Now that Martin Amis has relocated to Brooklyn from the UK, he found time to do an interview in last week’s New York. He chats about many topics including but not limited to: “Terrorism, Pornography, Idyllic Brooklyn and American Decline.”
It sounds schmaltzy to say, but fiction is much more to do with love than people admit or acknowledge. The novelist has to not only love his characters…[t]he difference between a Nabokov, who in almost all his novels, nineteen novels, gives you his best chair and his best wine and his best conversation. Compare that to Joyce, who, when you arrive at his house, is nowhere to be found, and then you stumble upon him, making some disgusting drink of peat and dandelion in the kitchen. He doesn’t really care about you. Henry James ended up that way. They fall out of love with the reader. And the writing becomes a little distant.
