Heavy Water: and Other Stories

I received an autographed copy of this book and was hesitant to read it. I am a big fan of Martin Amis and bent the spine and folded corners in it right away!Amis's flexability as a writer is evident in this book. The stories in this book are different from The Rachel Papers and Dead Babies. For those familiar with his work, it fits somewhere in the middle. For those not, this would be a good one to start.

Martin Amis is the greatest living writer. Heavy Water is par for the course. It, too, is awesome. 'Let Me Count The Times', 'Career Move' and the other duly noted stories are worth 3 or 4 readings. Before buying though, pick this book up, feel it, touch it, then walk up to the counter and ante up the change.

People talk about this Martin Amis as though he's the be-all and end-all of modern literature, like he's the Michael Jordan of fiction (only not retired). Well, guess what? They're right. It's hard to imagine anyone thinking they were truly in touch with literature today not having read Amis. He does push the envelope, the very limits of the form, dazzling with every page. But what, I would ask detractors, is wrong with that? Isn't that what great writers are supposed to do? And, this collection is no exception, showing Amis to be, for the most part, in top form. In fact, some of the pieces in the collection, such as the moving and funny 'State of England', in which a yob struggles to find his place in modern England, rank among his best work in any format. Not to mention, 'What Happened to Me on My Holiday', 'Coincidence of the Arts', and 'Janitor on Mars'. All great great great. Don't think, either, that Amis is all about the writerly pyrotechnics he so handily summons. As other reviewers have noted, Amis' writing lately is displaying a lot of, well, heart. There is empathy and compassion in these stories, mixed in with all the brilliance. Any one who thinks otherwise has probably not actually read them. You might even be a little moved by some of them, in between bouts of being dazzled. Imagine that. Highly recommended. You'll no doubt want more of Amis, so go from HW to 'Money', 'London Fields', 'The Information' and 'Times' Arrow'.

As he has descended from the lofty perch of the satirist, Martin Amis's fiction has become--dare I say it?--more soulful. The best stories in his new collection Heavy Water and Other Stories--"The State of England," "The Coincidence of the Arts," "What Happened to Me on My Holiday"--attest to the increasing range and resonance of his fiction. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the final story in Heavy Water, "What Happened to Me on My Holiday." Ironically, the emotional resonance of this intensely autobiographical tale is deepened by means of a linguistic device that may initially alienate many readers. The story is narrated by an eleven-year old boy, a fictional version of Amis's son Louis, whose summer holiday on Cape Cod is shattered by the death of his step-brother (Elias Fawcett, the son of Amis's first wife Antonia Philips, who died at seventeen).Amis represents Louis's response to this loss by means of a highly stylized phonetic speech (part American slang, part British phrasings) that is the verbal equivalent of the estrangement and stupefaction death leaves in its wake: "I dell id thiz way--in zargazdig Ameriganese--begaz I don'd wand id do be glear: do be all grizb and glear. There is thiz zdrange resizdanze. There is thiz zdrange resizdanze." Reading the story aloud to my 10 and 14-year old children, I felt Louis's grief as a physical presence--thick, hard, unyielding. Wordsworth's "still, sad music of humanity" sounds throughout "What Happened to Me on My Holiday," preserved in a meticulously crafted fugue-like structure in which the voices of other characters and nature itself contribute to the theme of loss. Louis plays with his younger brother and his four-year-old cousin, catching crabs and minnows, understanding all too well (as his cousin does not) that a dead sprat will never return to life. He sees in the natural world intimations of the mortality he is now struggling to understand, observing the "gloud of grey" he sees rising from a pond on the day he hears that his stepbrother has died back in London: "nat mizd [mist], nat vag [fog], but the grey haze of ziddies and of zdreeds [cities and streets] . . . and nothing was glear." Elias now inhabits the distant land of memory, where Louis imagines him hurrying about "with bags and bundles . . . jaggeds and hads [jackets and hats], gayadig, vestive [chaotic, festive]". Meanwhile, another of Louis's cousins goes into the pool without his arm-floats and must be rescued. At the end of his holiday, in the car on the way to the airport, the word "grey" returns again, like a haunting melody--the melody of mortality: "Greynezz is zeebing ubwards vram the band. And nothing is glear. And then zuddenly the grey brighdens, giving you a deeb thrab in the middle of your zgull." Now all the notes of the story converge, all the deaths come together, and Louis thinks of his brother: "one vine day you gan loob ub vram your billow and zee no brother i