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Subject: 'The War Against Cliche' review ...
Date: Sun, 31 Mar 2002 17:16:49 -0500
From: "Sandy P. Klein" <spklein52@hotmail.com>
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http://www.thetimes.co.uk/section/0,,1,00.html
March 30, 2002
The War Against Cliche
By Martin Amis
Vintage, ё8.99, 520pp
ISBN 0 099 42222 0
THERE▓S SOMETHING about Martin Amis the novelist;
too smart, too glib, too damn clever. But this
paperback collection of his essays and reviews
over a 30-year period is neither too smart nor too
glib, just damn clever.
He clings to the idealistic view that all writing
is a campaign against clichй and his Lit Crit
battle trail takes him from Elvis to Jane Austen,
Warhol to Wodehouse, as well as Larkin, Lowry . .
. almost anyone who has raised a pen or flaunted
an ego.
I would expect him to be contemptuous of P. G.
Wodehouse, instead he is rather affectionate:
⌠Right to the end, that green world of his never
began to lose its vernal brilliance.■ Elvis
Presley he dismisses as: ⌠It is hard to imagine a
character of more supercharged banality.■
He is ambivalent about Iris Murdoch. Were she to
slow down her output, he laments, ⌠she would begin
to find out how good she is■. And so it goes,
sharp, witty, perceptive. Malcolm Lowry: ⌠You
wonder how he ever wrote anything ≈ how he ever
signed a cheque or left a note for the milkman.■
James Joyce: ⌠He makes Beckett look pedestrian,
Lawrence look laconic, Nabokov look guileless.■
And Nabokov? Amis▓s copy of Lolita is filled with
notes, which he explains as ⌠gasps of continually
renewed surprise. I am running out of clean white
space.■ Though not, one suspects, out of words.
Richard Holledge
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