I’ve been a devotee of Martin Amis ever since I started to properly appreciate fiction. Not the man himself, you understand, who is clearly a pompous tosser of the highest order. But when it comes to show-boating, grand-standing prose that leaves me literally bewildered with admiration, there’s simply no-one else on the playing field.
This story is one of his more low-key efforts, originally published in The New Yorker. You might curl an intellectual lip at the high-concept novelty, but when it’s done with such imagination, such panache, and is pitched with just the right amount of tantalising smart-arsery, it’s difficult to quibble.
The idea of the ‘what if?’ story isn’t new, of course, and I’m quite sure a similar juxtaposition has been done before (Amis himself uses the gimmick again in ‘Straight Fiction’). What sets this apart, I think, is the whip-smart writing – sharp, witty and, unusually for Amis, unexpectedly moving. The characters, for the most part, are little more than ciphers, but this hardly matters in a clever, funny satire that encapsulates so many good ideas within a framework of superb prose.
I have heard all the usual criticisms of Amis – he’s a bit too clever-clever, he’s emotionally bereft. But frankly, when you can produce output like this, who cares?
http://www.martinamisweb.com/commentary_files/career_move_2.pdf
James Smyth
James Smyth currently works in the City, doing a job so shamefully unBohemian it hardly seems appropriate to mention it here. He’s been writing for years, specialising mainly in unfinished short fiction and barely begun novels. Once he almost had a story published.
Stories Written: "Listening to Reason" (read by Martin Lamb), "The Honourable Thing" (read by Jaz Deol), "Dial A For Action" (read by Max Berendt), "Let There Be Light" (read by David Mildon), "Telling It Like It Is" (read by Steve Wedd).
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