The War Against Cliché

by Martin Amis

1998 · 505 pages

reviews
books
clichés
history and criticism
essays
fiction & literature

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About this book

Spanning three decades, The War Against Cliché showcases Martin Amis’s razor-sharp defense of style and originality, skewering lazy thought and secondhand feeling with wit, precision, and moral intensity.

Martin Amis has long waged his fiercest battles not on the battlefield of fiction, but in the trenches of criticism. In The War Against Cliché, he assembles three decades of essays, reviews, and reflections into a blistering defense of style itself—of clarity, precision, and originality against the deadening forces of lazy thought and secondhand feeling.

Across these pages, Amis appraises the giants—Nabokov, Bellow, Larkin, Updike—with a critic’s discipline and a novelist’s ear, measuring each by the same exacting standard: freshness of mind and language. He skewers pretension, sentimentality, and the counterfeit profundity that passes for wisdom in contemporary letters, his prose gleaming with both mischief and moral seriousness.

From literary obituaries to takedowns of modern mediocrity, Amis writes with the exhilaration of a man who believes words still matter—and that to write well is, always, to think well. The War Against Cliché is a master class in literary combat, brimming with the energy, elegance, and scathing humor that have made Amis one of the defining voices of his time.

Quotes

From Wikiquote

One of the historical vulnerabilities of literature, as a subject for study, is that it has never seemed difficult enough. This may come as news to the buckled figure of the book reviewer, but it's true. Hence the various attempts to elevate it, complicate it, systematize it. Interacting with literature is easy.
Does screen violence provide a window or a mirror? Is it an effect or a cause, an encouragement, a facilitation? Fairly representatively, I think, I happen to like screen violence while steadily execrating its real-life counterpart. Moreover, I can tell the difference between the two. One is happening, one is not.
It would be inaccurate to say that John Fowles is a middlebrow writer who sometimes hopes he is a highbrow: it has never occurred to him to believe otherwise. There is a difference, morally.
Vidal is determined to be a) in the thick of things, and b) above the fray. He knows everybody and he doesn't want to know anybody. He has had lovers by the thousand while doing 'nothing' — deliberately, at least — to please the other.