Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: The ClinchIt was Jane Austen who clinched it.When Martin Amis died last year, an essay he had written for The New Yorker in 1995 titled 'Jane's World' resurfaced on Twitter. 1 In this essay, Amis recounts how he and Salman Rushdie found themselves trapped in the cinema confronted with Richard Curtis's Four Weddings and a Funeral, a film they both loathed; Amis wrote it off as 'Jane Austen, in a vile new outfit'.I have always hated this film: how Andie MacDowell's career survived this bafflingly empty performance long enough for her to gain my favour with her charming turn in Magic Mike XXL I will never understand.To discover that Amis felt the same way (about Four Weddings-he never voiced publicly his views on the Magic Mike franchise) warmed me to him.I read on to find that we felt the same way about many things, the most crucial being Jane Austen.Here was Amis, unashamedly calling himself a 'pious and vigilant Janeite', his tirade against the film quickly morphing into a celebration of Austen's Pride and Prejudice.2 Amis praises that, 200 years after Austen's death, her most celebrated novel 'goes on suckering you'; it is obvious that Elizabeth and Darcy must end up together by the nature of the genre, Amis admits, but even so, Austen inspires a 'panic of unsatisfied expectation' in readers who know the plot back to front.Amis's London Fields (1989) suckers its readers too: It is a story that from the outset tells you where it will end and yet torments you with panicked imaginations of what might take place.3 Labelled as a 'Who'll do it' rather than a 'whodunnit', the novel follows American writer Samson Young (Sam), on a stay in London to cure his writer's block.Sam, through an unlikely friendship with professional cheat and darts extraordinaire Keith Talent and wretchedly good Guy Clinch, uncovers a plot by the irresistible Nicola Six to bring about her own murder.Nicola, an erotic cartoon of a femme fatale who employs sexual prowess to tempt fate, has garnered much attention in the critical discourse surrounding Amis, many citing her as prime evidence for their arguments that his writing about women is misogynistic.In a 2001 episode of BBC Radio 4's Bookclub, 4 the discussion heads straight for Nicola.One reader raises Amis's claim that reading Gloria Steinem made him a feminist,
Source: Critical Quarterly
DOI: 10.1111/criq.12801
Author: Anna Devereux
Institutions: University of East Anglia, The University of Texas at Austin
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $2,760
OpenAlex ID: W4403285833