The Rub of Time is Amis at his considered best, witty, erudite and unafraid. You can sit and be like Martin Amis all day, wondering how he could be so right about the Republican party in 2011, so prescient about Trump as early as May 2016. The hierarchy thing, that need to revere older writers, may be a little bit male for some, but male is the way that Amis rolls, which makes him one of the best people on the planet to write about the porn industry (a chivalrous piece, as it happens). He is sweetly sentimental when it comes to the British royal family (why?), funny about tennis, always brilliant about the body, scorching in his refusal of death, its sorrows and humiliations ... Amis is always begging for interruption and fending it off at the same time, busking his way to the best bit, fighting with shadows to snatch the prize ... Amis is fantastic company until he isn’t. The drop can sometimes be severe, though never so steep as with his friend Christopher Hitchens, another writer who makes the reader feel smart, energised, enlarged, or does until he says something stupid in a really clever way ... I will, like many of his readers, grow old in a different direction. Still, this collection is full of treasures. And, if you want a good scrap, if you want to feel like Martin Amis while fighting with Martin Amis (which is possibly how he also spends his day), a couple of these pieces will keep you going for a long time.
Some of the essays, reviews and reported articles collected in The Rub of Time take Amis’s household-name status as an occasion or a theme. But the deep subject of this book, what holds its disparate bits together and makes it worth your time even if you have only the vaguest idea of who its author is supposed to be, is not celebrity at all. It’s professionalism ... He is especially good at literary criticism. The best parts of The Rub of Time are devoted to his two favorite novelists, Vladimir Nabokov and Saul Bellow ... But there is some filler to get through ... Amis’s contempt toward the human material in front of him often feels easy, habitual, unearned, a matter of prejudice rather than experience ... Over time, Amis has learned to read the mainstream without a chart, and to steer clear of the dangerous shoals and ledges. He is a nimble navigator, the wind is gentle at his back and the boat, alas, rarely rocks.
The Rub of Time is as surprisingly great as his other collections of criticism and magazine work ... As one would expect, the pieces on literature are the most successful. Amis has one of the greatest ears for contemporary letters ... Though Amis is a brilliant critic, capable of le mot juste—and often whole paragraphs justes—the political pieces are hit or miss. A few originated as commentary for British papers and carry a whiff of dated blog posts ... When Amis writes, 'We are all of us held together by words; and when words go, nothing much remains,' something of that belief rubs off on the reader. This new collection is not only praiseworthy, then. It should be celebrated as an old-fashioned panacea for our anti-intellectual times.
Amis’s new book, like the collections that preceded it, is the product of a ferocious yet sensitive mind. Even when he is considering writers he’s assessed many times before (Saul Bellow, Philip Larkin, John Updike, Christopher Hitchens), his aim is so unerring that he resembles a figure out of Greek myth, firing arrows through ax-heads lined up in a row.
The reporting pieces have a fair share of old chestnuts (the book-tour essay) and barrelled fish (a Republican Convention), but none is without its stinging pleasures ... a very dated piece on the pre-Pornhub porn industry grinds on, further distracting a reader from the book’s heart, which is its literary criticism, labor that allows Amis to realize his most comfortable and integrated self: a novelist engaged in the scrupulous appreciation of others’ style ... The Rub of Time, like Martin Amis’s other critical collections, is itself something of a style manual, with corrective passages that fall somewhere between patient mini-lectures and readings of the riot act ... He can exhibit a near-nasty streak in dealing with his correspondents—the new collection includes two samplings called You Ask the Questions—but more typically Amis cherishes the most cosmopolitan virtue of all, humor.
He brings his scrutiny to bear on contemporary masters of fiction, such as Don DeLillo and Philip Roth, as well as the 'twin peaks' of his literary education, Vladimir Nabokov and Saul Bellow. His perspicacity in the field of genius-level prose makes Amis highly qualified to analyze the mechanics of his beloved forebears ... Clichés matter. The Rub of Time reminds us how much is at stake in the matter of language, and how much originality, in thought and expression, really means ... Using language without respecting it: This, for Amis, is the cardinal sin. The point is to do better than platitudes and empty phrases.
The reportage is some of the best stuff here. For someone who often doesn’t much seem to care for journalists, Amis is a very good journalist indeed ... When he puts his nose to a text, close up, there are few readers like him...But there’s also, sometimes, a slightly bullying tone to his literary pieces. He seldom sneaks up on a thing or allows himself to be tentative ... There’s a rhetorical voltage (as he notes on page 54) to that maximalism, that unwaveringly indicative mood – but you weary of it too, a bit. The same certainty, not always a virtue, is present in his political pronouncements. He obviously knows an awful lot – a surprising lot – about post-revolutionary Iran, for instance. But you wonder: can he really know as much as it sounds like he knows? Perhaps he does.
The defining characteristic of Amis’s own style is not a countertone so much as a counterphrase, the employment of a modified repetition to startling effect. His paragraphs bring to mind an Olympic slalomer, executing a series of tight, hard pivots, each marking a punch line, a critical insight, a dramatic turn, or a moment of horror ... Amis’s prose...withstands even the most pedestrian subjects. If anything, the more predictable material leads him to compensate with his most frenzied writing ... criticism can reveal unseen qualities of even a beloved work. At its highest level, it can enrich one’s understanding of the art of literature. Amis has a surgical ability to isolate the qualities that distinguish a writer’s genius, particularly those that break with 'ovine' critical consensus ... Now Amis prepares for his greatest adversary yet. He won’t come away triumphant—no one does—but we can be assured that his fight will resound with the best qualities of his work: humor, originality of voice, and exacting, unflinching scrutiny.
One doesn’t read an Amis essay to be convinced of anything, and when he does go down this road he rarely succeeds. In fact, one can come away from reading The Rub of Time feeling that he’s quite wrong about a lot of things and that he holds many of his loudest and most entrenched opinions on faith alone ... Instead of argument, the essays are driven by their penetrating precision of observation. Amis isn’t one for always catching the feeling motivating people or events, but he has a gift for seeing into things — even, or especially, when dealing with subtle matters of style. Hence his fascination not only with authors but politicians and celebrities. This power of observation may also be why Amis’s essays have a directness and descriptive strength that his fiction often lacks.
The Rub of Time is divided into 16 somewhat arbitrary sections, the better to corral a wide variety of pieces, and has a yoked-together quality—as it necessarily must have, given that it contains reviews, essays and reportage written over the last 23 years. That said, there is much in this rangy miscellany that sparkles ... There are three pieces each on two of Mr. Amis’s literary idols, Bellow and Vladimir Nabokov, which showcase his talents as a close and generous reader ... Mr. Amis is a good enough political journalist and can hold his own as an entertaining, politically incorrect observer. The purely personal contributions, on the other hand, in which he interviews himself via questions submitted to a London paper or recounts his first trip to America at the age of 9, are either insubstantial or annoying; they strike me as an expense of ego in a waste of paper.
The Rub of Time is the latest collection of nonfiction, and serves as a must-have anthology for Amis aficionados and a worthy best-of compilation for everyone else. The discursive prose within — essays, articles, reviews, reportage — dates from 1994 to the present. All pieces were previously published in the likes of the New Yorker and the Guardian. The majority continue to stimulate, illuminate and, above all, entertain. ... Again and again Amis reinforces his points with eloquence and persuasiveness, utilizing backup quotes, sharp insight and a raft of memorable descriptions ('Rambo, that lethal trapezium of organ meat'). Provocative and thought-provoking, this is nonfiction with heft and bite.
There are excellent essays on Nabokov and Bellow, the 'twin peaks' of Amis’s literary mountain range; some disappointingly lightweight and anti-prescient riffs on Trump; and familiar takes on Philip Larkin, Christopher Hitchens and Amis’s father Kingsley. There’s also a ponderous, defensive Q&A with readers of the Independent, some funny pieces about tennis and a few early works of swaggering reportage. The style, once so joyfully alive, has ossified slightly ... The latent pomposity, once held in check by Amis’s undeniable ability to also channel what he calls the 'thought-rhythms peculiar to the time,' has become manifest, so that you never quite know how intentional it all is ... As an interrogator, as a critic of language, he’s on firmer ground. There is no one alive — with the possible exception of Adam Mars-Jones — who can hear an ailing sentence and diagnose its problems with such devastating and gleeful precision ... It’s when the frown becomes a sneer that Amis is at his worst: alone in his garret, removed from the world, railing against the mob.
The Rub of Time, his new collection of nonfiction, brings together his occasional work dating back to 1994. Like everything Amis writes, it is a showcase, and it gives you a sense of his personal canon ... Devout fans will already have drunk with Amis a 'pensive pint' or two, and heard a variety of things 'whimper with neglect.' So some of the furniture isn’t new. A reader might complain, more generally, that Amis has been over much — really, nearly all — of this ground before... In Rub, though, we see a man whom age has sobered declare, in a Q&A with The Independent, that he is through with 'insulting people in print' (a 'vice of youth') ... Some writers help you to see the world. Amis makes it so you can’t unsee it. It is a singular gift. Naturally, it is not to everyone’s taste.
...[a] vital, heady, landmark compendium. Amis writes with buoyant and cutting authority. His vocabulary, cross-pollinated by his trans-Atlantic reading and life, is pinpoint and peppery; his syntax supple and ensnaring. The pleasure Amis takes in observation, cogitation, and composition is palpable, and he is acidly funny. His literary analysis...is commanding and enlightening, while he brings his novelist’s sensibility to politics, especially in his unnervingly prescient assessment of Trump’s wobbly mental health during the 2016 campaign. In considering Vegas, tennis, Jane Austen films, and personal milestones, Amis writes with agility, spirit, artistry, and a shrewd sense of the deepest implications.
...mostly, the literary essays will leave you educated, enlightened, entertained ... The criticism is leavened with assorted pieces of reportage, sports writing and political commentary. The reportage in particular is extremely good. Highlights include a tour of the porn industry and an account of losing big in Las Vegas. On sport, Amis is at his funniest, which is saying something...But it’s hard to see why some of the pieces in the “politics” sections have been included — such as two inevitably stale profiles of Republican campaign trails in 2011 and 2012.
The essays on writing that constitute the bulk of the collection include plausible acts of tribute to Jane Austen, Christopher Hitchens, and Iris Murdoch. Now and again, you scratch your head as Amis tries to fit his taste to his criteria ... Mellifluous elegance is an odd desideratum – Beckett possibly wasn’t going for that – but as Amis exhibits, it’s not the worst thing to have around. The Rub of Time confirms that it’s possible to be foolish and brilliant at the same time ... Here we find not only elegant variation ('period' for 'sentence'), but a vulgar contraction ('quotes'), a creaky metonym ('pen') and a pair of slack adjectives that – horribile scriptu! – contribute to an internal rhyme ('painful,' 'paper,' 'major') ... And in the areas that readers do care about, Amis delivers exceptional service. The Rub of Time is a riot of immaculately delivered punchlines and improbably sustained set-pieces (a longish footnote on Trump’s use of 'bigly'), of bons mots and mots justes.
Certitude would seem to be a welcome thing in a critic; it lends his opinions ballast and force. And yet, while reading Martin Amis’s latest collection of essays, The Rub of Time,” I found myself longing for a little less of it, and for a few grace notes of tentativeness, a soupçon of doubt ... One comes away with the feeling that if he focused on the world a bit more and on his image a bit less, oh what a mighty writer he’d make.
If you have read Amis’ fiction, you will be delighted to find these gems. If you have not read Amis, these essays will provide you with an introduction to his brilliant use of language and his insight into many of the foibles of modern life. His critiques can be wilting, while his insights are often illuminating. The beauty of this collection is expressed in Amis’ sharp wit. He is a master of the English language and a superb reader of the highs and lows of the human condition. His insights are at times breathtaking, and, at other times, simple statements of the self-evident as he hits you over the head with them ... This collection is a cornucopia of delights and irritants while simultaneously deeply satisfying and educational. What more could be asked for from Mr. Amis?
Reading Martin Amis's non-fiction is like riding in a plane. As you cruise over miniaturized skyscrapers, crop circles, mountains, even oceans, you recognize—and remember—how tiny and insignificant your own piece of turf (wherever you came from; wherever you're going) actually is. Amis's works seems all-encompassing, and it's enough, at times, to fill one with diffidence and awe. But mostly delight ... His genius with words is our joy, and Amis is one of those rare writers who can take a topic already beaten to death (Vegas, Trump, pornography) and render it not merely fresh, but imperative. Even if the reader isn't aware or interested in the subject matter, Amis makes it interesting and enjoyable. As such, The Rub of Time is recommended to anyone for whom old-fashioned deliberation and erudition matter.
A sharp, witty collection ... John Travolta, Philip Roth, Christopher Hitchens, and Jeremy Corbyn all come under Amis’ sharp-eyed gaze. Several essays are disarmingly autobiographical; a few pieces compile brief, and sometimes-snarky, replies to readers’ questions. Literate, perspicacious, and thoroughly entertaining.
...[a] wide-ranging, rewarding collection ... Occasionally, on politics and art, Amis can be critically uninspired: in an essay on J.G. Ballard, he writes that Steven Spielberg is an 'essentially optimistic artist” and that David Cronenberg is 'a much darker artist.' But largely, nonfiction Amis is a witty, welcome presence: a practitioner of 'burnished technique and... sober delectation.'”
