By Martin Amis
Is there anything that Martin Amis can’t write approximately? during this virtuosic, career-spanning assortment he is taking on James Joyce and Elvis Presley, Nabokov and English soccer, Jane Austen and Penthouse discussion board, William Burroughs and Hillary Clinton. yet particularly, Amis is worried with literature, and with the lethal cliches–not merely of the pen, yet of the brain and the guts.
In The warfare opposed to Cliché, Amis serves up clean tests of the classics and plucks overlooked masterpieces off their dusty cabinets. He tilts with Cervantes, Dickens and Milton, celebrates Bellow, Updike and Elmore Leonard, and deflates the most bloated reputations of the previous 3 many years. On each web page Amis writes with jaw-dropping felicity, wit, and a subversive brilliance that sheds new gentle on every thing he touches.
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Extra info for The War Against Cliche: Essays and Reviews 1971-2000
Example text
I would also like to thank Dan Franklin, Pascal Cariss and Jason Arthur at Jonathan Cape. Pieces in this book were compiled by Professor James Diedrick. I gratefully salute his skill and acuity. R. Leavis and Lionel Trilling, and on lesser figures like Ian Robinson and Denis Donoghue). 'Literature and society' was, at one time, a phrase so much on everyone's lips that it earned itself an abbreviation: Lit & Soc. And Lit & Soc, I seemed to remember, had been for me a long-running enthusiasm. But when I leafed through the massed manuscripts I found only a handful of essays, all of them written, rather ominously, in the early Seventies (when I was in my early twenties).
Why oh why, he typically asks, is Hollywood so obsessed by Vietnam and so unmoved by the struggle in Kuwait, which, 'amazingly enough', has yet to be celebrated on film? If Dan Quayle were a lot brighter, this is what he would sound like. Despite its contemporary attire, Medved's theme, or plaint, is as old as time. It is Ubi sunt? all over again. Where are they now, the great simplicities of yesterday? In years past, in the heyday of Gary Cooper and Greta Garbo, Jimmy Stewart and Katharine Hepburn, the movie business drew considerable criticism for manufacturing personalities who were larger than life, impossibly noble and appealing individuals who could never exist in the real world.
America is that the moviegoing public doesn't like violence. ' Certainly, Hollywood vs. America got Hollywood thinking, at least for a weekend or two (late nights in the dens of the Moorish mansions). And it got America thinking, too, and the controversy that gathered around it managed to trickle up as high as Janet Reno and Bill Clinton. It was a book, and a mood, whose time had come: the feeling that Hollywood had gone too far in its divergence from the American mainstream; the feeling that Hollywood loved everything that America hated (violence, sex, swearing, drugging, drinking and smoking), and hated everything that America loved (religion, parents, marriage and monogamy, plus the military, policemen, businessmen and America).