The War Against Cliché

Essays and criticism

First published: 2001
Print length: 505 pagesVintage International, 2002

Description

Spanning 1971 to 2000, these essays and reviews approach criticism as a contest between exact language and inherited phrasing. Close readings of John Updike, Saul Bellow, Iris Murdoch, Philip Roth, Anthony Burgess, and Elmore Leonard consider how individual style carries intelligence, comedy, and moral vision—or collapses into mannerism. The collection also ranges beyond literature to chess, poker, football, cue sports, masculinity, and nuclear weapons, treating cultural judgment as part of the same demand for alert prose. Personal loyalties and sharp disagreements remain visible throughout; criticism here is neither neutral summary nor academic survey. The volume offers a career-length account of reading as an active resistance to dead language and automatic thought.

Reading profile

About this profile

Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).

Writing: How much attention the sentences and language require.
Ideas: How much interpretation or abstract reasoning the book asks of you.
Structure: How much you need to keep track of speakers, timelines and connections.
Background knowledge: Prior knowledge needed to follow the book, beyond what it explains.
Emotional intensity: Emotional pressure, from gentle (1) to intense (5). Separate from difficulty.

Writing style

Dense · Essayistic · Ornate · Witty

Pace

Variable

Tone

Cerebral · Irreverent · Satirical · Wistful

Structure

Anthology

Focus

Argument · Ideas · Voice

Emotional intensity

2 / 5

Reading complexity

1–5 · higher means more demanding

Writing: 4 / 5
Ideas: 4 / 5
Structure: 3 / 5
Background knowledge: 3 / 5

Themes

Art and creativityGenderKnowledge and truthMorality

About Martin Amis

Martin Amis was an English novelist, essayist, memoirist, screenwriter, and critic whose fiction made late-capitalist appetite, cultural decline, masculine vanity, and literary rivalry subjects of dark comedy. His prose is dense and verbally restless, driven by irony, coinages, elaborate sentences, and grotesque caricature. He often places compromised, self-dramatizing narrators inside plots that expose their efforts to control other people and their own stories. In Money, advertising director John Self’s compulsive spending and chaotic film project become a hectic study of consumerism and self-invention. London Fields turns an anticipated murder into material for a blocked writer, making narration itself part of the moral disorder. The Information uses one of Amis’s characteristic pairings, setting two novelist friends against each other as unequal success converts intimacy into sabotage. Such doubles give his large social satires a close personal pressure, while metafictional interruptions and borrowed genre structures keep their plots visibly unstable. His comedy repeatedly moves between verbal display and the damage done by appetite, envy, and self-deception.

Book details

For the print edition listed above.

Publisher: Vintage International
Language: English
ISBN: 9780375727160

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