wood's The Broken Estate or even Tom Paulin's Ireland and the English Crisis.

Yet there is something a bit off about collection. We start off with a collection of reviews on masculinity, looking at Iron John, Hillary Clinton, Nuclear War and Pornography. Then it's on to a collection of reviews of English writers, then to an extended defence of his father's closest friend, the poet Philip Larkin. We proceed to reviews of more canonical writers, then a review of popular novels, then a whole section on Vladimir Nabokov. We then go on to a section on American writers, a section labelled "obsessions and curiosities", a whole section devoted to John Updike, another section that is mostly about V.S. Naipaul and then five concluding essays on great novels. Surely there is much for everyone to enjoy.

It's not that Amis isn't amusing. Consider this passage on Michael Crichton's The Lost World: "Out there, beyond the foliage, you see herds of cliches, roaming free. You will listen in 'stunned silence' to an 'unearthly cry' or a 'deafening roar'. Raptors are 'rapacious'. Reptiles are 'reptilian'. Pain is 'searing'." Or consider this comment on George Steiner's book on the 1972 Fisher-Spassky match: "Yet one of the more attractive things about Steiner's new book is how refreshingly unSteineresque it is...Page after page goes by without any reference to Auschwitz." All this is well and good, but something about is palls. Perhaps there is something too easy in making fun about a book as unrelievedly wretched as Richard Rhodes' book on sex life. One can't help by comparing it to Katha Pollitt's review of the same book in the New Republic to note that something is off.

Sometimes Amis' attacks suffer from the passage of time. Did people really think two decades ago that John Fowles was one of the great living English novelists, and that D.M. Thomas was one of the most promising writers around? Good of Amis to recognize that wasn't true, but his criticisms lack the stylistic brilliance and moral indignation that marks Dwight Macdonald's polemic against James Gould Cozzens. And what is the point of writing four reviews about Iris Murdoch if at the end she is not perforated like a pincushion, but leaves her to write still more novels? Amis despises bad writing but he is kinder than his hero Nabokov to the offenders. But one does not sense a genuine sense of outrage at the sight of a literature slowly poisoned by the middlebrow and the bland. Karl Kraus's writings were once praised to be like "public executions." Amis' own comments are surprisingly genteel in contrast.

Other thoughts? There is a review of an anthology of modern humor that promises to be very cruel against the poor editor, the late Mordecai Richeler. But by the end of it Amis' review seems to have turned into an example of what he is criticizing. And one of his examples of bad humour, a passage by Stephen Leacock, undermines everything by showing signs of being amusing. The defence of Larkin does benefit from the fact that saying Larkin was one the last half-century's great English poets is less depressing that saying Kingsley Amis was one of the last-half century's great English novelists. But it is striking that Larkin and Amis sr were among the last people on earth who would look beyond the ungenerous, self-pitying and spiteful surface and praise the poetry. Can't imagine them being so nice about Brecht and Neruda, but then Brecht and Neruda had the misfortune of being dedicated Communist and superior poets. And I think Amis is quite wrong to think Martin Seymour-Smith unusually exotic and esoteric to consider Pirandello the last century's greatest writer of short stories. The praise for Ulysses does remind us of Joyce's considerable talent for the striking image. But literature is more than a series of brilliant metaphors and striking images. Amis does not really confront those like Dreiser, but also Dostoyevsky, whose style does not match Nabokov's peerless sheen but whose achievement is so much greater. At least Martin Amis appreciates Kafka, which is more than you can say for his father.