The closer these characters get to Amis herself – most recently in the flashbacks to “The Pregnant Widow” and “Inside Story” – the more overt this generational mapping becomes. But it also features prominently in his “State of England” fictions, including the 1996 story of that name and the 2012 novel “Lionel Asbo,” which reuses the phrase as a subtitle. There, the protagonists of the working class situate their own frustrations and satisfactions, their aging and coming of age, within an ambient dialectical narrative of progress and decline. In the shorter “State of England,” an upwardly mobile, almost divorced bouncer named Mal reflects that
class and race and gender were supposedly gone (and other things would go, like age and beauty and even education): all the really automatic ways people had of telling who was better or worse – they were gone. Right-minded people everywhere claimed that they were free from prejudice, that in them the inherited formulations had finally been purified. This is what they had decided. But for those at the forefront of the operation—the ignorant, say, or the ugly—it wasn’t just a decision. Some had no new clothes. Some were still dressed in the uniform of their shortcomings. Some were still wearing the same old junk.
Even as Amis’ fictional attention shifted to other histories, most notably and controversially the Holocaust and Stalin’s terror, a reader couldn’t help but hear the voice and sensibility of a worldly and well-to-do citizen of post-imperial literary London.
By all accounts – certainly according to Amis’ accounts – being young in that twilight was, if not quite heavenly, then very nice. The 1970s, when Amis, still in his twenties, served as back-of-the-book editor of The New Statesman and published his early, funny novels, were a whirlwind of deadlines, love affairs, literary squabbles, and long, drunken lunches with brilliant friends. Such friends! Amis’s peers of male British writers included Ian McEwan, James Fenton, Salman Rushdie and Christopher Hitchens, all of whom (especially Hitch) make regular appearances in his pages.
But in his critique, Amis’s gaze was more often cast backwards over his shoulder, to his father’s peers—Philip Larkin, Iris Murdoch, John Bayley, Robert Conquest—and across the Atlantic. There (that is, here, in the United States) he found the surrogate fathers, boisterous uncles, and boastful older brothers who spurred and challenged his ambitions: John Updike, Philip Roth, Joseph Heller, and especially his “twin peaks,” Vladimir Nabokov and Saul Bellow.
Even as he ascended to transatlantic fame and best-selling fortune, Amis was happy to embrace his junior status, to establish himself as an admiring, critical, sometimes rebellious acolyte. This is not to say that he was modest or diffident. On the contrary: he enjoyed precocity, brutality, iconoclasm and snark. He tapped his idols’ feet of clay with the chisel of his irreverent wit, as he scrambled onto their shoulders to see farther and clearer than they ever could.
If I accept the power of Bellow and Nabokov, it is partly because Amis has convinced me, both by the principles of his critique and by the example of his fiction, which wrestles with and overcomes their influence. What I mean is that I liked him more and trusted him more.
