Adieu Amis

Martin Amis is emigrating to America, according to a wide-ranging interview in the Times (£) at the weekend. The reasons are primarily personal (being near his mother-in-law primarily among them, as well as best-bud Christopher Hitchens). But the interview reads more like a farewell piece. The forty-year battle of Amis vs the British establishment is all but over. As Ginny Dougary describes it:
 
‘It’s scarcely surprising that Amis, for all his courtesy…seems depressed. In print his answers are full of his usual brio and thoughtfulness but his delivery was uncharacteristically subdued. He talked into his chest and his body seemed etiolated with psychic fatigue. When I ask him about Hitchens, at one point he lets out a deep, strangled sigh, as though the question has mugged him.’
 
Amis has come back once before. A fanfare met his return from exile in Uruguay with House of Meetings a few years ago.