Salman Rushdie has led tributes to Martin Amis after the famous author died aged 73.
Rushdie said that Amis, who died on Saturday at his home in Florida, had a unique literary voice and that it was “unwise to try to imitate him”, adding a piece for the New Yorker: “He used to say that what he wanted to do was to leave behind a bookshelf, to be able to say: ‘From here to here, it’s me.’ His voice is silent now. He will be greatly missed by his friends. But we have the shelf.”
This shelf includes 15 novels, including Money, London Fields, 2014’s Zone of Interest, the film adaptation of which premiered at the Cannes festival this week, and his latest novel, Inside Story, published in 2020
The death of Amis, who had been diagnosed with esophageal cancer, the same disease that killed his friend, the author and journalist Christopher Hitchens, in 2011 caused widespread consternation in publishing and beyond.
Christopher Hitchens (second from left) and Martin Amis (third from right) in 2001. Photograph: Alan Davidson/Shutterstock
Its UK publisher, Michal Shavit, said: “It’s hard to imagine a world without Martin Amis. He was the king: an extraordinary, super cool stylist, a brilliant, erudite and fearless writer, and a truly wonderful man.
“It has been so important and formative to so many readers and writers over the past half century. Every time I published a new book it was an event. He will be remembered as one of the greatest writers of his time.”
Amis’ agent, Andrew Wylie, told the Guardian: “The level of attention that Martin gave to each sentence was unique and special. He played in a field that few writers have visited.”
“Amis was a princely writer, utterly serious, always careless, sometimes hurtful,” said the novelist Anne Enright. “Libidinous, propulsive, hilarious: I loved the sense of possibility that his discordant syntax unleashed in the reader.
“Pick up a book by Amis and you too can be The Man. The voices in his fictions freed the voice in the work of other writers, including mine. There was something about his confidence that was infectious and liberating”.
Friends at home in London in 1995. Photograph: David Levenson/Getty Images
Novelist John Niven asked Twitter users to post their favorite bits from Amis’s novels when he posted that the author’s death had “hit me hard” and began tweeting lines from ‘they. Physicist Brian Cox responded by saying: “Scrolling through Twitter is worth it in one go – it’s remarkable paragraph after paragraph.”
Former Prime Minister Boris Johnson tweeted that he was “shocked and saddened by the death of Martin Amis, the greatest, darkest and funniest satirist since Evelyn Waugh”. If you want to cheer yourself up, re-read the tennis match in Money.
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Amis was born on August 25, 1949, in Oxford, to Booker Prize-winning novelists Kingsley Amis and Hilary Ann Bardwell. After graduating from Exeter College, Oxford, she embarked on a series of journalism jobs at the Times Literary Supplement and New Statesman, before publishing her debut, The Rachel Papers, in 1973.
In an interview with the Paris Review in 1998, Amis described his philosophy of fiction writing: “Plots really only matter in thrillers. In conventional writing, the plot is: What is it? a hook The reader will wonder how things are going. In this sense, Money was a much more difficult book to write than London Fields because it is essentially a plotless novel. It’s what I would call a voice novel. If the voice doesn’t work, you’re screwed.”
Amis’ love of language over plot and narrative was highlighted by many who mourn his death. Journalist and broadcaster Emily Maitlis said: “I’m quietly devastated. I actually just loved the way I loved the words. Dark, bleak and brilliantly funny. I grew up on #MartinAmis and will be forever grateful.”
Actor and writer Steve Martin said: “When I was a younger writer, I was at a little dinner with Martin Amis. A writer’s name came up and Martin said, casually, ‘Well, he’s a sloppy writer.’ . I said, “What does a sloppy writer do?” He said, “Unintended alliteration, accidental rhyme, repetition of words.”
Enright told the Guardian: “It was fun to see his generation asserting itself in some new way against heavy-handed authority. Amis did it with just his voice. He made you feel that one act of expression was enough, more how enough: it had its own strength and integrity, it had style.”
Amis, who was married to American writer Isabel Fonseca, bought a brownstone residence in Brooklyn, New York, in 2010 and said the following year that he was leaving London to live permanently in the US. He also bought a house in Lake Worth, Florida, where he was staying when he died.
In an interview with The Guardian in 2017, he said he missed the English, and especially the Londoners: “I miss the wit… Americans are not as witty as the British, because the humor is to offend a little. It’s an assertion of intellectual superiority.”
Tributes came from around the world and across the political divide. In Germany, the liberal-leaning newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung referred to Amis as “one of the most important contemporary British authors”, recalling the controversy that The Zone of Interest, set in Auschwitz, caused in Germany, which caused the its rejection by the leading publisher Hanser in 2015.
The conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung said Amis was “one of the greatest writers of the last hundred years”, who “polarized with his ruthless opinions, but whose novels of the 1980s and 1990s are considered ground-breaking by in the English literary scene”.
