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AS smart and funny as his novels are, Martin Amis is a devastatingly good essayist as well. I spoke to him recently about his latest collection, The Rub of Time, which assembles several decades of nonfiction pieces.
The subject of the book is the toll taken by the ages — the way it gradually erodes talent and inspiration as surely as it does the soil on a hillside. (Nabokov, Bellow, and the late, great Philip Roth are three touchstones.) We touch on, of course, Amis’s close friend Christopher Hitchens.
But the book is all over the place, and shows Amis’s own powers so far undiminished.
My conversation, in the Los Angeles Review of Books, is here.
I just read my first Martin Amis book! London Fields, it was so good. I just saw that they have made it into a movie now too, the trailer looks great.