In the days since Martin Amis died at 73 of oesophageal cancer, the papers have been full of tributes. Mostly by men, mostly admiring, and clearly envious of Mart’s gutsy, mad way with words and his lusty, hard-living literary life, full of the cigarettes that killed him and more booze and women than today’s young literary chaps could ever hope to get anywhere near.
Amis was, it seems clear in memoriam, a man’s writer.
Except that he wasn’t. At least, he wasn’t for young women like me. Primed already by the total horniness of Philip Roth’s narrators, and particularly Alexander Portnoy of Portnoy’s Complaint, I dove happily into the fervid folds of Mart’s pages, mentally pinched and groped by his incessant, entirely unforgiving imagery of sexual conquest. Despite being a lady reader, I was amused to no end, but also interested by the harshness of Charles Highway’s machinations in The Rachel Papers and the narrator’s keen eye for Nicola Six’s beauty and power in London Fields.
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