When Martin Amis died earlier this year, the obvious choice for rereading was The Moronic Inferno, a series of book reviews and interviews with American creators dating from the early 1980s. Whereas much of Amis’ fiction required its writer to exaggerate the worlds he described, Inferno – or to give it its full title The Moronic Inferno and other visits to America saw a humbler Amis, wanting to understand as well as to critique. Plus, I was going to be in New York. Inferno it had to be.

Probably the best way to illustrate the way things have changed since these essays were written is to consider the case of John Updike. Updike’s star has fallen since the 1980s, somewhat. Amis could write: ‘Plainly, here is a writer who can do more or less as he likes. But what ought he to like?’ By 2019, Patricia Lockwood’s acidic-yet-at-times-tender piece about Updike in the LRB would go viral, at least by the standards of book reviews: one of her kinder remarks is that ‘after [his] adolescent years a smoothness sets in, as if he is living the dream of a life of a writer instead of an actual one.’ I think that there are two things going on here. Neither Amis nor Lockwood think that Updike has reached his potential: that there’s some misdirection or misfiring – but Amis is interested in why Updike has gone astray and seems to wonder unconsciously whether he might meet the same fate. Lockwood is saddened and appalled at the ‘waste, waste, waste, waste’. 

Maybe it’s all about confidence. Lockwood knows the kind of writer she is – ‘I was hired as an assassin,’ and she meets the brief. Amis meets his too, but the point of this brief is that he’s out of his water: he’s outsized within British literary society but in America he’s second tier. He isn’t comfortable. He wants to be an American intellectual, able to ‘act like a maniac’ as Mailer does, or setting up with a new wife, as does Vonnegut. ‘When success happens to an English writer, he acquires a new typewriter. When success happens to an American writer, he acquires a new life.’ This may be true but I’m not sure that Amis is the right person to make the observation. He’s scrabbling about, sucking up slightly, acting like a fan – ‘you want your hero to be genuinely inspirational.’

It’s that kind of confessional approach that makes this collection sing. Amis is on the outside, just as most of his readers are. For once, Amis’s behaviour is quite relatable: trying desperately hard to fit in. He’s closer to his readers than his subjects. Or at least, he seems to be. The little asides, the confessional pauses – all these draw us in. When Amis tells us that he made ‘an incautious remark, illiberal in tendency – an undergraduate remark’ we wince and/or giggle. 

But – sorry – back to Lockwood and Updike and the ‘dream of a life of a writer’. Not all – perhaps not many – of Amis’ writers and film directors have stood the test of time. And his choices are startlingly homogenous – though given that most of the pieces were commissioned I’m not sure that it’s Amis that we need to call to account for that. The path to writerdom is different now. But certainly Lockwood’s comment about Updike’s dreams can be applied to Amis. And for all that Lockwood personifies the fashionable literary essay of our times, there’s plenty to learn from 1980s Amis. I can probably ascribe to him my own tendency to think about what a writer is getting at before deciding whether they are any good at it. It’s meant to be generous, rather than sloppy. If reading Amis in the 1980s shows us how far we’ve come since then, it also shows us just what we owe to him.