better late than never

A week ago today, I had the pleasure of attending Martin Amis’s appearance at the Central Library in support of his new novel, House of Meetings. I don’t know if I was convinced to read the book, but I was in awe of the way people like Amis exist in the world – bursting with a confidence achieved through the erudition only leisure brings and possibly through a healthy dose of white male privilege. Whatever it is, I want some.

Amis was introduced by Michael Silverblatt who said he had never seen a character like HOM’s narrator - a despicable man somehow redeemed by language. Uh, hello? Twentieth-century literature? Anyway… at one point, Silverblatt recounted the interviews he had conducted earlier in the week – Mailer on The Castle in the Forest and Dave Eggers on What Is the What – and seemed unexpectedly overcome with emotion at the state of the world depicted in the three novels. I don’t think the pathos was necessarily scripted and I was sort of touched.

Amis, on the other hand, was not particularly emotional, but he was characteristically audacious, insightful, and hilarious. He began by mourning the death of humor and pointed out that this fatality had been predicted by de Tocqueville over 200 years ago. He said that a joke by definition is undemocratic and therefore has no place in today’s PC culture. He brought up “A Modest Proposal” and ventured a guess that Swift wouldn’t exactly play today (although he may have his imitators). Amis thinks this lack of humor leads directly to a lack of common sense, quoting Clive James’s idea that “humor is common sense dancing.”

Because of the novel’s subject matter, there was much discussion of ideology (including an interesting but decades-long question from a Russian audience member), regardless of whether it’s the right’s ideology or the left’s anti-ideology. He proposed that the Middle East needs secularization more than they need democracy. Amis discussed how ideology requires taking on an illusion you can’t defend with your mind alone, and he and Silverblatt discussed how our complacency and resistance to things that don’t entertain us is no match to its power. Bleak. However, Amis said a writer can’t worry about his readers committing suicide. Plus it’s more difficult to write about “the nice,” citing the idea that “happiness writes white.” (The color, not the race.)

My favorite quips of the night were probably the least literary, but I’ve repeated them several times already. He referred to aging as an “irresponsible low-budget horror movie.” Then he described how someone who suffers from dysmorphia looks in the mirror and thinks what they see is horrible. Deadpan, he said he hopes he suffers from this condition.

Amis’s next novel will be titled The Pregnant Widow, referring to the state where “the father is dead and the child is not yet born.” I believe he said that the novel would be a fictionalization of the events in Experience: A Memoir with the “pregnant widow” in this case being the current state of feminism (whatever those two things may have to do with one another). That one I’ll read.