I am fed up with Martin Amis: in this I am far from alone.  My heart, of course, goes out to all the haters, particularly to Anna Ford for her open letter to Amis in Saturday’s Guardian.  However, I think the detractors of the soi-disant ‘bad boy’ (or as he’d have himself, the ‘Prince Charles’) of English letters have omitted to criticise something important about this author, maybe even the most important thing about him and the most revelatory.

It’s not that Amis is arrogant, believing himself to be even cleverer than he undeniably is; it’s not that he expresses more or less unconscionable political views; it’s not even that he has rather crassly proffered himself on more than one occasion as both a ‘philosemite’ and a ‘gynocrat’ (although I really don’t want him lobbying for either cause, thank you very much). 

No, the trouble with Martin Amis is his inability to steer a true course between art and life, because of a pronounced absence of imagination.  Not the authorial imagination which gives rise to characters and plotlines: this, Amis has in plenty.  He is missing a type of inventiveness which is more like intellectual empathy, the ability – or perhaps it is only the willingness – to defer to the possibility of an emotional reality which is not his own.

Amis’s bugbears are wide-ranging – a certain type of journalist; old age; death; religion (for him the adjective ‘religious’ appears to be intrinsically pejorative, which, by the way, makes me wonder where exactly the philosemitism comes in) – but they do have one thing in common: they stir up intense and illogical feelings, and in so doing, assault one’s sense of autonomous rationality.  Just as Amis cannot get a handle on that curious quality religious belief, just as he cannot say when his body might turn against him or simply stop working altogether, he cannot control, as much as merely provoke, the media maelstrom which always surrounds him. 

Amis is not, naturally, unique in worrying over those elements of life that human beings cannot master.  He is even following in fairly auspicious literary footsteps when he articulates the consummate artist’s plaint of passivity in the face of ageing; indeed, it is not hard to imagine him, in three years’ time, echoing his godfather Philip Larkin’s adolescent-sounding ‘Sixty-three… can’t believe it.  What have I done to be sixty-three?  It isn’t fair.’

Even Larkin, though, knew that his best chance at battling that uncontrollability was to try to access, even to indulge, the imaginations of others who felt it too – which is what Amis can only ever do as an accidental side-line to his major project, which is indulging himself.  This is why The Rachel Papers works so well: Charles Highway enshrines Amis as he and his readership, for once in perfect alignment, secretly both long to keep him: young, velvet-jacketed, full-lipped and smokin’, and forever in potentia. 

I have tried to reconcile my fondness for some of Amis’s novels with my distaste for The Pregnant Widow (which, by the way, really ought to be retitled The Stagnant Ego); and I don’t, as many do, conclude that the author has simply deteriorated.  Amis’s mind is as sharp as it has ever been and his prose as excellent, no matter what the subject matter.  I am sorry to admit, for example, that his riposte to Anna Ford reads brilliantly, despite being a nasty piece of work. 

But it is getting harder and harder to sympathise with a writer who has blinded himself to the fact that not everything in life can be reasoned away.  He will give you the etymology of any feeling you can name – nostalgia, trauma, bereavement, all are eruditely enumerated in The Pregnant Widow.  But Amis has long since let alone the task, less flashy but more important, of fathoming out what those, or any feelings really mean.