Was it Tibor Fischer’s hatchet job on Yellow Dog? Was it the fallout from the Islamophobia row? Was it getting his teeth fixed? Who knows, but at some point in the last decade or so, Martin Amis fell out of fashion – hard. It’s closer to croquet than football, I grant you, but slagging him off is now a national sport.
Reading his books in public has become a bourgeois taboo. Flicking through one of his essay collections on the bus the other day, it didn’t take me long to figure out why my neighbour was eyeing me like I was a sex offender. The insults that get thrown his way, meanwhile, range from ‘not as good as his dad’ to the sort of stuff normally reserved for Holocaust deniers.
But the most consistent slur is that he’s ‘out-of-touch’ – and for a literary novelist and self-appointed chronicler of British culture, that’s kryptonite.
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