Right now, in a parallel universe closed off forever from you and I, a novelist called Martin Amis is flicking through his copy of the Independent.
The pale, clear light of a January morning slants in through the tall windows as he turns the pages. He takes a sip of coffee and his eye falls on the author's Q&A he had such fun doing a couple of weeks back.
He smiles as he reads the first question - coincidentally from a fellow novelist - about the difference between his spiky, sparky fiction and his easy-going, laid-back public persona. "Your unconscious does it," was his reply. "Your unconscious does it all."
Back here, in the real world, the real Amis's responses have been a little less relaxed. He turns a routine question about which of his own novels he prefers into an attack on Tibor Fischer ("a creep and a wretch. Oh yeah: and a fat-arse"). He grinds a question about following in his father's footsteps into the dirt ("If he had been a postman, then I would have been a postman. If he had been a travel agent, then I would have been a travel agent. Do you get the idea?"). And he tells Jonathan Brooks, who finds something funny about Amis's term ("horrorism") to describe suicide mass murder, to "fuck off".
What is it about Martin Amis that inspires such rage, such envy? (Question nine: "Why are you such a snob".) His politics? His father? His teeth? What is it about Martin Amis that compels him to reply with such heat?
Perhaps the fire that drives him to pick fights with a bunch of newspaper readers is the same fire that fuels the "compulsive vividness" of his work. Perhaps a laid-back Amis is a logical impossibility, an oxymoronical chimera beyond the reach of any possible world. But as long as we remember to expect nothing more from writers than that they can write, I'll take the one we've got.
