Joe Bloggs

Rug re-thinks and the OED overlord

If Edward Norton is my favourite young actor, his literary equivalent has to be Martin Amis. The latter isn't young any more, but he's not a fogey either. It seems his latest book (out next week) is creating quite a brouhaha. The Observer reviewer loves it, the Telegraph guy thinks it stinks, and the New York Times sits on the sidelines and frolics in the fracas.

Read all three articles and you'll get a good idea of the genius that is Amis. As Fischer says in the Telegraph, "Amis is the overlord of the OED". He is. Douglas-Fairhurst in the Observer gets even closer to the man "Like all great writers, he seems to have guessed what you thought about the world, and then expressed it far better than you ever could". And from the final paragraph of the NYT "If you're as clever as (Amis), and as successful, you don't much care about what someone like Tibor Fischer says". Or what anyone else says either I suspect. I've always thought of Amis as the natural successor to Dickens - or at least the late 20th century equivalent to the great man. Read London Fields and you'll know exactly what I mean. He has a connection with the common man that I haven't found in any other living author. Money, though, is my favourite. I always think of it when I go for a 'rug re-think'. Off for one today.

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