Martin Amis is tired of London. He is emigrating to America again – this time for good, probably. In an interview with Ginny Dougary in last Saturday’s Times, Amis explained that his reasons are personal. There was a mournful tone to his answers, a sighing resignation that contrasts with the verve of those he gave at his zenith, such as these to the Paris Review.
Amis may be a balding controversialist, whose chutzpah and cocksure vanity graze the self-regarding. But if he is through with Britain, then that is our funeral because we would have lost the most singular stylist of the post-war era.
By his own admission, Amis is a ‘voice writer’. Plot, form and character are secondary to register. He is always striving to ‘stretch’ language, and the reader with it. He once told the Paris Review:
‘When I am stuck with a sentence that isn’t fully born, it isn’t yet there, I sometimes think, How would Dickens go at this sentence, how would Bellow or Nabokov go at this sentence? What you hope to emerge with is how you would go at that sentence, but you get a little shove in the back by thinking about writers you admire.
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