Einstein's Monsters
Amis, Martin
In the middle of Martin Amis's "po- lemical introduction" to his new book, Einstein's Monsters, sits an account of an argument: he vs. his father, Kingsley Amis, on the subject of nuclear...
...Lassie-like storyboard aside, there are several deft and welcome brushstrokes here...
...The tone is closer to Mel Brooks than Borges, whom Amis claims as the inspiration for "The Immortals...
...Too vulgar, you see...
...Not since Charles Highway, the eager young narrator of The Rachel Papers, has a genuinely sympathetic protagonist graced Amis's fiction...
...That this bullet-headed tower of a man is actually a Minuteman/SS-20 in disguise is made just a little too clear by the narrator (one of the neighborhood's policed and protected), who calls Bujak "our deterrent...
...An object lesson in the danger of failing to coordinate strategy at the highest level can be found in the history of the same Prussian General Staff that Mr...
...he jeered at the crumbling British class system and punctured the political ideals of left and right...
...As everyone knows, taking over the U.S...
...I would be hard pressed to think of a better title for Thomas Donatelli's recent cannonade against the Military Reorganization Act than "Go Navy" (TAS, February 1987)—except, perhaps, "Go Navy, Beat Army...
...Kingsley winds up the bout with remarks along the lines of: "Think of it...
...Just as some people "get" religion, he has gotten Peace, or The Fear—not of God but the split atom...
...This idea may have had validity for its author...
...But the scene has been set...
...It is as vivid a one as you are likely to get of the differences between father and son, or of the family feud that pushes their books so far apart on the literary-political map...
...France, Belgium, and Italy had lost the capacity for offensive operations...
...The pressure of writing his way out from under the paternal shadow seems to have weighed heavily upon him...
...Richard T Marin is an assistant editor of Harper's...
...In World War I, the Prussian General Staff continued its tradition of operational excellence by leading the German Army from victory to victory on land...
...Ask what lies on "the other side of the firebreak" and Amis will tell you—"Necropolis...
...One day soon it is going to burst...
...As Amis points out, most imaginative fiction to deal with this subject "belongs to the genres": fully one-quarter of science fiction novels are set after "WW...
...By the end of 1917 Serbia, Rumania, and Russia had been removed from the anti-German alliance...
...However, from your article, it seems he is not the type of man to be bothered by revelations of sexual peccadillos—at least if his partner were female...
...It was a speeding transatlantic picaresque loaded with porn, greed, liquor, drugs, obscenity, and money both real and imaginary: gleaming metallic credit cards, heavy bricks of travellers checks, dense wads of cash...
...My head is a city, and various pains have now taken up residence in various parts of my face...
...Perhaps the problem lies in the species of writing undertaken...
...He is engage...
...Admiral Mahan was, after all, a nineteenth-century man who based his opinions on the lessons of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century naval campaigns...
...After John...
...A little too loud, actually...
...However, before we sacrifice our hopes of a coherent strategic policy on the altar of Poseidon, we should consider whether Mahan's dichotomy holds true in an era where wars are not merely fought in the land and the sea, but also in the air, in space, and in the electromagnetic spectrum...
...If you don't believe Turner, ask Marshal Ogarkov...
...Always a stern moralist, Amis has never before been a dour one...
...In this inverted community the women are "all rugged and ruddy and right...
...The one closest to Amis's "thinkability" mindset is the second, called "Insight at Flame Lake...
...It boils and swells...
...71 he five stories in Einstein's I Monsters are set sequentially, two pre- then three post-holocaust...
...It was a novel of wretched excess, a long joke about sex and death...
...The conversation was triggered by Turner's antics and mouth-frothing indignation in connection with ABC's "Amerika...
...In the end, we are told, Bujak "laid down his arms," and the moral shouts through loud and clear...
...despite the glaring effect upon his writing of its life and literature, the younger Amis has few kind words for the U.S.A...
...Or a good joke...
...He is a weepy sort, this narrator, prone to saying things like, "I have nothing to fear, except the end of the world...
...So it looks as if the explanation is not a sudden change of any kind, but a revelation of what has been there all along—a shallow, power-hungry opportunist who is willing to be used by the Soviets in the belief that he is using them...
...As for the ideas, they are shopworn and uncharacteristically woolly: unilateral disarmament, "dismantling" nuclear weapons...
...At last, a whiff of the old (the young...
...As for my brain," says Self, "it's Harlem up there, expanding in the summer fires...
...Ripping through the seventies, Amis ravaged the drugs-and-love culture left over from the previous decade...
...The imagery is more provocative: it evokes life in a "Manhattan of missiles," which "squat on our spiritual lives...
...Set in a ragged village on the edge of chaos, a small contingent of our descendants live in mortal fear of a terrible creature called "the dog...
...Money was the story that had been boiling and swelling in Amis since his first book, The Rachel Papers, a wickedly lewd coming-of-age novel published when its author was himself but a callow 24...
...In a recent collection of journalistic pieces and pontifications, The Moronic Inferno, he engaged in more of the same, this time on American soil...
...After the blasts wiped out the electromagnetic field...
...Time is also the lead player in "The Immortals," a pompous lament by a man literally as old as the hills, who finds himself stuck on a dead earth with a few millennia to kill...
...Einstein's Monsters, Amis announces in its 24-page introduction, titled "Thinkability," is all about living with, and hating, the bomb...
...Of all these stories, "The Little Puppy That Could" is the most traditional piece of SF speculation—and the most lively...
...Nuclear winter persists and the heavens have gone dark ("Oh, the sky, the poor sky...
...To me, that adds up to several hundred-thousand pages of crushing tedium—and to Amis as well...
...My congratulations to the person who writes your headlines...
...Random copulation laced with deviant sexual practices, brain-frying drugs—these things disgusted Amis, but he could still laugh at them...
...It seems Amis chooses only those aspects of Schell's post-nuclear dystopia that suit his fictional purposes...
...Self's rollicking stream of consciousness, the diffuse, nondescript voices through which the stories in Einstein's Monsters trickle down come as something of an anticlimax...
...The surest way to a reader's heart isn't through his conscience, but a good story...
...Local cable operators backed down in the face of united opposition from all local television broadcasters and KCPQ-TV, Channel 13, remains on the channel 13 position in cable homes throughout the Seattle Tacoma market...
...Like Saul Bellow's Herzog (Amis regularly invokes Bellow as the great influence on his prose), Money is a huge angry screed, overstuffed with learning and allusion, each sentence dense with metaphor...
...Donatelli erroneously implicates as a model for the reformed JCS organization...
...Turner put on a number of hours of propaganda designed to counteract ABC's "harsh" treatment of the poor, well-intentioned Soviets...
...Genetic bedlam reigns and human beings are "mildly dismayed to find themselves travelling backward down their evolutionary flarepathsor worse, sideways, into some uncharted humiliation of webs and pouches, of trotters and beaks...
...The Time Disease" conjures a cyber-punk Hollywood future-world, where life imitates TV and sex is moribund...
...They sacrifice "Queers" (their malevolved cousins) to the evil canine's voracious appetite until a lesser beast (the doglet of the title) intervenes...
...Such is the anxiety of influence when one is born the enfant of so celebrated an enfant terrible as Kingsley Amis, Angry Young Man of yore, author of Lucky Jim, and recent recipient of the Booker Prize, Britain's most prestigious literary garland...
...Now it's "time" (always in italics) that looms as the omnipresent oppressor...
...CORRESPONDENCE (continued from page 9) operators with banishment to the "commercial oblivion" of the upper reaches of channel positioning (channels 2-13 are more heavily viewed), this did not come to pass...
...Neither the boy nor his EINSTEIN'S MONSTERS Martin Amis/Harmony Books/$12.95 Richard T. Marin THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1987 51 uncle "Ned" comes off as real fleshand-blood folk, but rather as didactic stand-ins, ideas in search of a character...
...Martin, ever the rude boy, counters: "Well, we'll just have to wait until you old bastards die off one by one...
...The gags miss the mark, though, leaving us a protracted bromide by the world's oldest and most boring raconteur...
...The Prussian General Staff was a one service staff that brought victory as long as Prussia could win its wars in the course of a land campaign that culminated in one or two decisive battles...
...Recently, a group of friends and I were discussing the riddle of what had converted an apparently patriotic and conservative entrepreneur into an "agent of deception...
...his father, Kingsley Amis, on the subject of nuclear war...
...It's not easy to argue with someone who's talking so fast...
...Martin, 37, informs his father that he is writing about nuclear weapons...
...the men all drab, effaced, annulled...
...It recounts the diary of a mad teenager, a boy of 13 resembling "Franz Kafka or Ivan Lendl," whose thermonuclear obsession sends him first into schizophrenia then self-destruction...
...To hell with polemics, "thinkability," and the moronic superinferno...
...Martin Amis, cataloguing the nasty byways of perversity, as Balzac did cheeses in the market square...
...But as in "Bujak," the symbolism squats flatly on the story's spiritual life...
...With the release of Money, two years ago in this country, Martin Amis cut a flamboyant swath across the precious, cultivated landscape of American prose...
...Chris Kelly KCPQ-TV/Channel 13 Tacoma, Washington The article on Ted Turner was quite illuminating...
...He is unerring...
...Just by closing down the Arts Council we could significantly augment our arsenal...
...But now Martin Amis has a cause to champion...
...These victories in one sphere, however, 52 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1987...
...His subsequent output, both fictional and otherwise, furthered his expeditions into social satire...
...The firstbatch of ape people were just a big drag as far as I was concerned . . ." And so on...
...Nice place to write about, but live there...
...Thus the problem he sets for himself: how to write about the holocaust differently, more skillfully...
...But, a nit-pickermight ask, how come all the TVs are working...
...But read on, and you discover that the five stories in this collection are not pitched to the high style promised in the introduction...
...He thanks Schell both "for ideas and for imagery," whilepraising him reverentially: "He has moral accuracy...
...Such testy polemics, we are told, usually dissolve into cooing over Martin's one-year-old son—Kingsley's grandson...
...a "suicide note" to the world scrawled by a character called John Self, bequeathed to another called Martin Amis...
...In fact, Amis over the years has had few kind words for anyone or anything...
...Central to Mr...
...Kingsley, 64, responds: "Ah...
...This was no cloistered suburban tale of backyard melodramas or romance kindled by Hibachi flame...
...Donatelli's argument is the idea that a nation cannot be both a "sea power" and a "land power" at the same time...
...spinning an improbable but compelling yarn, and relaxing, enjoying it...
...is the farthest thing from their minds...
...If these stories "arouse political feelings then that is all to the good," Amis says, after insisting that their primarypurpose is to give "various kinds of complicated pleasure...
...The first, "Bujak and the Strong Force," tells of a hulking Polish emigre cum Samaritan who polices his neighborhood not so much with physical violence as the threat of it...
...Dead Babies, his quintessential gross-out novel, was a graphic cry of revulsion at the sight of decency's decline and fall...
...In Einstein's Monsters he's so busy hanging crepe over the last days of Western Civilization he can't even muster a few Strangelove-style barbs, black though they might be...
...Despite his years spent in this country (while his father was ensconced at Princeton...
...Edgar Williams Carrboro, North Carolina Why Go Navy...
...We all agreed that the most likely explanation for Turner's apparent quick conversion was that, during a trip to Cuba, he had been the victim of a classic entrapment, i.e., videotaped in a sexually compromising situation and blackmailed...
...Take his ideas or leave them, Amis is still pushing words hard across the page...
...I suppose you're 'against them,' are you...
...Jonathan Schell's doomsday prog- nostications (in The Fate of the Earth and The Abolition) served as the catalyst for Amis's sudden awakening to the present danger...
Vol. 20 • May 1987 • No. 5
