J g ballard biography of martin amis

In 1987, when I was at university studying English literature, Martin Amis came to town for a reading and signing at the student bookstore. He was a literary celebrity, this being an era in which those two words could be juxtaposed without irony, and we undergraduate fans were so numerous that—in my memory, if probably not in actual fact—some of us, finding no chairs available, resorted to sitting cross-legged at his feet, like eager children in a kindergarten class. That would be an unusually swear-filled, scabrous kindergarten class, naturally. Though Amis was there to promote “Einstein’s Monsters,” his very bleak, very scary, very scared book about nuclear weapons, he was at the time best known for his dark comic novel “Money.” That book had been published three years earlier, and was avidly passed around among my peers, to be read between our assignments on Chaucer or Coleridge.

To an English student studying English at an English university—an institution that Amis, too, had attended a generation earlier—Amis exuded a kind of transatlantic glamour, despite being thoroughly English himself. Later that night, I wrote in my diary that, during the Q. & A. session at the bookstore, “Amis had been talking about a New York expression, ‘schmoozing,’ which is like talking bus

•