Most novelists, even popular and acclaimed novelists, are permitted to move from city to city without the rest of the world putting its two cents in. (Do you know where Norman Rush lives, or Toni Morrison?) But when Martin Amis transplanted his family from London to Brooklyn this year, it was a subject of controversy and heated speculation. Did the move signify that the center of the literary world had shifted—that America was the only place for a plugged-in writer to be? Or had Mr. Amis, for decades a favorite punching bag of the British tabloids, finally gotten sick of his own country—as the harsh satire of his most recent novel, "Lionel Asbo: State of England," seemed to suggest?
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