Culturebox: Martin Amis in Brooklyn

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culturebox Martin Amis in Brooklyn A few local tips for the tennis player and famous author. By Troy Patterson Updated Monday, Aug. 1, 2011, at 10:07 AM ET On the 8th day of December, in the year 2010, a certain parcel of land, with the buildings or improvements thereon erected, situated in the Borough of Brooklyn, was granted and released to Martin Amis and Isabel Fonseca. The British novelist and his wife bought a townhouse in an area called Cobble Hill, which, with its Greek Revival and Anglo-Italianate architecture, somewhat resembles the Greenwich Village through which the protagonist of Money lithely slithers: "Bank Street looked like a chunk of sentimental London, black railings and pale blossoms girding the bashful brownstones ...." Renovations are coming along nicely, which passes for cultural news for a few reasons. The most minor of these is that Amis is the greatest living English-language prose stylist, and the neighborhood is a New Yuppie stronghold. He represents our culture's best hope for coming up with some fresh jokes about $1,000 baby strollers and local organic cousa squash. This kind of expatriation seems the most natural narrative destiny for this most American of British novelists. Typing that last phrase, I realized that I stole it from Joyce Carol Oates, who once used it when introducing an Amis reading at Princeton University. Then I realized that the man's biographers will trace his faith in this country back to 1959, when his father toiled for a year in those very academic flatlands. Amis sometimes performs a set piece about that Christmas morning, when he received presents including a robot, a knife, an axe, and a six-pack of cherry bombs and realized, "This is a wonderful country." The wonder has been a regular feature of Amis' fiction and journalism. He believes with Saul Bellow that our moronic inferno is where the real modern action is, and the narrator of London Fields cuts to the heart of the matter: "Most places just are something, but America had to mean something too, hence her vulnerability--to make-believe, to false memory, false destiny." This is a crazy place--"crazy like an X-ray laser"--and Amis characters tend to appreciate the vivacity of New York, its cultural capital, "all the contention, the democracy, all the italics, in the air." To continue reading, click here. Troy Patterson is Slate's television critic. Join the Fray: our reader discussion forum What did you think of this article? POST A MESSAGE | READ MESSAGES Also In Slate Welcome to Brooklyn, Martin Amis. Here Are a Few Local Spots You Must Visit. The Woman Who Made It Cool for Teen Books To Be Grotesquely Violent Five Great Articles About the Eccentric Geniuses of High Fashion	Advertisement
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