Transatlantic Class: Martin Amis and the "Special Relationship" of the 1980s

Essay Excerpt

"Given the enormous amount of traffic—both physical and cultural—between the UK and the USA, it is surprising that Martin Amis is one of the few genuinely ‘transatlantic’ novelists of the contemporary period. Amis merits this description because he was raised and educated, and has lived in, both nations (as well as Uruguay), and because his fiction has both British and American settings and characters (often in the same novel). In this essay, I argue that Amis’s ‘transatlanticism’ runs deeper, in that the ideological shifts I detect between his early and mid-period fiction run in parallel with the nature of the so-called ‘special relationship’ between the US and the UK over the past few decades. Central to my argument (and to the novels discussed here) is the notion of ‘Americanization’: a vague but potent term in the UK that in turn reveals much about the terms of the ‘special relationship’, particularly from a British perspective. Amis’s work also serves as a useful illustration of the situation of the ‘social novel’—that is, the novel that addresses themes of social and political interest in a more or less explicit manner—in the context of the triumph of the New Right in the 1980s and 1990s."