I never could get on with Amis fils, not because I object in any way to amorous adventures as recorded by males; nor because I recoil from remembered adolescence – his line about the self looming large in those years rings terribly true. No, it’s the posturing intellectualism I dislike; the introduction of theory into the mind of someone in the very midst of action. This is far, far worse than mere self-consciousness. Frankly, it feels like a dreadful blend of cowardice – retreating behind all those polysyllables – and pretension. And it’s so horribly cold, too. It’s as if the characters are so alienated from their presence in the world, their embodied, sensational presence, that they conduct those bodies in the manner of Ryle’s “ghost in the machine”, sitting inside some cockpit in the forehead and driving the levers this way and that. In the end, it is this disdainful refusal of experience – refusal of its power to shape him, to shape the protagonist – that leaves his fiction lifeless. The obvious contrast is with Kundera, who manages to settle recorded, fully absorbed sensual experience within a process of reflection, which lives not in the character’s mind as it acts, but in the narrator’s voice as it remembers. Far, far better.

Just read 470 pages of nonsensical drivel called London Fields.

Do actual normal, well-adjusted men actually read those neurotic, post-WW2 navel gazing, novels, where men obsess about their sex lives? I’d rather have dental work than read Roth, or Amis, or Mailer.

“Long before we delegated mediating this crisis to Caitlin Moran, the wretched young man had his own literary genre: the late-20th century young man’s novel. It was born, loud and cocky, in the Sexual Revolution decades. Spurred on by the general loosening of mores and laws around the depiction of sex on the page,…”
Isn’t that where it all started to go wrong?

Allowing the sub editors the use of ‘toxic masculinity’ is to ‘frame’ the following article before a word is read.

Hel-oo, one little thing. Males have moved massively on to video games. Reading and writing are for and by women, who have populated 90% of the book industry, from writers and agents to publishers and reviewers. Surprised you haven’t noticed.

Peter York has the best analysis of Martin Amis’s success: ‘The media needed a novelist who looked like Mick Jagger’.

The most memorable scene in The Rachel Papers was Rachels’ other love interest reading history textbooks while having sex in order to prevent premature ejaculation.

I’m trying to recall if I’ve ever actually read any lit-fic published post-1965 or so, and I think the answer is no. Give me genre fiction any day of the week.