The Rub of Time

The Rub of Time is Amis at his considered best, witty, erudite and unafraid… He is sweetly sentimental when it comes to the British royal family (why?), funny about tennis, always brilliant about the body, scorching in his refusal of death, its sorrows and humiliations… He is a great believer in semantic rigour; every sentence snaps with an accuracy that is fresh and fierce… This collection is full of treasures. – Anne Enright * Guardian *First-class… Amis reveres Vladimir Nabokov, and wonderfully evokes the author’s “miraculously fertile instability”, and the “dazed hymns to the bliss of existence”… Amis’s wide reading is prompted by pure pleasure and in this regard he is proudly Kingsley’s son… Amis’s literary criticism is richly enjoyable, his intellectual gifts are formidable and he is worthy of the praise he shovels upon Nabokov in his prime… His non-fiction is bayonet sharp… The Rub of Time is impressive. The inner world of the old devil on display is one to be treasured. – Roger Lewis * The Times *The reportage is some of the best stuff here. For someone who often doesn’t much seem to care for journalists, Amis is a very good journalist indeed. If anyone has written a better, more penetrating, more open-minded interview with John Travolta, for example, I’d like to see it… When he puts his nose to a text, close up, there are few readers like him… And his is superbly good at capturing the nub of what’s so interesting in DeLillo, deftly sectioning the phases of JG Ballard’s career, tracing the weirdly wonky process of Philip Roth finding his voice or summing up a mood in a glancing phrase. – Sam Leith * Observer *Erudite, eclectic and entertaining, Amis’s essays offer serious assessments of Vladimir Nabokov and Saul Bellow alongside a tour of the porn industry, an exemplary prolife of John Travolta and a hilarious analysis of the hazards of being christened “Tim”. – Claire Lowdon * Sunday Times, Book of the Year *He is our sure-footed mountain guide, leading us gleefully from one delight to the next in these quotation-rich encomiums. “Panegyric is rightly regarded as the dullest of all literary forms,” he writes in Nabakov’s Natural Selection, a scintillating panegyric that absolutely achieves its stated aim… The literary essays will leave you educated, enlightened, entertained… I defy anyone not called Tim to get to the end of the Henman-inspired essay, The Tims, without a helpless guffaw… Martin Amis is a great writer and a great reader. – Claire Lowdon * Sunday Times *There is no one alive — with the possible exception of Adam Mars-Jones — who can hear an ailing sentence and diagnose its problems with such devastating and gleeful precision. – Jon Day * Financial Times *Mellifluous elegance is an odd desideratum – Beckett possibly wasn’t going for that – but as Amis exhibits, it’s not the worst thing to have around… It turns out that brisk generalisations, nurtured for decades, lend themselves to potent writing. Certitude is the key to Amis’s superhuman flair – and what makes this collection so compelling… Part of the appeal of reading Amis is to holiday in a world of clean, legible order… The Rub of Time is a riot of immaculately delivered punchlines and improbably sustained set-pieces (a longish footnote on Trump’s use of “bigly”), of bons mots and mots justes. – Leo Robson * New Statesman *Some absolutely A-grade literary journalism… It only takes a glance at the Larkin stuff…to reveal the depths of Mart’s engagement, his habit of throwing out apercus in half a line that would detain most critics for a paragraph… and his eye for individual physicality. – DJ Taylor * National *America, the slatternly muse, inspires Amis’s best writing… It is Amis’s sensitivity to language which allows him to describe the different sounds so precisely… His style, bolstered by Latinate and literary diction, doesn’t allow the reader to become complacent, to turn her gaze from the subject, to let her mind wander… Perhaps it is best to view Amis as a miner: deep underground, in the narrow tunnels and cramped caves, among the labour and the coughing and the dirt, he finds gold. – William Poulos * Varsity *Typically glorious, typically enraging… You’re also reminded of his astuteness as a reader, and his instinctive grasp of what an author’s up to… Very few writers can surprise and delight in the way Martin Amis can. There may be pratfalls to come, there may be breaches of decorum, but that ear for the thought-rhythms will have to get a whole lot tinnier before I stop reading him. – Orlando Bird * Daily Telegraph *

Martin Amis was twenty-three when he wrote his first novel, The Rachel Papers (1973). Over the next half century - in fourteen more novels, two collections of short stories, eight works of literary criticism and reportage, and his acclaimed memoir, Experience - he established himself as the most distinctive and influential prose stylist of his generation. To many of his readers, Amis was also the funniest. His intoxicating comedic gifts express a profound understanding of the human experience, particularly its most shocking cruelties, and Amis wrote with pathos and verve on an astonishing range of subjects, from masculinity and movie violence to nuclear weapons and Nazi doctors. His books, which have been translated into thirty-eight languages, provide an indelible portrait and critique of late-capitalist society at the turn of the twenty-first century. He died in 2023.

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