One of my favourite writers, Martin Amis, died recently. In a substantial way, Amis taught me to write. On the shelf in front of me, there are three books: Money (1984), The Moronic Inferno (1986), and Experience (2000). While Money is merely a little dog-eared, Experience is brimming with sticky notes, tabs, and etched with pencil underlinings. Amis’s painfully self-aware, precise, graphomaniacal voice gave me a sense of literature, a sense of decorum, and a sense of what it was to be young. When I was a teenager I listened over and over to a video of him talking about The Zone of Interest, undoubtedly one of his best novels. Alongside the always-present playfulness, there was a gravity to him. This was a serious man, and one could not be a serious man without a sense of humour. To quote a devastating footnote from Experience:
By calling him humourless I mean to impugn his seriousness, categorically: such a man must rig up his probity ex nihilo.
Amis said in *The War Against Cliche *(as a response to then-recent (2000) trends in literary criticism) that “[i]n the long term, though, literature will resist levelling and revert to hierarchy. This isn’t the decision of some snob of a belletrist. It is the decision of Judge Time, who constantly separates those who last from those who don’t.” I have been rereading his work, introducing it to my friends. He has given me great joy over the years. And it is the least I can do to fulfil my obligation, as his ever-grateful reader, to ensure that he continues to be read.