Understanding Martin Amis

Diedrick analyzes an increasing cultural conservatism in Amis’s work, rooted in Amis’s relationship with his father, the novelist Kingsley Amis. During his early career, the younger Amis opposed his father’s political and aesthetic conservatism. But his opposition has given way to frequent expressions of political and literary solidarity. Diedrick shows how this filial relationship continues to shape the son’s outlook and writing. Diedrick also identifies two complementary impulses in Amis’s work. The first is journalistic and satirical, expressed in an incisive wit aimed at contemporary social realities. The second is aesthetic, manifesting a Nabokovian love of verbal play and formal experimentation. Besides analyzing the ways Amis’s fiction forges the topical into the literary, Diedrick argues for the importance of Amis’s considerable journalistic oeuvre and provides close readings of his non-fiction collection and his uncollected essays and reviews.

Author Biography

James Diedrick is the Howard L. McGregor Professor of the Humanities at Albion College, where he specializes in British fiction. He collaborated with Martin Amis in compiling and editing Amis’s nonfiction collection The War Against Cliché Essays and Reviews, 1971-2000, which won the 2002 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. The coeditor of Depth of Field: Stanley Kubrick and the Uses of History, Diedrick lives in Albion, Michigan.