The My Sinful Valentine XXXMatter of Martin

Martin Amis poses for a photo in his North London home on Oct. 18, 2005. Courtesy of Writer Pictures/Graham Jepson, via AP Images.

“They’re waiting for an autograph from Salman Rushdie,” the man behind me explained. After everything he’s been through. People were gathering behind a barricade at a door of the 92nd Street Y, down the block from the one where I stood waiting for “A Celebration of Martin Amis.” A couple of minutes passed, during which time the man behind me also decided to tell me that he thought the attempt on Donald Trump’s life seemed staged. Then the actual Salman Rushdie arrived at our door, wearing a tan Yankees cap, and walked right in, unbothered by fans. Suspicious of my line mate’s sense of the nature of the assassination attempt and his suggestion that the crowd was there for a novelist, I excused myself and went to investigate. A woman at the barricade said they were there for Murderbot. (This, I gathered from Google later, is an action-comedy TV series.)

A literary writer in 2025 may not pull throngs of fans hanging off a barricade the way an action comedy TV series can. But the crowd passing through the lobby of the 92nd Street Y, there to hear a set of distinguished writers talk about Amis, was indeed soon in the hundreds. Martin Amis, whom Geoff Dyer once called the “Mick Jagger of literature,” was among our last great literary celebrities. Along with his crew of London writer friends—which included Christopher Hitchens, Ian McEwan, and Rushdie—Amis moved like a star, back when writers (I’m told) commanded that kind of public attention.

In the lobby, some attendees self-identified as Amis diehards: Paige McGreevy, who works at the United Nations, remembered being eighteen in Barcelona, staying out until six in the morning, sleeping all day in her blackout-shaded room, and then waking up and inhaling Money in bed. The novelist Julian Tepper recalled with a cringe the time he approached Amis at a PENgala and did the whole “Mr. Amis, I just wanted to say—” thing. Another Moneyfan, Emilie Meyer, who said she was a friend of the Amis family’s, marveled at the way its protagonist combines piggishness with a nimble, pixielike wit. Meyer is a bookseller at Aeon Bookstore, and she often recommends Amis’s work to people who come in seeking books for a vacation—that way, she explained, they will always remember it as the trip when they read Amis.

Emilie is twenty-five. Most of the other young people in the crowd were there with groups from M.F.A. programs. Both the New School and NYU, I was told, arranged for tickets. Some of the students hadn’t read much—or any—Amis, but all seemed pleased to be there. Most of the attendees were closer to Amis’s age, and some were from his milieu. Anna Wintour entered; this being the second Monday of May, she was available. She sat down in the auditorium not far from literary agent Andrew Wylie, who represented Amis from the mid-nineties on. (Wintour, who also attended Amis’s London memorial service in 2023, goes way back with Amis; in their London youths, she dated his great friend the Hitch.)

A few rows back from them, I chatted with Hugo Guinness, another pal of Amis’s from those days, who fondly recalled tennis games and “lots of drinking.” Novelists were still cool and glamorous then, he said; playwrights too. He and his wife, the painter Elliott Puckette, had also attended the London memorial. This event, as the speakers soon made clear, was the New York version of that service.

The event was billed as a “celebration,” and I didn’t quite know what that would mean. I was thinking maybe a panel, perhaps some group discussion of his books. Instead a procession of venerated writers stood behind a lectern to deliver what were effectively eulogies; it was a celebration of life, two years after Amis’s death. Isabel Fonseca, Amis’s wife, reflected in gracious opening remarks on Amis’s recurrent interest in the theme of aging. She noted that he was searing on each stage of life, including old age, though he “hardly touched his own.” The speakers shared tender anecdotes about “Martin.” Jeffrey Eugenides, who spoke after Fonseca, noted that Amis was actually a “sweetheart” who’d gone to the trouble of shipping his daughter’s stuffed animal, left behind at Amis’s rental house in Brazil; cigarette ash was stuck to the stamps. (That the speakers noted that Amis could be tender did not surprise me: Anyone who has read Amis’s writing about children, not to mention the boundless sorrow of losing his cousin Lucy Partington, the victim of a brutal murder, suspects this.) Lorrie Moore described how he aged gracefully from an enfant terrible, recalling the handful of times she encountered him. She said, intriguingly, that money in his work functioned as a “La Brea Tar Pit of the soul.”

People shared snippets of conversation and memories, praised his style and personal qualities, and read long passages from Amis’s work. It was during these readings that the biggest laughs came. Amis writing about himself is probably funnier than most people could be about him. (Though it was also very funny when Fonseca said that to crack open a Martin Amis book is to wonder, “When will something truly horrible and humiliating happen to this man, or this woman?”) A. M. Homes read the opening of The Rachel Papers, and Jennifer Egan read from The Information, Amis’s great tale of literary rivalry and flailing. Nathan Heller was the only speaker who had never met Amis: “I knew him as a writer, which is the way I suspect writers would most like to be known.” He spoke to and for the many of us who also knew Amis only through his work—those of us pulled to the event by the Nabokovian throb of recognition. Of all the speakers, Heller best captured, and reenacted, Amis’s sheer sense of wonder and glee about literature. One pleasure of reading Amis is the electricity of his alertness to the world: Heller described him as writing realism with “the saturation turned up.” Recalling the “ecstatic snicker” that comes from reading both Martin and Kingsley Amis—this “somatic line of literary happiness”—Heller reminded us that reading Amis is fun. Murmurs of how great Heller was circulated in my section.

Overall, the tone of the speeches was reverent—appropriate, probably, to the occasion. Still, Amis was a writer who ventured gleefully beyond the bounds of good taste. Rushdie, who closed out the evening, recounted the cheeky word games they used to play; in one, they replaced the word Lovein titles with the words Hysterical Sex, to get to “Hysterical Sex in the Time of Cholera” and things like that. A close friend of Amis’s, he shared his regret, his voice almost breaking, that he never properly got to say goodbye. “So I’ll say it now,” he concluded. “Goodbye, Martin. And I send you a lot of hysterical sex.”

Amis’s work was the focus of the event. But Amis was interested in life—his own, and those of the writers he examined in his parallel career as a critic. As the critic Parul Sehgal (who cohosts a terrific podcast on Amis called The Martin Chronicles) wrote in 2020: “The hallmark of his own literary criticism is his interest in the pressures that life and art exert on each other.” His own life seemed to exert much. He was not a hermit type. He had a rich world—relationships, children, tennis matches, vexed paternal relations, feuds, spats, dental work (sorry!). Amis ran headlong into the mix, as any satirist, arguably any writer, should. He went after Hitchens in print, who went after him in turn. He defended himself vigorously against claims that his major dental surgery was cosmetic, and friends did the same, for example in a ten-page New Yorkerspread—covering the oral surgery, a massive book advance, and his falling-out with Julian Barnes and Pat Kavanagh—which appeared in 1995, a few months before I was born. One critic, Rushdie told the magazine, “behaved disgracefully badly in the matter of Martin.” But on Monday, none of this came up. The asterisk that sometimes hovers over conversations among young people today about his work (yes, the portrayals of women aren’t always great, but … and yes, he was sort of controversial, but …) were absent too. That’s okay: it was, after all, a celebration. It was all very pleasant for the man who, in the eighties, became the face of what one critic called the “new unpleasantness.”

Amis’s writing is stylish and screwy and grotesque and vulgar. The jokes come at an unhinged pace. He was an exquisite writer of the male body and the horrors of inhabiting one: “My hair hung on my head as if it were a cut-price toupée,” Charles Highway (Charles Highway!) reflects in Amis’s debut novel The Rachel Papers. That same character savages the “Big Boys” that are his pimples and speaks of “laundering my orifices,” as “they went all to hell if not scrupulously maintained.” A genital region is referred to as a “rig.” The names, across his books, are insane. Amis calls characters things like Spunk, 13, Fart Klaeber, Sod. A female cop (or as she calls herself “a police”) is named Mike Hoolihan. A quartet of violent dogs are Joe, Joel, Jeff, and Jon. That he called a writer-character Martin Amis, or so the story goes, caused his father to throw Moneyacross the room. Famed for his antic satire, he was later unafraid to take on—in his novels, nonfiction, and short stories—genocide and the end of the world, too.

No one is doing it like Amis did. That the contemporary fiction landscape lacks his flavor of frenzied humor, chaotic storylines, maximalist characters, and full-throated play is a loss. But perhaps that’s how it should be, especially for a critic who championed writers whose work could not be mistaken for anyone’s but their own. He was an influence—the 92nd Street Y is planning more events featuring young writers affected by Amis—but he was also singular. Perhaps his legacy, more than inspiring copycats, will be to have opened up a sense of freedom, a sense that, yes, you really can do what you want.

The auditorium in the 92nd Street Y’s Unterberg Poetry and Literature Center has the names of a handful of famous writers and thinkers emblazoned on the walls. I was amused to note that directly to the right of where I sat, the wall read SHAKESPEARE. Amis was fascinated by, and irreverent toward, the Bard of Avon. In The Rachel Papers, young Highway suggests that Shakespeare had it easy because he could just wrap things up with a wedding; far harder to make it through the narrative muck of twentieth-century relationships. And one of the all-time Amis passages, for me, is John Self’s close analysis in Moneyof a portrait of Shakespeare: “The beaked and bumfluffed upper lip, the oafish swelling of the jawline, the granny’s rockpool eyes. And that rug! Isn’t it a killer?” (A rug, in Amisese, refers to a head of hair.) Shakespeare, to the comfort of our hero, “looked like shit.” Amis, who mocked literary giants, nonetheless betrayed in his journalism, and in the frequent references to great writers in his novels, an awe for the stars that preceded him—though he never stopped denigrating playwrights, whom he suggested, in his memoir Experience, were knighted far too much. “It is very funny that Shakespeare was a playwright,” he wrote. (Amis was himself knighted posthumously in 2023.)

After the speeches, everyone filed back onstage for a charming farewell. No one took a bow. It was not a performance, not really. In the lobby, I chatted with a couple of members of the extended Amis–Fonseca family, one of whom observed that Amis talked like he wrote. The evening, they concluded, had felt authentic.

Amis showed, even early in life, a canny awareness of his own image (one doesn’t become a literary Mick Jagger by accident) and both his capacity and his inability to shape it. In a letter to his father and his then-stepmother Elizabeth Jane Howard, ahead of his Oxford interview, a teenage Amis wonders: “Shall I be refreshingly different, stolidly middle-brow, engagingly naïve, candidly matter-of-fact, contemptuously sophisticated, incorruptibly sincere, sonorously pedantic, curiously fickle, youthfully wide-eyed? Should I bow my head in solemn appreciation of the hallowed atmosphere of learning? Should I play the profound truth-seeker, the seedy anti-hero, the crusty society-observer, the all-discerning beauty-appreciator?” Fair questions, all. But his conclusion, touching and wise, is: “No, I suppose I shall end up … just … being…… myself.” Himself he seemed to stay.

Amis’s friends and readers last week, looking at his life, did not attempt holistic description of who he became. In his criticism, Amis sometimes quoted at length from the writers he reviewed. I am not reviewing Amis, of course. But in the spirit of skimming inspiration from him, I will end with a passage from Experienceabout the trouble with life and the structure of it all:

The trouble with life (the novelist will feel) is its amorphousness, its ridiculous fluidity. Look at it: thinly plotted, largely themeless, sentimental and ineluctably trite. The dialogue is poor, or at least violently uneven. The twists are either predictable or sensationalist. And it’s always the same beginning; and the same ending.

Lora Kelley is a writer who lives in Brooklyn.