My Martin Amis Jack Aldane

Reporter for The Sunday Times Will Lloyd sits down with Jack Aldane on this ninth episode to discuss The Second Plane, a collection of twelve pieces of nonfiction and two short stories by Amis published in 2008, covering 9/11, the age of terrorism, Islamism and the follies of the Blair-Bush coalition.
Will says Amis should be remembered as one of the greatest comic novelists ever to write in English. However, he adds that had the author remembered this himself when it counted, The Second Plane would probably never have been written.
The Second Plane shows what can happen to a writer when seismic events combine with the weight of expectation to explain them in real time. When the World Trade Center is attacked on 11 September 2001, Amis does not report from the ground, nor speak to those who witness the event firsthand. Instead, he along with other members of the literary elite are conscripted to tell the Anglophone world what it all means.
Some confess in their columns to being poleaxed by what they’ve seen. Amis instead uses his adrenaline to tame and name the collective moment with signature bombast. But this is not John Self’s New York, and Amis is unusually way off the mark.
Will explains why The Second Plane is arguably a literary parallel of the Iraq War. For one thing, the same errors of conjecture and righteous zeal are noticeable throughout.
Like so many cultural and political thought leaders of his time, Amis went over the top only to discover that he was woefully out of his depth.
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Journalist and memoirist Graham Caveney speaks to Jack Aldane on this eighth episode of the series about Martin Amis's iconoclastic fifth novel Money: A Suicide Note.
He and the host discuss the novel's true subject, which runs counter to popular interpretation. Though Money is often celebrated as the quintessential novel of the 80s, Caveney argues it is as much if not predominantly a story about the 60s, of which the 80s was arguably the last, lurid hurrah.
And of course, they discuss the novel’s protagonist John Self, who shows what happens when yobbish machismo meets a culture of convenience and excess, and whose farcical downfall makes Money an early diagnosis of the human condition under neoliberalism.
Caveney explains the novel's impact on his generation. By the closing decades of the 20th century, he says, aspirant writers in the UK were resigned to thinking about the English novel as a relic of the pre-war era. With the American canon at the helm, Britain was losing its voice in contemporary fiction. By writing Money Amis single-handed tore up the rulebook, proving that it was once more possible for English writers to take on the zeitgeist with originality and authority. For Caveney, Money was a cultural watershed on par with the greatest seminal moments in modern music.
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Leo Robson is a freelance writer whose work has featured in The New Yorker, Harpers and New Statesman, among others.
In this episode, he and the series' host and producer Jack Aldane sit down to discuss Martin Amis's fourth novel Other People, a Mystery Story, published in 1981.
Robson explains that Amis had many literary debts his fans can take pleasure in exploring, and that the novelist, much like his father Kingsley, wrote in order to manage his fears and anxieties about the turbulence of the 20th century.
The taxonomies Amis used to organise the world, from the largest elemental forms (Time, Death, Sex, Money), to the minutiae of existence, were arguably his coping strategy, Robson says, and one he wielded brilliantly.
Though his "centurion confidence" as a writer could grate, he adds, Amis gifted his readers a way to see the world afresh, to take it in slowly and carefully, and to use some of that same confidence to marvel and laugh at its darkest features.
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Editor of Cap X Alys Denby discovered Martin Amis through a boy at university would she would later go on to marry. The first book of Amis's he leant her was Success, published in 1978.
Success juxtaposes two lives set in the same era of social and economic transformation in Britain: that of well-bred Gregory Riding and his lowly foster brother Terence Service. The story is told through a two-way mirror of Riding and Services's ego-fuelled ambition. Their contrasting projections foreshadow Amis's long-term interest in male rivalries and women who enter them, often with hilarious and horrific consequences.
Alys tells Jack the story of what Success taught her about men's idea of success, how many of Amis's male readers seriously underestimate how funny women find his prose, and how times have changed such that a book like Success would likely never receive the same plaudits today as it did from papers like The Observer.
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Columnist, podcast and book reviewer for The London Times James Marriott joins Jack Aldane on Episode 5 to discuss The War Against Cliché , an anthology of Martin Amis's reviews and essays from 1971 to 2000. It was the book that changed James's approach to life, and especially writing.
James tells Jack why, despite his never having been a devotee to Amis the novelist, Amis's journalism contains by far some of the cleverest, funniest and most galvanising opinions on literature you’ll ever encounter.
The War Against Cliché remains, he says, the book which makes him want to write more than any other, and without which producing book reviews would be a whole lot less fun.
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Gender scholar, author and columnist Zoe Strimpel tells Jack Aldane about the "sexual sentimental education" she gleaned from Martin Amis’s novels as a young woman battling teenage angst.
In particular, they discuss Amis's first novel, The Rachel Papers, which introduced Zoe to the dark corners of male heterosexuality through Amis's burgeoning comic prose style, and how the book's portrayal of sex compares with the rules of attraction today.
Is the novel's insatiably horny hero Charles Highway now an extinct breed, or is his academic approach to sex a precursor to the modern male propensity to overthink?

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