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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 part of the problem is Amis's: who wants to read a pithy three-page critique of someone else's critique of Philip Larkin?
What ultimately saves Martin Amis is that he is such a ham, so showbiz, so sentimental, even in a highly technical argument about the virtues of this or the drawbacks of that. He just loves human beings and their idiosyncrasies. He's a novelist, after all. Amis is also refreshingly uninterested in appearing professorial and disinterested. He'll gladly cheer his favorites (Saul Bellow, Philip Larkin) and forgive their shortcomings, while reserving his venom for authors who irritate him (Robert Parker, Michael Crichton). What results then is a strange mixture of literary theory and yarn-spinning. It works about half the time.
The final piece of the Amis puzzle is Amis himself. Instead of the reserved, serious literary lion that some would like him to be, he comes off as a pretty fun guy. He's into football (soccer), chess, playing with his kids. The reason we know all of this is that --- again, the ham --- Amis can't help but be a little bit autobiographical. As someone with a great fondness for many aspects of American culture, he seems to have inherited some of this country's obsession with self-obsession. And it works for him. In addition to everything else, THE WAR AGAINST CLICHÉ is also the work of a columnist. Although you have to get through a lot of intelligent criticism to get to it, the book works as a series of installments from a witty friend. I found myself wondering, "What would Martin think of the Academy Awards. I hope he covers them." He doesn't. But he does go into Andy Warhol, the men's movement, traveling, and various other detritus of modern life.
THE WAR AGAINST CLICHÉ is a lot of things --- it's a big doorstop of a book, after all. It's perhaps useful to some as literary theory. To me it was just boring on that front. On the other hand, it's the work of a great writer with an interesting and informed outlook. If you stick with it, there are rewards to be gleaned from nearly every essay in the book --- just not necessarily from where you'd expect them; the trick is to tune out the dull stuff. That's your pal Martin: He can be a bit stuffy and pretentious but he's smart and funny when you get him going. He's like his book that way.
--- Reviewed by Fred Kovey
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