The War Against Cliche: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000 - Softcover

Amis, Martin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0375727167 ISBN 13: 9780375727160

Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2002

Synopsis

Is there anything that Martin Amis can't write about? In this virtuosic, career-spanning collection he takes on James Joyce and Elvis Presley, Nabokov and English football, Jane Austen and Penthouse Forum, William Burroughs and Hillary Clinton. But above all, Amis is concerned with literature, and with the deadly cliches-not only of the pen, but of the mind and the heart.

In The War Against Cliché, Amis serves up fresh assessments of the classics and plucks neglected masterpieces off their dusty shelves. He tilts with Cervantes, Dickens and Milton, celebrates Bellow, Updike and Elmore Leonard, and deflates some of the most bloated reputations of the past three decades. On every page Amis writes with jaw-dropping felicity, wit, and a subversive brilliance that sheds new light on everything he touches.

About this title

Review

In Martin Amis's War Against Cliché, a selection of critical essays and reviews published between 1971 and 2000, he establishes himself as one of the fiercest critics and commentators on the literature and culture of the late 20th century. (He has already established himself as one of the most controversial and original novelists writing in English with novels such as Money and Time's Arrow). In his "Foreword" Amis ruefully admits that his earlier reviews reveal a rather humourless attitude towards the "Literature and Society" debate of the time. Yet this only adds to the fascination of the collection, as Amis gradually finds his critical voice in the 1980s, confirming his passionate belief that "all writing is a campaign against cliché". In the subsequent sections of the book this war leads to some wonderfully cutting and amusing responses to whatever crosses his path, from books on chess and nuclear proliferation to the novels of his hero Vladimir Nabokov and Cervantes' Don Quixote. Praise for his literary heroes is often fulsome--JG Ballard's High-Rise "is an intense and vivid bestiary, which lingers in the mind and chronically disquiets it"--but his literary wrath is also devastating in its incisiveness. Thomas Harris's Hannibal is dismissed as "a novel of such profound and virtuoso vulgarity", whilst John Fowles is attacked because "he sweetens the pill: but the pill was saccharine all along". Often frank in its reappraisals (Amis conceded to being too hard on Ballard's Crash when reviewing the film many years later), some of the best writing is reserved for his journalism on sex manuals, chess and his beloved football. War Against Cliché will provoke strong reactions, but that only seems to confirm, rather than deny the value of Amis' writing. --Jerry Brotton

Review

"Irresistible. . . . The man's a genius with words. . . . Whatever Amis has to say about a book or a writer seems just right--and lip smackingly phrased." --The Washington Post

"Brilliant prose. . . .[Amis] proselytizes for talent by demonstrating it, by doing it. . . . He is a master." -The New York Times Book Review

"Whatever the book, there is no one whose review of it you'd rather read than Amis's. His prose is always buzzing, so much so that he doesn't just review books, he rewrites them." --San Francisco Chronicle

"[Written] with intelligence and ardor and panache. . . . Speaks not just to a lifetime of reading but also to a fascination with individual writers mature." --The New York Times

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0375727167
• ISBN 13: 9780375727160
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 528