A review of Martin Amis’ latest non-fiction collection:
Amis can do a lot of things, but his genius has always been for vividness—“terrible compulsive vividness,” as his father, Kingsley, put it, not quite admiringly. The extreme case is other people’s bodies. One is reminded by Amis’s physical portraiture of what Norman Mailer said about Diane Arbus: Giving her a camera was “like giving a hand grenade to a baby.” When Amis picks up his pencil, he pulls out the pin. Donald Trump, “hammily scowling out from under an omelette of makeup and tanning cream,” has a “little woodland creature that sleeps on his head.” Rambo, aka Sylvester Stallone, is a “lethal trapezium of organ meat,” and Monica Jones, Philip Larkin’s rather handsome lady companion, “resembled an all-in wrestler renowned for his indifference to the norms of fair play.” In Las Vegas to gamble, Amis hits the poker tables, where he is reminded of Chris Moneymaker, the 2003 World Series of Poker champion, whose surname still raises certain questions: “What if he was called Chris Moneyloser or Chris Breadline or Chris Asshole?” It is at this point that Amis notices that Americans are kind of fat.
Or, as Amis has it, there’s a woman with “arms like legs, legs like torsos, and a torso like an exhausted orgy”…
