miseryguts for garters

Call me shallow, but it seems to me that Martin Amis is aging rather badly... For one thing he has the bizarre modern version of a comb-over - a comb-back - with thin, longish hair that he must consider trendy or something but in fact makes him look sort of Dickensian. And he looks shockingly sclerotic. This sclerosis perhaps contributes, or is it the other way around, to an air of pained, desiccated misanthropy. (On which note, I love the way he's now sticking up for the rights of women! Back in the day, girls, did we really think of Martin Amis as one of the sisters? Let's try and remember.) It's been going this way for years: it must have been in the early nineties, the interview I read where someone asked him about money, maybe to do with That Advance, and even then he answered airily: "oh, I just send all those kind of things to my accountant, I never even look at them, it's too tedious." He said he never even glanced at his own bank statements.

Maybe that fact alone can shed some light on why he just doesn't get it.

(Of course Ms Baroque doesn't glance at her bank statements either, but that's not tedium, that's just not wanting to face the fact that one will most likely starve in old age. Every so often Little Miss Baroque will start to follow her around the house with them, saying, "Mummy, shouldn't you open some of your post?")

I read his big "Horrorism" Observer piece the other week, all the way through. It was full of the patness we have come to expect in his fiction. Neat little stitched-up, packaged-up shticks may be all very well for a satirical novel, but if he really is claiming this towering moral superiority for "The West" (Timothy West, maybe?), and if he really is citing our brave tradition of freedom of inquiry and thought and speech and all that, maybe he could start by looking at his own brand of didacticism. He's beginning to tip over the edge into one of his own characters.

Amis has, by his own admission, been spending some time writing a novel ("on suffering") poolside in Uruguay, in between summering in the Hamptons of course. It's probably easier doing it that way; even in Notting Hill or somewhere he'd probably just be too close in to see it properly.

And now this huge (Observer, once again, and sadly not on the web) picture of him glowering on an enormous sunshine-yellow couch, at his summer place in the Hamptons, has given me great pleasure - the word "Amis" is in a matching yellow, overprinted on top of a rather striking eight-foot abstract painting. You know, as an example of our culture I did love it. I do love our wonderful heritage. It just looks wonderfully and completely inane, like something out of Decline and Fall.

Maybe his upcoming UK book tour will do him good. And it might remind him why, here at the coalface, we have to laugh.