Dead Martin Amis, a life in struggle with many fathers. Farewell to the age of dad Kingsley – Corriere.it

Martin Amis has written a number of novels, short stories, essays. At least one novel, The information one of the most beautiful of his generation. But Martin Amis’ crucial book sprang from what marked his life. No, not just life, even death. Martin died at 73, the same age his big, bulky, loved-hated father, the comic novelist Kingsley, died. I’m talking about Experiencean indefinable autobiography, a difficult novel, an astonishing essay.

Martin faces what could not but become his problem: of being the son of a writer father, of a famous writer in the post-war years. It is not for nothing that Martin’s life and writings are dotted with so many presences that it would be difficult not to think of them as paternal, from Saul Bellow to Gore Vidal to Philip Larkin. But it is the presence of Kingsley that overflows the book in our memory as readers: not so much, not only, finally no longer, because his father was also a writer: the question belongs to all of us, as children. What is a father? How can you live next to a father, whoever he is? And again, how to live when that father who was never far away is gone? Arrived at that goal Martin Amis wrote: My life seems ludicrously formless to me. I know what it takes to make a good story, and life lacks almost everything: structure and balance, form, completeness, measure. It often happens that a life, at least in principle, resembles a successful story, but the only genre on which tragedy can always be counted.

It is difficult to say whether his premature death can be considered a tragedy. But sure in the coincidence of the years of life with the years of the father’s life you can see a shape, a balance.