A Sunday Times / Times Literary Supplement Book of the
Year
One of the finest essayists of all time with an essential
collection of essays looking at our times.
Martin Amis is the author of fourteen novels, the memoir Experience, two collections of stories and six collections of non-fiction. He lives in New York.
The Rub of Time is Amis at his considered best, witty, erudite and
unafraid… He is sweetly sentimental when it comes to the British
royal family (why?), funny about tennis, always brilliant about the
body, scorching in his refusal of death, its sorrows and
humiliations… He is a great believer in semantic rigour; every
sentence snaps with an accuracy that is fresh and fierce… This
collection is full of treasures.
*Guardian*
First-class… Amis reveres Vladimir Nabokov, and wonderfully evokes
the author’s “miraculously fertile instability”, and the “dazed
hymns to the bliss of existence”… Amis’s wide reading is prompted
by pure pleasure and in this regard he is proudly Kingsley’s son…
Amis’s literary criticism is richly enjoyable, his intellectual
gifts are formidable and he is worthy of the praise he shovels upon
Nabokov in his prime… His non-fiction is bayonet sharp… The Rub of
Time is impressive. The inner world of the old devil on display is
one to be treasured.
*The Times*
The reportage is some of the best stuff here. For someone who often
doesn’t much seem to care for journalists, Amis is a very good
journalist indeed. If anyone has written a better, more
penetrating, more open-minded interview with John Travolta, for
example, I’d like to see it… When he puts his nose to a text, close
up, there are few readers like him… And his is superbly good at
capturing the nub of what’s so interesting in DeLillo, deftly
sectioning the phases of JG Ballard’s career, tracing the weirdly
wonky process of Philip Roth finding his voice or summing up a mood
in a glancing phrase.
*Observer*
Erudite, eclectic and entertaining, Amis’s essays offer serious
assessments of Vladimir Nabokov and Saul Bellow alongside a tour of
the porn industry, an exemplary prolife of John Travolta and a
hilarious analysis of the hazards of being christened "Tim".
*Sunday Times, Book of the Year*
He is our sure-footed mountain guide, leading us gleefully from one
delight to the next in these quotation-rich encomiums. “Panegyric
is rightly regarded as the dullest of all literary forms,” he
writes in Nabakov’s Natural Selection, a scintillating panegyric
that absolutely achieves its stated aim… The literary essays will
leave you educated, enlightened, entertained… I defy anyone not
called Tim to get to the end of the Henman-inspired essay, The
Tims, without a helpless guffaw… Martin Amis is a great writer and
a great reader.
*Sunday Times*
There is no one alive — with the possible exception of Adam
Mars-Jones — who can hear an ailing sentence and diagnose its
problems with such devastating and gleeful precision.
*Financial Times*
Mellifluous elegance is an odd desideratum – Beckett possibly
wasn’t going for that – but as Amis exhibits, it’s not the worst
thing to have around… It turns out that brisk generalisations,
nurtured for decades, lend themselves to potent writing. Certitude
is the key to Amis’s superhuman flair – and what makes this
collection so compelling… Part of the appeal of reading Amis is to
holiday in a world of clean, legible order… The Rub of Time is a
riot of immaculately delivered punchlines and improbably sustained
set-pieces (a longish footnote on Trump’s use of “bigly”), of bons
mots and mots justes.
*New Statesman*
Some absolutely A-grade literary journalism… It only takes a glance
at the Larkin stuff…to reveal the depths of Mart’s engagement, his
habit of throwing out apercus in half a line that would detain most
critics for a paragraph… and his eye for individual
physicality.
*National*
America, the slatternly muse, inspires Amis’s best writing… It is
Amis’s sensitivity to language which allows him to describe the
different sounds so precisely… His style, bolstered by Latinate and
literary diction, doesn’t allow the reader to become complacent, to
turn her gaze from the subject, to let her mind wander… Perhaps it
is best to view Amis as a miner: deep underground, in the narrow
tunnels and cramped caves, among the labour and the coughing and
the dirt, he finds gold.
*Varsity*
Typically glorious, typically enraging… You’re also reminded of his
astuteness as a reader, and his instinctive grasp of what an
author’s up to… Very few writers can surprise and delight in the
way Martin Amis can. There may be pratfalls to come, there may be
breaches of decorum, but that ear for the thought-rhythms will have
to get a whole lot tinnier before I stop reading him.
*Daily Telegraph*
There are some terrific essays here, especially those on the
literary subjects most dear to him (Bellow and Nabokov booking the
volume) and those to whom he was personally close, such as his
father and Christopher Hitchens. A review of Nabokov’s barely
sketched last novel, The Original of Laura, titled Nabokov and the
Problem from Hell, grapples with greater honesty than any other
critic has managed with Nabokov’s “nympholepsy” or, as it might be,
sympathy with paedophilia.
*Evening Standard*
Joyously self-deprecating… As in tennis, Martin Amis boasts a range
of lightly executed master strokes, and sustains an entertaining
game… Amis is as big a personality on the literary court as the
players he lionises. The critical distinctions he draws between
Vladimir Nabokov, the patrician émigré spinning “divine levity” out
of his family’s flight from the Holocaust, and Saul Bellow, the
loving immigrant with a visionary intellectual range and sentience,
most often hit the mark.
*Irish Times*
Stunning… What a read.
*Mail on Sunday*
This collection of essays, written over 30 years, is a joy to dip
into as he brings his critical eye and linguistic dexterity to bear
on literature and politics, sport and pornography.
*World of Cruising*
Think of Milton’s… Darkly glittering Satan – vivid, passionate,
partisan and fatally persuasive – and you have Martin Amis... The
Rub of Time is written in the teeth of mortality. Here is Amis,
often at his most brilliant, quick, passionate, very funny and up
to his eyes in the mess of being human… For all their cleverness,
these essays are characterized by their emotional engagement. Amis
gathers his personal canon around him, as you might pull a cloak
tight against the cold and coming dark… It’s Life that Amis is
interested in. His plea, addressed to Time, is: give us just a
little more Life, damn you.
*Spectator*
Euphonious, penetrating and very funny. Amis on Larkin. Amis on
porn. Amis on Amis. You’d better get it.
*Spectator*
Martin Amis’s non-fiction stretches the mind and the vocabulary of
his readers. He is acutely perceptive, and illuminates and reveals
an author or a book. The Rub of Time…, his recent collection of
pieces written between 1986 and 2016, is brilliant on politics,
poker, people and place. Unmissable.
*Spectator*
They are also little masterpieces in themselves - almost every
sentence in my copy is in underlined. Amis is a good novelist but
he's a brilliant essayist.
*Guardian*
[Amis] knows how to make his words stick in your head. A real
treat
*Evening Standard*
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