The Moronic Inferno: And Other Visits to America [Hardcover]

"The good bits are so fortuitous, indeed (mere reflexes of a large and callous talent), and the no-good bits so monolithic, that the critic's role is properly reduced to one of helpless quotation."

-Martin Amis in an essay on William Burroughs.

I'm a fan of a good essay, and Martin Amis is a worthy essayist. This collection of essays is somewhat artificial in its construct, as the author tells us in his apologetic introduction, "I should have worker harder, but was quite hard work getting all this stuff together." He also warns that these are journalistic articles. In other words, written to please editors and tailored to the audiences of specific journals, "the hack and the whore have much in common: late nights, venal gregariousness, social drinking, a desire to please, simulated liveliness, dissimulated exhaustion- you keep having to do it when you don't feel like it."

The theme uniting these essays is America, writings about Americans or about the culture or country itself, a place that we are told both frightens and excites the author. Although he conceded it is a hodgepodge of writings, an overall theme does emerge and unites the individual pieces. The author's overall prejudice is no secret, after all, the title of the book is "The Moronic Inferno." America, from the European perspective, seems to be extremist, raucous, juvenile and provincial. Too which I will refrain from replying with my loudest, most passive-aggressive: "Whatever."

His reviews of American authors are never without links between their individual styles and a greater American ethos. American writing, like American society, is characterized by "excess, solipsism, enmity, paranoia and ambition." American writing is influenced by the fame and fortunes of its authors, to an extent not seen in England "where the boundaries between success and its opposite are often hard to establish."

In a piece on Saul Bellow, he refers to "the American predilection for Big Novels as a vulgar neurosis- like the American predilection for big cars or big hamburgers."

He comments on what he sees as uniquely American feuds, like the one between Vidal and Capote, "hatreds which often extend to litigation." Norman Mailer is the "cosseted superbrat of American letters," another victim of the American "vacuum of success," "unembarrassable to the last." The Jack Abbott story, is framed as a tragedy but "it is a farce too, an American rodeo of inverted callousness and pretension. Could this happen anywhere else? The world looks on fascinated, rubbing its eyes."

His highest praise for an American writer goes to Gore Vidal, who he describes as "incorrigibly anti-American." He swoons "My, is Gore unpatriotic!" "I have never met an American so English in his Irony." But in the end, he takes Gore down as well for arguing that the family is an economic unit rather than a biological one, "the whole line sounds rather... American, does it not, tending to reduce argument to a babble of interested personalities, an exchange of stricture and veto, with money as the bottom line?"

Fat, late-period Elvis and Hugh Heffner are discussed as embodiments of American success (Michael Jackson could fit in here as well if he had written of him), people who operate in a universe in which all of their personal relationships are defined by a power differential, people surrounded by sycophants to the point where there are no external checks and balances with which to maintain a Super-Ego. There is a great line about Hugh Heffner, describing him living his whole life indoors in the Playboy mansion, "a man who never goes out, who rises at mid-afternoon, who wanders his draped mansion in slippers and robe (whose lifestyle, on paper, resembles nothing so much as a study in terminal depression)."

His descriptions of American locales are rich with continental condescension as well. "American cities appear to have a habit of surrounding their seats of learning with slums." Indianapolis, Indiana, where Kurt Vonnegut grew up is "a cultural Nothingville." In Palm Beach, where the only activity is leisure, "people talk obsessively about real estate- partly, I suppose, because it is an informal way of talking obsessively about money." "Like all provincial elites, the Palm Beach beau monde is both baffling and uninteresting, an enigma that you don't particularly want to solve." He writes of El Paso, Texas, "This felt like Reagan Country all right, where everything is big and fat and fine. This is where you feel slightly homosexual and left-wing if you don't weigh twenty-five stone." (Great description of the jocular laughter from the press following Reagan's travels, "Their laughter, like so much American laughter, did not express high spirits or amusement but a willed raucousness.") Steven Spielberg's secret connection with his audience is ascribed in part to "the very blandness of his suburban origins," "I wondered if he had ever really left the chain-line ranch-style embryos of his youth." His essay on Joan Didion's style opens with the sentence "Joan Didion is the poet of the Great California Emptiness." A playmate from Nebraska is "Miss Nowhere," "from some dismal ex-prairie state."

You also get that British style of spelling, the extra letters, "an hilarious." Humor isn't funny without an extra `u,' "humour." Pajamas spelled "pyjamas." Just in case you wanted to forget for a moment that this is a Brit writing disdainfully of American culture.

So. As an American, am I offended? No, it's great. I read it not masochistically or as a self-loathing American, but it is great writing with some spot on observations. More than just a collection of good bits. He wrote of the Evangelical Right, back in 1980, worried about their growing political influence in a discerning way that demonstrates serious prescience. The insights with perhaps the greatest significance come in to chapters written during the eighties when America first struggled to make sense of the emerging AIDS epidemic. Although I'm not convinced this is uniquely American, he discusses a society that "actively resists enlightenment" about certain human themes. Themes such as homosexuality, sexual disease, and death, which had a forced public confluence with the emergence of AIDS. Some things we are more comfortable fearing than trying to understand. He talks about the distracted energy that goes into euphemisms, `sexual orientation' changes to `sexual preference,' for example, "It is a very American dishonesty- antiseptic spray from the verbal-sanitation department. Having named a painful reality (the belief seems to be), you also dispatch it; you get it off your desk."

So I'm not offended by the judgmental tone of writing when the writing also happens to be high quality, humorous and thought provoking.

And what's more- and here I'll borrow a phrase Amis wrote of Gloria Steinem's humor- "its satirical accuracy is enlivened by affection." Beneath it all, beneath the insults that decorate his observations about America and Americans, there is warmth and I sense even a touch of jealousy. There is that secret British desire to be on the inside of the hysterical circles of "willed raucousness. Underneath all the invective, I really sense envy of what he sees as the rambunctious chaos of America. A secret desire for the volatile and foul-mouthed freedom afforded by our pervasive and accepted cultural ignorance.

This is one of Martin Amis's funniest and most interesting books. The book/author reviews are incredibly good (you'll never read Mailer, Burroughs, Didion, with a completely straight face again), and the social commentary is very well delivered.

As the title indicates, this book is highly critical of America, but it is a criticism tempered and somewhat confounded by Amis's complicated Ameriphilia: Amis's favorite writers are Americans (or at least expatriates who live in America), and Amis is very fond of claiming that he feels himself to be about half American. Yet America is the home and central breeding-ground of most of Amis's most hated evils: obscene wealth, unscrupulous capitalism (whitewashed in American euphamisms), the nuclear warfare industry, braindead religion, banal art &c. In both this book and the same-period novel Money (probably Amis's best), Amis posits pornography as America's economic and cultural nexus.

Amis's tense relationship with America provides for some incredibly good journalism and essays. The style throughout is outstanding, and most of my memories of the book come back in complete phrases. Looking at the early stages of the AIDS epidemic: "'Spend-down' turns out to be one of those cutely hyphenated nightmares of American life. Practically stated, it means that the AIDS victim sells and spends everything before qualifying for Medicare. Duly pauperized..." On Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead: "The novel was impossibly mature. The immaturity was all to come....[later in the article] Mailer's essays from this period--'The Existential Hero,' 'The Philosophy of Hip,' and 'The White Negro'--sum up how Mailer was feeling about himself at the time." "Truman Capote lived the life of an American novelist in condensed form: He was a writer at 9, a drunk at 15, a celebrity at 21, a millionaire at 35, and dead at 59." Almost the whole book is bracingly well-written.

Almost: strangely, only when Amis is writing about his favorite writer (and in a few very short dud pieces), Saul Bellow, does his style seem to go dead. I suppose there's so much adoration involved (adoration which, I have to admit, I don't understand), that he's reduced to helpless quotation.

The best recommendation for this book is that it is simply good writing, very good writing. Amis may, in fact, be the premier writer of his time for this type of short, spare-not-the rapier witty style of journalistic writing so common in England: As opposed to America, this collection's ostensible subject, where there is no style, and it is discouraged as bravura. A brief example of this is Amis's crisp, droll assessment of a particular book: "The first thing to say about it is that it's bad: It's bad." - There are other things to say about it, of course, which Amis duly proceeds to do. But it's that stylistic, ironic nuance in the opening that captures the flavour of these pieces. Can anyone imagine an American reviewer or journalist getting away with displaying, heaven forbid, such personal style.

The only fault I find with this book is the one Amis apologizes for in the Introduction, that it is simply a compilation of essays and reviews previously written for English papers. Thus, what we have here is a collection of snapshots, crystal clear, of certain aspects of America and her writers. The "big picture," so to speak, is missing.--But, again, the big picture is not Amis's forte, and you will find yourself delightedly guffawing, in spite of yourself perhaps, at these brilliant flashes of the master of rapier wit.