To rate his achievement at its least, Martin Amis has been for upwards of 25 years the By Appointment purveyor of classic sentences to his generation. In Money (1984) he achieved something that was as much of a breakthrough for our insular literature as Bellow’s had been in The Adventures of Augie March (1953) for American writing, a manner electric, impure and unimpressed, except sometimes by itself, mixing refracted slang with swaggeringly artificial cadence. If it seems astonishing that Money is now nearly as old as Augie March was when Money itself was published, then the reason must be the aura that certain books take on, of seeming to inhabit the permanent present they have defined. These books stand out, even if you can see their flaws, sending a little pulse of shock not just into the future, producing wave after wave of imitators, but into the past, making recently viable styles seem to recede into distance.

LRB 21 June 2012 | PDF Download