The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America

Amis's father was a genius. Think about it for a minute and then consider what poor Martin has been up against. That said, Martin is a bit of a genius himself. One of the key signs if not proofs of genius is the talent to recognize one without shriveling up in jealousy. Amis here celebrates the genius of the great American writers, if not the genius of the great American people. Like many sensible Americans - John Adams, Mencken, Allen Bloom - Amis is not quite ready to embrace the moronic inferno (Saul Bellow's phrase), perhaps out of fear of being burned alive. He may be horrified, but he is amused. Amis's fiction is heavily influenced by American authors. His favorite, Saul Bellow, has had a profound influence on him. Amis here expresses his appreciation of Bellow, who became Amis's friend during the last years of his life, and of Updike, a very different sort of writer, but Amis can see genius and takes pleasure in it for its own sake. He is capable of an inexhaustible generosity when he recognizes a great mind at work. He reviews Mailer's flawed "Executioner's Song" - the Gary Gilmore "factional" novel, which Amis thinks is good for 300 pages and then sort of runs out of steam for another 700 pages. He writes, too, about other aspects of America, but he rarely says anything especially insightful, blah, blah, AIDS, blah, blah, blah. No, Amis has a good brain but, like many British authors, he thinks he is at his best being sardonic. The truth is that he writes better when he is in love. The appreciations of great writers are first class, the rest is filler.

"The good bits are so fortuitous, indeed (mere reflexes of a large and callous talent), and the no-good bits so monolithic, that the critic's role is properly reduced to one of helpless quotation." -Martin Amis in an essay on William Burroughs. I'm a fan of a good essay, and Martin Amis is a worthy essayist. This collection of essays is somewhat artificial in its construct, as the author tells us in his apologetic introduction, "I should have worker harder, but was quite hard work getting all this stuff together." He also warns that these are journalistic articles. In other words, written to please editors and tailored to the audiences of specific journals, "the hack and the whore have much in common: late nights, venal gregariousness, social drinking, a desire to please, simulated liveliness, dissimulated exhaustion- you keep having to do it when you don't feel like it." The theme uniting these essays is America, writings about Americans or about the culture or country itself, a place that we are told both frightens and excites the author. Although he conceded it is a hodgepodge of writings, an overall theme does emerge and unites the individual pieces. The author's overall prejudice is no secret, after all, the title of the book is "The Moronic Inferno." America, from the European perspective, seems to be extremist, raucous, juvenile and provincial. Too which I will refrain from replying with my loudest, most passive-aggressive: "Whatever." His reviews of American authors are never without links between their individual styles and a greater American ethos. American writing, like American society, is characterized by "excess, solipsism, enmity, paranoia and ambition." American writing is influenced by the fame and fortunes of its authors, to an extent not seen in England "where the boundaries between success and its opposite are often hard to establish." In a piece on Saul Bellow, he refers to "the American predilection for Big Novels as a vulgar neurosis- like the American predilection for big cars or big hamburgers." He comments on what he sees as uniquely American feuds, like the one between Vidal and Capote, "hatreds which often extend to litigation." Norman Mailer is the "cosseted superbrat of American letters," another victim of the American "vacuum of success," "unembarrassable to the last." The Jack Abbott story, is framed as a tragedy but "it is a farce too, an American rodeo of inverted callousness and pretension. Could this happen anywhere else? The world looks on fascinated, rubbing its eyes." His highest praise for an American writer goes to Gore Vidal, who he describes as "incorrigibly anti-American." He swoons "My, is Gore unpatriotic!" "I have never met an American so English in his Irony." But in the end, he takes Gore down as well for arguing that the family is an economic unit rather than a biological one, "the whole line sounds rather... American, does it not, tending to reduce argument to a babbl

Amis's book, The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America, in which he contemplates the U.S. from a distance, has never been more contemporary. He anticipates the force with which the "New Evangelists" (written in 1980) take over American. Although he may never have imagined how the movement would completely hijack American politics.His observations of Ronald Reagan (1979), echo ominously of Bush Jr. Reagan's lack of curiosity and general dullness seem to Amis mere aberrations, but much to America's detriment, they have recurred. Many young Americans think they are witnessing history for the first time, but we are doomed to repeat our past (forgive mangled misquote).This book of essays should be required reading for anyone thinking about what it means to be a citizen of the United States in the 21st century.

This is one of Martin Amis's funniest and most interesting books. The book/author reviews are incredibly good (you'll never read Mailer, Burroughs, Didion, with a completely straight face again), and the social commentary is very well delivered. As the title indicates, this book is highly critical of America, but it is a criticism tempered and somewhat confounded by Amis's complicated Ameriphilia: Amis's favorite writers are Americans (or at least expatriates who live in America), and Amis is very fond of claiming that he feels himself to be about half American. Yet America is the home and central breeding-ground of most of Amis's most hated evils: obscene wealth, unscrupulous capitalism (whitewashed in American euphamisms), the nuclear warfare industry, braindead religion, banal art & c. In both this book and the same-period novel Money (probably Amis's best), Amis posits pornography as America's economic and cultural nexus. Amis's tense relationship with America provides for some incredibly good journalism and essays. The style throughout is outstanding, and most of my memories of the book come back in complete phrases. Looking at the early stages of the AIDS epidemic: "'Spend-down' turns out to be one of those cutely hyphenated nightmares of American life. Practically stated, it means that the AIDS victim sells and spends everything before qualifying for Medicare. Duly pauperized..." On Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead: "The novel was impossibly mature. The immaturity was all to come....[later in the article] Mailer's essays from this period--'The Existential Hero,' 'The Philosophy of Hip,' and 'The White Negro'--sum up how Mailer was feeling about himself at the time." "Truman Capote lived the life of an American novelist in condensed form: He was a writer at 9, a drunk at 15, a celebrity at 21, a millionaire at 35, and dead at 59." Almost the whole book is bracingly well-written.Almost: strangely, only when Amis is writing about his favorite writer (and in a few very short dud pieces), Saul Bellow, does his style seem to go dead. I suppose there's so much adoration involved (adoration which, I have to admit, I don't understand), that he's reduced to helpless quotation.

A collection of journalism whose highlights include pieces on Claus and Sunny von Bulow, Bellow, Didion, Updike and Vonnegut. The cliche that less is more has led many critics to carp that Amis would write better books if he had a less obvious style, or spent less time polishing this or whatever. Well, this is his best writing. And it's good because it's so finely balanced. The style is always present, especially the risky throwaways. But the tone is all business, and the throwaways that survive are often genius. As a journalist, Amis writes close-to-perfect scene setters - witness the opening of his story on von Bulow, on living the "life of real money". Perhaps it's the relative shortness and density required for journalism that gives Inferno its charge. The book's far tighter than Amis's follow-up collection, Visiting Mrs Nabokov. London Fields may be Amis's best work, but moment-by-moment Inferno is even more satisfying.