Celebrated novelist Martin Amis, the influential author of era-defining novels including Money and London Fields, and essays and other works of non-fiction that confronted the vital issues of his time, has died at 73 at his Florida home.
He succumbed to oesophageal cancer, the same disease that claimed the life of his close friend and fellow writer, Christopher Hitchens, in 2011.
Amis, the son of poet and novelist Kingsley Amis, was among the celebrated group of novelists including Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan and Julian Barnes, whose works defined the British literary scene in the 1980s.
The BBC cites friend and fellow writer Salman Rushdie’s tribute in The New Yorker, in which Rushdie recalls of Amis that ‘(he) used to say that what he wanted to do was leave behind a shelf of books – to be able to say, “from here to here, it’s me”. His voice is silent now. His friends will miss him terribly. But we have the shelf.’
And another contemporary, novelist Sir Kazuo Ishiguro, told the BBC: ‘He was a standard-bearer for my generation of novelists and an inspiration to me personally. For all the bite of his satire, the brilliant swagger of his prose, there was always something tender not far from the surface, a yearning for love and connection. His work will last, surviving the various shifts of fashions and mores.’
Writing in The Guardian, Sarah Shaffi notes that Amis and his close friend Hitchens were part of a cohort of novelists and thinkers with a public profile that extended well beyond the page. In 2002, Amis published Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million, a nonfiction work about Stalin’s Great Terror. The book sparked a literary controversy, partly because of its attack on Hitchens, whom Amis accused of having sympathy for Stalin and communism.
Hitchens retaliated via an article in The Atlantic, but the friendship was apparently unaffected, Shaffi writes. ‘We never needed to make up,’ Amis told the Independent in 2007. ‘We had an adult exchange of views, mostly in print, and that was that (or, more exactly, that goes on being that). My friendship with the Hitch has always been perfectly cloudless.’ When Hitchens died, in December 2011, Amis delivered his eulogy.
Amis was born in 1949 in Oxford, and educated at schools in Britain, Spain and the US, before going to Exeter College, Oxford, where he graduated with first-class honours in English.
He credited his stepmother, the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, with waking him up to literature when he was a drifting adolescent.
His first novel, The Rachel Papers, was published in 1973 while he was working as an editorial assistant at the Times Literary Supplement. It won the Somerset Maugham award in 1974, and another book, the blackly comic Dead Babies, was published the following year. He worked as the literary editor of The New Statesman between 1977 and 1979, during which time he published his third novel, Success.
Amis was often compared with his father, Kingsley, who won the Booker prize in 1986 for his novel The Old Devils. Though the younger Amis never won the Booker himself, he was shortlisted for his 1991 novel Time’s Arrow, a portrait of a Nazi war criminal told in reverse chronological order, and longlisted in 2003 for his novel Yellow Dog.
The Guardian quotes Amis’s UK editor, Michal Shavit, as saying: ‘It’s hard to imagine a world without Martin Amis in it. He was the king – a stylist extraordinaire, super cool, a brilliantly witty, erudite and fearless writer, and a truly wonderful man.
‘He has been so important and formative for so many readers and writers over the last half-century. Every time he published a new book it was an event. He will be remembered as one of the greatest writers of his time and his books will stand the test of time alongside some of his favourite writers: Saul Bellow, John Updike, and Vladimir Nabokov.’
His former UK editor, Dan Franklin, is quoted in The Guardian as saying: ‘For so many people of my generation, Martin Amis was the one: the coolest, funniest, most quotable, most beautiful writer in the British literary firmament.’
Franklin added: ‘He was fearless in his opinions (although curiously naive about the furore those opinions would provoke in the British press), he wrote inimitable prose and some of the funniest novels you will ever read. The news that he has died is unbearably sad.’