Kingsley Amis hurled away Money when his son wrote himself into it
According to Martin Amis, his father Kingsley stopped reading Money and sent it flying at the exact point where a character called Martin Amis appears. The son went on to shape a generation of British writers, and after his death one critic described the last three decades of the 20th century as the Amis Era.
He was born in Oxford on 25 August 1949 to the novelist Kingsley Amis and Hilary Bardwell, and grew up largely in Swansea, where his father lectured. His schooling was patchy, taking in Mallorca, Swansea and Cambridgeshire before a London grammar school expelled him for truancy. After his parents divorced in 1965 he moved in with his father and stepmother, the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, who pointed him toward Jane Austen and a Brighton crammer. That same year he played John Thornton in the film of A High Wind in Jamaica. He went on to take a congratulatory first in English at Exeter College, Oxford.
From 1971 he reviewed science fiction for The Observer under the pen name Henry Tilney, a nod to Austen, and by 1972 had a junior post at The Times Literary Supplement. At 27 he became literary editor of the New Statesman and met Christopher Hitchens, who stayed his closest friend until dying in 2011. His debut, The Rachel Papers, appeared in 1973 and took the Somerset Maugham Award; in 1980 he committed to writing full time.
Money, published in 1984 with the subtitle A Suicide Note, is narrated by John Self, an advertising man lurching between London and New York, and reads as a satire of greed in the Thatcher years; Time later ranked it among the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005. London Fields, in 1989, set its trio of grotesques in a 1999 London facing climate catastrophe, and missed the Booker shortlist after two judges objected to its treatment of women. Time's Arrow, shortlisted in 1991, tells a Nazi camp doctor's life in reverse, even down to the dialogue.
Critics prized his ironic distance, ornate sentences and postmodern tricks. He drew on Saul Bellow and Vladimir Nabokov, and in turn influenced Will Self and Zadie Smith. His memoir Experience won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, he taught creative writing at the University of Manchester from 2007 until 2011, and in 2008 The Times placed him among the 50 greatest British writers since 1945. He died of oesophageal cancer at his home in Florida on 19 May 2023.
Source: Martin Amis
