And he was routinely invoked as a successor to both. OK, so he had written at length about both Updike and Ballard before. “Marvellous creaminess”, “weird and sudden expansions” – how did he do that? “What was influential, though, was the marvellous creaminess of his prose, and the weird and sudden expansions of his imagery,” he continued. He was sui generis,” Amis enunciated with verbal italics. “Very few Ballardians (who are almost all male) were foolish enough to emulate him. This time we made it to over 1,000 words. We repeated the exercise barely three months later when another of his great heroes and friends, JG Ballard, died. Happily, he felt a duty to contribute to what Gore Vidal called “book chat”.Ī daring take on the Holocaust … Martin Amis at the Booker ceremony in 1991, holding a copy of Time’s Arrow – the only one of his books nominated for that award. And on Updike, the last postwar American literary giant? It had to be him. Time was tight and we were aiming high, but as with every major (and not so major) event at that time, Amis was the writer everyone was after. “There is only one value judgment in literature: time,” he insisted.īack in 2009, I called Amis – as editors all over the world would have been calling or emailing leading writers on Saturday night – to ask if he might write a tribute to the American novelist John Updike, who had just died. With a body of work spanning 50 years, he leaves 15 novels, two short-story collections, one memoir and seven book-length works of journalism and history. And when you go, maybe my afterlife, too, will come to an end, my afterlife of words.” So wrote Martin Amis in his heavily autobiographical final novel Inside Story in 2020. ‘Y ou’ll be reading me every now and then at least until about 2080, weather permitting.
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