Martin Amis says that when a man turns 40 he stops saying “hi” and starts saying “bye”. So, as a 41-year-old, I now stand unequivocally on the farewell side of the tracks, putting my affairs gradually in order before the eventual arrival of the Grim Reaper – who in an Amis novel would probably be called Keith or Tel and speak an obscure London argot.
Amis himself is 60 today and I wonder how significant a milestone that is for the writer himself. For his father’s generation, 60 was a moment freighted with messages – what Martin calls “the Information” in his novel of the same name – about work, longevity, sex, prospective senility and so forth. For Amis fils and his coterie of friends, ex-friends and writers (mostly alumni of the New Statesman in the Seventies, such as Christopher Hitchens, Julian Barnes and James Fenton), the moment is less unarguably bleak, offering as it does, in 2009, the comforts of Pilates and good nutrition, the pleasures of middle-aged paternity, and a longer spell at the crease in which to determine the dictates of posterity.
Amis, who, for fairly obvious cradle-born reasons, thinks about such matters more than most writers, believes that posterity is all that counts.
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