Martin Amis, the acclaimed British author best known for “Money,” “London Fields” and a dozen other novels of flash, style and substance and a fixture of the London literary scene, has died at age 73.
He died Friday at his home in Lake Worth, Fla., as confirmed by his longtime publishing house, Alfred A. Knopf. The cause was esophageal cancer. He is survived by his wife, writer Isabel Fonseca.
Amis came to prominence with what is commonly referred to as his “London trilogy” of novels: “Money: A Suicide Note” (1984), “London Fields” (1989) and “The Information” (1995). Over the span of his career, he published 15 novels as well as works of nonfiction and collections of essays and short stories. He turned his gaze inward with his well-regarded memoir, 2000’s “Experience.”
Earlier this week, Jonathan Glazer’s adaptation of Amis’ 2014 novel, “The Zone of Interest,” had its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival. The film, which centers on a Nazi officer who lives next to Auschwitz with his family, was well-received by critics in attendance.
Amis’ distinct writing style was often filled with a caustic and cynical tone in his examination of modern life, leading him to be regarded by many as an enfant terrible. “A maddening genius,” is how the Sunday Mail described him after the release of “London Fields,” while another critic once called him “the nearest thing to a [Vladimir] Nabokov that the punk generation has to show.”
It’s how he carved an identity as one of England’s hottest literary figures after starting out his career as the son of a famous novelist.
Martin Louis Amis was born Aug. 25, 1949, in Oxford, England, to respected British writer Kingsley Amis and Hilary A. Bardwell, the daughter of a civil servant in the agriculture ministry. Amis had an older brother, Philip, and a younger sister, Sally, who died in 2000.
The dynamic between Amis and his father, who died in 1955, was tense, at best. Martin began his literary life in the shadow of Kingsley, a British working- and middle-class novelist of the 1950s known for his comic novels of postwar England, including “Lucky Jim” and “I Want It Now.” As Martin rose to literary prominence, his father was hardly his biggest champion.
“My mother rang me up, and said that he got to about Page 80 with ‘Money’ before he flung it across the room,” Amis told The Times in 1990. “That’s when the character named Martin Amis appeared in the book. He’s not keen on that sort of thing.”
Amis’ first novel, “The Rachel Papers,” won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1974. His “Dead Babies” in 1975 and “Success” in 1978 helped solidify his reputation as a controversial and outspoken social commentator. He counted Nabokov and Saul Bellow among his literary heroes, figures whose literary essence critics have noted within Amis’ work. As his fame reached new heights in the ‘80s and ‘90s, his escapades and outings with friends and fellow literary cohorts such as Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes, Salman Rushdie and Christopher Hitchens were often written up in the press.
But he struggled to maintain that same fame and literary foothold he experienced in the late 20th century later in his career.
By the 2000s, Amis’ work still focused on weighty subject matter, but was more serious in tone. In “Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million” (2002), he investigates the life and atrocities perpetrated by Josef Stalin and his Soviet regime. “The Second Plane” (2008) was a collection of nonfiction and two short stories about the Western world and terrorism.
His last published work would be 2020’s “Inside Story,” which though a novel, felt like a memoir bookend of sorts to “The Experience,” with Amis blending fact and fiction in giving an insider’s look at his relationship with three influential writers: Philip Larkin, Bellow and Hitchens, who also died from esophageal cancer, in 2011. At more than 500 pages, it would be one of his longest novels.
“I’ve been trying to write this novel for 20 years,” Amis told The Times in 2020. “I abandoned it a couple of times. But it dawned on me very slowly after Christopher died that Saul had already been dead for 15 years and Larkin for much longer. …They’re all dead. Perhaps there was a bit more freedom to write fiction about them. As I keep saying, fiction is freedom and freedom is indivisible.”
Around the time of the release of “Inside Story,” Amis was said to be working on a book about race in America.
In addition to Fonseca, Amis is survived by three daughters, Delilah Jeary, Fernanda Amis and Clio Amis; two sons, Louis and Jacob Amis; four grandchildren; and a brother, James Boyd.
This obituary will be updated.
