The Rub of Time by Martin Amis – brilliant, except when it’s not

Amis is sublime on JG Ballard, writes Anne Enright, but she is less convinced by his views on Islam, ‘foreigners’ and war

Some writers make poor critics because they can only ever describe themselves, so it is greatly to his credit that Martin Amis really does write about Nabokov in his essays about Nabokov, and about Roth in the pieces about Roth. His portrait of Iris Murdoch is more about her presence in life than on the page, and this gap allows in some other thing that is hard to identify – is it sorrow? “I knew Iris; I have respectfully kissed that cunning, bashful, secretive smile” – maybe it’s just Oxford.

His piece on JG Ballard is sublime for managing to illuminate the work of both writers at once, and should stand as a classic in any discussion about influence, but it is hard to see anyone other than Amis in a piece about Saul Bellow’s essays. This reads like a manifesto, a note to self. Bellow is “abnormally alive to social gradations”; a highbrow writer who nonetheless has “a reflexive grasp of the street, the machine, the law courts, the rackets”. He is a “rampant instinctivist”, whose “fictional and non-fictional voices intertwine and cross-pollinate”. Bellow had certain core principles: The writer must “resist the heavy influences” of people such as Flaubert and Marx as well as “the savage strength of the many”, because the imagination has an “eternal naiveté” that he cannot afford to lose.

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