Martin Amis / Style Supremacist

MARTIN AMIS
Illustration by Triunfo Arciniegas

MARTIN AMIS

STYLE SUPREMACIST

Few writers are as rapt and rigorous in their celebration of prose.


Thomas Mallon
January 29, 2018

Martin Amis has in his life generally toed what he calls “the Flaubertian line”—the belief that writers generate their boldest imaginative success by keeping things stable and routine at home. His novels contain little coziness and much mass murder, their daring perhaps leveraged by his own domestic regularity. Amis’s more serious tabloid brushes—over a change of literary agents, in the nineties, and a change in residence, from London to Brooklyn, in 2010—have been widely spaced and personally resented. He fights an inclination toward grudges (“acrimony pageants”) and, now and then, with weariness or exasperation, has had to cudgel back against charges of misogyny and, more lately, Islamophobia. (“What I am is an Islamismophobe.”) He remains needlessly concerned about “left-handedness”—the slackening that can happen “when writers of fiction turn to discursive prose.” His nonfiction books now number half as many as his novels, and the connection between both stretches of the shelf is organic and secure.

Vargas Llosa / Restless Realism

Illustration by Triunfo Arciniegas

Restless Realism

Mario Vargas Llosa’s imagined lives.

BIOGRAPHY

Thomas Mallon
March 9, 2015

Vargas Llosa has a zookeeper’s tenderness for the human “fauna” he describes in his fiction.CREDITILLUSTRATION BY PATRICK BREMER

Vargas Llosa has filled his books with enough personal refractions to remind one of Alberto Moravia’s sense of the novel as “higher autobiography.” But if he has a genuine alter ego, an escapist projection of himself, it is the character of Don Rigoberto, introduced, in 1988, in a slender Ovidian tale called “In Praise of the Stepmother” and revived, a decade later, in “The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto” (1997). A Lima insurance executive by day, Rigoberto is by night a “libertarian hedonist,” enveloped in books and music and baroque sexual activity with his voluptuous second wife, Doña Lucrecia. He dictates her hairdressing and her jewelry, then orchestrates their erotic role-play with highbrow connoisseurship, directing Lucrecia to play figures painted by Titian and Boucher and Jordaens. Told in comically overdone prose (“We will take our pleasure in that half twilight that already is raping the night”), the couple’s adventures are enhanced by a comely housemaid named Justiniana and threatened by Don Rigoberto’s pre-adolescent and highly sexualized son, Fonchito, a cross between Tadzio and Lucifer whom his stepmother can’t resist.