First things first. Martin Amis is a fantastic writer; a perfect
writer, maybe. His prose is assured, balanced, metered, elegant,
everything good writing is supposed to be. His sentences march like
soldiers. His punctuation is sublime. The book reviews, which
comprise nearly all of THE WAR AGAINST CLICHÉ, are testaments
to Amis's erudition and refinement. There is a certain sick
pleasure to be derived from watching Amis take some sad sack
(usually American) novelist apart for failing to comprehend proper
syntax or the full meaning of a word used carelessly. Amis gets
away with this highfalutin behavior because, unlike most critics,
he has the kind of success as a novelist that makes charges of sour
grapes irrelevant. He's a writer/critic, in that order, and as Amis
points out, there is historical justification for what he is
doing.
Although THE WAR AGAINST CLICHÉ is composed of reviews
published from 1971 to 2000, two coherent arguments emerge from the
text. One forms the title of the collection: Amis doesn't like
clichés; he thinks they're a primary cause of bad literature.
The other is that writers should be critics --- and maybe
vice-versa --- and that the responsibilities of a writer-critic are
different from those of a regular critic: In the simplest terms, it
is the responsibility of a writer-critic to defend his turf, to be
a booster of his own approach to literature. Amis's justification
for this stance is largely historical. The laundry list of
writer-critics of yesteryear that he trots out is certainly
impressive: Nabakov, Joyce, Wolfe, and so on.
So why, with all its ducks in a row credibility-wise, is THE WAR
AGAINST CLICHÉ at times so unsatisfying? The quick answer is
that in reviews, great prose is only great prose --- it's not the
whole game, not even half of it. Great ideas are more the point,
and this is where the book is lacking. Amis's reviews are witty,
even true, but they're limited in scope; his criticisms are of
little consequence to people outside the literary establishment, to
ordinary readers. What he's doing is literary theory. The trouble
with THE WAR AGAINST CLICHÉ --- and the joy of it --- is that
Amis doesn't seem to realize this.
Most of the reviews in the collection come from middlebrow
publications like The Atlantic or The Observer. I
mention this to distinguish the places Amis chooses to write from
the places he could write if he preferred to, namely literary
journals, whose thick, non-glossy editions are sold to university
libraries and guys in berets. I give credit where credit is due;
Martin Amis doesn't try to be highbrow. His aim is to focus his
considerable gifts as a writer on issues of import to everyday
people --- or at least everyday people who read tony magazines. But
his split mission is never entirely successful. While I enjoyed his
pieces on Margaret Thatcher, Abe Lincoln, and Chess, I didn't get
much out of his literary critiques. Part of the problem is mine: I
just don't know enough to evaluate his arguments. But the other