Martin Amis, _The Rachel Papers_

 OUCH. AMIS’S DEATH gave me a chill, he being only a few years older than I am. Brr.

As I wrote a while ago (6/16/2016), Amis’s oeuvre has an arc roughly comparable to that of Evelyn Waugh, turning from an early run of shorter, snarkier, more satirical novels to longer, more ambitious, more weighty ones. Waugh’s earlier ones have a somewhat higher standing now, it seems to me. Vile Bodies and A Handful of Dust capture something of their time that no one else caught as well, but it takes a hardcore commitment to Waugh to get through the Sword of Honour trilogy. In Amis’s case too, I suspect, the bad boy early career fiction will stand a better chance with posterity than the more mature work, and for the same reason—it seems to tune in on something definitive about the moment it was written.

Take The Rachel Papers, for instance, his first novel, published when he was just 24. There he is in the back cover author photo doing his best Jagger-circa-1972, shaggy hair, direct gaze, pouty unsmiling mouth, dangling mostly-consumed cigarette. 

The narrator, Charles Highway, is hours away from turning twenty and saying farewell to youth as he tells us of his preoccupations of the last year, which are mainly about getting into Oxford and bedding a young woman named Rachel. Charles is a highly recognizable character: callow, shallow, horny, and hyperliterate, "having a vocabulary more refined than your emotions” as he puts it. So yes, he is a stereotype, but Amis so perfectly renders that stereotype as it manifested in 1969-71 (e.g., Charles’s conviction that turning 20 makes one irrelevant) that, fifty years on, the book is valuable as a portrait of its era. One doesn’t exactly like Charles Highway, as one doesn’t exactly like Holden Caulfield, but he is as recognizable as your face in the mirror.

And then there’s the style—fast, fresh, funny, a firecracker or two on every page. Amis is a young writer showing off, true, but that can be a lot more diverting than a mature writer trying to be Saul Bellow.

Well, rest in peace, Mr. Amis. I think you have an excellent chance of continuing to be read.