Fizz and Moxie

I passed Martin Amis on the street in Brooklyn in 2011 or 2012, which was like seeing Caravaggio on line at Madison Square Garden: startling, wonderful, and totally out of context. I was not then aware that Amis had recently moved to New York, and my unexamined fantasy placed him in a pub in Camden Town, drinking a Tennent’s Lager with Ian McEwen. On Court Street, he was wearing a V-neck sweater and an old London Fog and, remarkably, he was not smoking. (His most famous fictional creation, John Self of Money: A Suicide Note [1984], informed readers that unless he specifically stated otherwise, he should be assumed to be smoking.) I forgave Amis his tense and distracted air and his stooped posture. After all, he was carrying the whole of the English language on his back.