Older people with confusion

Barker, Duncan

doi:10.7748/nop.15.2.38.s20

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“…Zadie Smith has described (somewhat facetiously) how she was 'busy plagiarising' Amis as a young writer, 73 and her early novels certainly suggest a degree of influence; 74 and Nicola Barker has called Amis her literary 'Daddy'. 75 Adam Thirlwell, whose early literary mentor, Craig Raine, is another member of the Amis, Barnes, McEwan literary set, has often been compared to Amis, while his personal blend of European and American influences is reminiscent of Barnes's cosmopolitan style. David Mitchell (whose Amisian tendencies I have adumbrated elsewhere 76 ) even appears to model one character on Amis in his 2014 novel The Bone Clocks, and the compilation technique of several of his books blurs the lines between story collection and novel in a way that recalls Barnes's approach in A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, just as his multi-voiced narratives could draw useful comparison to Barnes's Talking it Over and Love, etc.…”

Section: Stylistsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Cambridge Companion to British Fiction: 1980–2018

Boxall¹

2019

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In a eulogising essay following the death of John Updike in 2009, Ian McEwan wrote: 'American letters, deprived in recent years of its giants, Bellow and Mailer [and now Updike], is a levelled plain, with one solitary peak guarded by Roth.' 1 Philip Roth would go on to announce his retirement from writing in 2012 and passed away in 2018, thus eradicating the final face from McEwan's literary Mount Rushmore. McEwan's friends and peers, Martin Amis and Julian Barnes, similarly wrote eulogies for Updike; just as McEwan and Christopher Hitchens (another member of their literary set) had done for Saul Bellow in 2005 ('What other American novelist', asked Hitchens, 'has had such a direct and startling influence on non-Americans young enough to be his children?' 2 ), while Amis and McEwan both spoke at Bellow's memorial in New York. Amis also wrote an account of Roth's oeuvre the year after his retirement, 3 and followed this with an appreciation after his death, while McEwan remembered Roth on BBC Radio. 4 Thus, in the early years of the twenty-first century, three of Britain's most acclaimed and criticised novelists -Amis, Barnes and McEwanfound themselves reflecting on the enormous influence of a senior generation of American writers now passed, and were perhaps left wondering where this placed their own generation on the altered literary landscape. Certainly, Zadie Smith, one of the major-voices-to-be of a new twenty-first-century literary generation, regarded Amis, Barnes and McEwan as a collective in its own right: 'Better to cultivate a cipher-like persona, be a featureless squib called Mart, Jules, Ian', writes Smith in her debut novel, White Teeth (2000), suggesting her indebtedness in perhaps the way they would most appreciateironically. 5 Smith was not the first to identify these writers as a group or gang. Since at least the 1980s the media has imagined them as an exclusive all-male group of cronies and sometimes rivals, also including Salman Rushdie and Hitchens among their ranks (both of whom became American citizens), as well as the poets Craig Raine and James Fenton, and more senior figures like Clive James and Ian Hamilton. Many of these writers were first corralled under the stewardship of Hamilton at

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Section: Stylistsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Cambridge Companion to British Fiction: 1980–2018

Boxall¹

2019

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Older people with confusion

Cited by 1 publication

References 0 publications

The Cambridge Companion to British Fiction: 1980–2018

The Cambridge Companion to British Fiction: 1980–2018

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