The War Against Cliché:Essays and Reviews 1971–2000
By Martin Amis. Talk Miramax, 521 pages, $35.

Martin Amis is a " stylist " — which could mean he’s a thoughtful writer who aspires to work from an extensive palette or else a prattling bore who refuses to play by the rules. Or maybe some combination of both. A good stylist can set people’s teeth on edge. For most writers, writing begins (for many, it ends) as an intricate form of mimicry, one’s bid to do one’s rendition of the shared language. Which is why a stylist can seem positively anti-social. In Amis’s case the urge to tap into a personal sense of the mot juste is so strong that commonplace phrasing dismays him. A few years back, around the time his novel London Fields appeared, he was being interviewed on the BBC’s South Bank show, and he expressed the distress he felt when writing the flat, straightforward sentence. When host Melvyn Bragg pointed out that such sentences are unavoidable, Amis sighed that yes, that’s true, but when he has to do them, a little part of him dies inside.

So The War Against Cliché is a grand but not unexpected title for a collection of Amis journalism from the past 30 years. The meat of the matter, and the larger part of this collection, consists of book reviews and fresh (in both senses of the word) takes on bits of the canon, but there are also ruminations on geopolitics, with an emphasis on nuclear war (he’s against it) as well as Elvis Presley, sex, and such odds and ends as chess, dice, and other " Obsessions and Curiosities. " Here all the style in the world can’t overcome the sense of showing off one’s well-roundedness — or so it seems to those of us who don’t want to read about dice or Margaret Thatcher or (especially) Elvis Presley, ever again, no matter how voluptuously the insights are couched or how springily the sentences are sprung.

But the lit stuff, the main attraction, is really good. His eviscerations are neat and clean. William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice is " a flapping, gobbling, squawking turkey " and " a thesaurus of florid commonplaces. " Anthony Burgess, though well worth reading, suffers from late-period bloat and his " recent prose is characterized by professional haste and a desire to be a stylist. The result is knotted, cadenced, bogus lustiness: every sentence, every phrase, is sure to contain some virile quirk or other. . . .  " And John Fowles’s Mantissa shames its author: " Stripped of the usual scaffolding (Fowles’s considerable gifts as a middlebrow story-teller, the protective glaze of his pedagogy), such talent as survives stands there naked and trembling in the cold. Few writers have ever blown the whistle on themselves so piercingly. "

Some writers elicit something more ambivalent. In a series of reviews of books by J. G. Ballard, he evolves from dismissal to grudging admiration. He’s cautiously simpático with Norman Mailer’s " felicities of syntax " but finds the author’s " old obsessions and drives " to be " impossibly dated: all that butch spiritual anarchism. . . . The idea of manhood is seen as a weird union of, say, Søren Kierkegaard and Oliver Reed " And like everybody else, he finds Elmore Leonard hugely entertaining, deciding with approval that he writes in " a kind of marijuana tense . . . creamy, wandering, weak-verbed. "

Philip Roth is problematic, peaking with The Counterlife but going all wrong with Sabbath’s Theater, where " the dangers of writing concertedly about sex are numerous and Roth skirts none of them. To his left, the Scylla of schlock; to his right the Charybdis of pornography. . . . You toil on, looking for the clean bits. " Nabokov is adored, naturally, and Bellow is loved, curiously. One would think that Amis would find the latter’s intellectual macho as dated as Mailer’s funkier sort, and his furrowed-browed heroes who mentally juggle German philosophy while pulling down the willing chicks a bit tiresome, but no. He even adores Ravelstein.

Writing of Nabokov’s collected letters, Amis says, " The book contains hardly a sentence that isn’t droll, delicate, precise and alerting. " Is that a case of blind love? Not really. Would it be an exaggeration to say the same thing about Amis’s collection? Only a little.

Issue Date: December 13-20, 2001

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