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  • The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."
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May 09, 2008

TEV GIVEAWAY: THE WAR AGAINST CLICHE

AmwarOne of our recent commentors challenged us for having joined the Martin Amis "pile-on."  We respectfully challenge that assertion on a few levels, the key being that "pile-on" has a connotation of an unfair wrong perpetrated against a defenseless creature.  If there is a critical mass of folks criticizing Amis (and we're scarcely alone), we suspect it has a good deal to do with the frequency and the idiocy of his public pronouncements on global politics.  Now, to some extent, this is unsurprising.  Anyone who even skimmed Amis's risible Koba the Dread came away with a sense that when Amis ventured into global politics, he was on decidedly unsure footing.

But what makes it all the more disappointing (for us, at least) is as a measure of how far he's fallen.  Although he might attribute his lapses to "thought experiments," we continue to come across tin-eared sound bite after tin-eared sound bite from a man who has so publicly and intelligently declared war on the cliche - cliches that now constitute his armaments.  Put another way, if his literary criticism weren't so goddammned wonderful, his recent foolishness wouldn't disturb us quite as much as it does.  But he is capable of wondrousness.  Consider, for example, his wonderful review of Underworld, included in his magnificent collection The War Against Cliche:

''Underworld'' surges with magisterial confidence through time (the last half century) and through space (Harlem, Phoenix, Vietnam, Kazakstan, Texas, the Bronx), mingling fictional characters with various heroes of cultural history (Sinatra, Hoover, Lenny Bruce). But its true loci are ''the white spaces on the map,'' the test sites, and its main actors are psychological ''downwinders,'' victims of the fallout from all the blasts -- blasts actual and imagined. DeLillo, the poet of paranoia and the ''world hum,'' pursues his theme unstridently; he is tenacious without being tendentious. Yet even his portraits of bland, hopeful, pre-postmodern American life -- his Americana -- glow with the sick light of betrayal, of innocence traduced or abused. The ''great thrown shadow'' has now receded and terror has returned to the merely local. MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction) was exploded; and the bombs did not detonate. Still, the press-ganged children who wore the dog tags must live with a discontinuity in their minds and hearts. DeLillo's prologue is called ''The Triumph of Death,'' after the Breughel painting. In the end, death didn't triumph. It just ruled, for 50 years. I take DeLillo to be saying that all our better feelings took a beating during those decades. An ambient mortal fear constrained us. Love, even parental love, got harder to do.

Breathtaking.  From there, we've somehow come around to "Islam must get its house in order."  Hence our profound and continued irritation with the 2008 edition of Martin Amis.  He has, it seems, fallen on the battleground of his own war against cliche.

But we prefer our fond memories of the Amis continued in this volume (and in Experience), and so we are happy to offer up a lovely hardcover edition of this excellent collection of literary essays for your enjoyment.  Rules, rules, rules.  We'll take all emails, subject line "A HIT OR AMIS" (ouch, sorry), until 9 p.m. PST.  Please include your full mailing address, and previous winners are ineligible.  We'll turn to the RNG to select a winner and post the details when we're back from the trip.

Posted by TEV at 12:01 AM in Giveaways |

Comments

Very well put. Amis is much more fun and convincing when he's waging war on cliche than on terror, or islamofacisthorrorism or whatever his latest catch-all neologism is.

Posted by: Tim | May 09, 2008 at 12:48 AM

One of my favorite books to just pick up and wallow in.

Posted by: Brady Westwater | May 09, 2008 at 01:05 AM

I think it's a mistake to intimate that there's nothing worthwhile within the 2008 edition of Martin Amis, or the Amis of future years. It hurts me to see Amis digging himself further into a hole, but I cannot discount the man. I can ignore the work I find lacking. But surely the ignoble strands you rail against were there in the 2000 edition. Which is to say that Martin Amis, like many, is a complex person of stupendous strengths and tremendous faults -- this latest book being a regrettable exemplar of the latter.

But to apply a datum here, as if Martin Amis is a bottle of merlot, seems nutty to me. There are writers out there who I don't care for. But I can still find a worthwhile piece or two from an author I consider terrible. (Dave Eggers's "Up the Mountain Climbing Slowly" comes to mind.) Likewise, I also believe that writers can surprise -- whether it's a great writer turning out a shit novel or a bad writer shining with a grand one.

Point being: Why dwell so heartily on Martin Amis's evil (or anyone else's) over serial blog posts when you can either (a) get it all out in one post (as you did Hitchens) or (b) dwell on more constructive topics? This post, outlining what you find favorable in Amis, is certainly a good start. But I also know that you hate Amis's fiction. So I'm at a loss as to why you're devoting crucial energies to Amis here.

Posted by: ed | May 09, 2008 at 07:25 AM

I think they meant "piling-on" in the sense that picking such an easy target is, in itself, a cliche.

Posted by: Matt Pearce | May 09, 2008 at 08:12 AM

I think of "piling on" less as "an unfair wrong perpetrated against a defenseless creature" than as a mass of uniform items, none of which adds much to the others. In football, when the player carrying the ball has been tackled, it doesn't do much good (or take much valor) for additional defensive players to jump onto the mound--even if the player with the ball is unharmed, and is merely bored with all the grunting and leaping. And in literary parlors, little value is added when yet another commentator trains his skeptical eye on Martin Amis's *sound-bytes* (!) and then casually condemns Amis--without explanation--for the "idiocy of his public pronouncements on global politics."

I'd guess that a solid majority of the people in this country--including many liberals--feels a ring of truth to the politically incorrect assertion that "Islam must get its house in order." I certainly felt it the other day when I read in The Economist that women in Saudi Arabia "are unable by law to study, work, travel, marry, testify in court, legalise a contract or undergo medical treatment without the assent of a close male relative." If you disagree that this social system--which is predicated on sharia law and affects some 15 million women in Saudi Arabia alone--is problematic, I would hope there are enough feminists among us that you'd feel the need to explain why, rather than assuming that the answer is obvious.

http://www.economist.com/world/africa/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11090113

Posted by: Michael O'D | May 09, 2008 at 11:04 AM

It's quite sad, indeed, when a truly great fiction writer becomes so full of hubris that he forgets the whole of his art and takes himself and his celebrity much too seriously. I was once a huge fan of Amis and remain convinced he will impress us again with his fiction. (Yellow Dog was not nearly as bad as folks were saying.) But this confusion Amis now has about his ability to present dogma on issues where his expertise clearly fails him is sad. Fiction is about raising questions. I would love to see Amis climb down off his soap box and return to what he does best.

Posted by: Steven Gillis | May 10, 2008 at 05:51 AM

One day I'm gonna surge with magisterial confidence. Just like America.

Posted by: Brad Listi | May 10, 2008 at 05:43 PM

"One of our recent commentors challenged us for having joined the Martin Amis 'pile-on.' "


Just who was this scruffy knave? I hope he's been seen to with fitting ruthlessness... !

Posted by: Steven Augustine | May 11, 2008 at 05:31 AM

What was wrong with Koba the Dread? It was a feature article at book length, yes; but it was a feature article of rare brilliance, and it introduced me to certain authors and many facts that I'm glad now to know. How was it 'risible', exactly?

Posted by: Martin Petersen | May 12, 2008 at 08:28 AM

I really don't like his fiction much, too mannered or too something, but I love War Against Cliche.

My favorite part is in the review of a horrible installment in the Hannibal Lecter series, where Amis talks about what a dog the book is, and then compares the book (a horrid hog of a thing) to the man eating pigs in the book and comes out with this fantastic statement about how it stinks so much and revels in its stink to such an extent that it is like [paraphrasing through poor memory here] a dancing pig with a "twirling tail and twinking trotters." I still love that "twinkling trotters" bit. What a guy.

Posted by: MJ | May 15, 2008 at 08:40 AM

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