Remembering Martin Amis

In reading, as in writing, the pleasure principle is supreme. The authors you would most wish to save from a fire, or take with you to a desert island would be those that most consistently deliver exhilaration. These writers speak to you with an immediacy and intimacy that make you feel like their ideal reader, the person for whom the work is intended. And in turn, you defy anyone to love them as much as you do. Martin Amis, who died in May this year, said that this was precisely the experience he had when reading his literary idol, Saul Bellow. In a 2000 interview with Charlie Rose, he said of Bellow’s last novel, Ravelstein: “I couldn’t imagine anyone getting more out of this book than I was getting.” Many of Amis’s own readers, I wager, would say the same of him. They would all readily elect themselves his readers. And this critic is no different: for me, few authors offer more pleasure per verbum and seem capable of such largesse.