Customer Reviews

Dead Babies

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I think the other reviews here for this Martin Amis novel are very apt. "Dead Babies" is a glib, superficial novel, not up to Amis's usual standards and obviously written early in his career. Characters are barely developed, the plot is obscure at best and at times completely incomprehensible, and Amis's disgust and nastiness (always present in his writing) is undisciplined here and overshadows everything else.

However, that said, even less than stellar Amis is fun to read, because he has a writing style that is so unquestionably unique and he writes phrases that pop like firecrackers. He's also scathingly funny, if your sense of humour leans a certain way.

The complaints about Amis's shallow treatments of Americans in this novel are justified, but his treatment didn't bother me too much, since he doesn't paint a much rosier picture of the English.

Like others here have said, if you've never read Amis before, I probably wouldn't start with "Dead Babies," as you might not want to read anything else. However, if you're an Amis fan, this novel lends an interesting look into the early development of a great writer.

I gave this book to a friend of mine, and she said it was the only book she'd ever read that made her physically ill. But she finished it. This book chronicles the adventures of some English twentysomethings sharing a house during the 70s. Of course there's the typical sex and drugs, as well as bizarre art movements, a family of dwarves, physical violence, and murder; but the real star is Amis' style -- vibrant and horrifying, never letting you respond any one way at any particular time. His control over the language is astounding, his authorial voice ever-elusive, and his moral sense is omnipresent and yet never simplistic or heavy-handed. This book is not genius, but it is an early work by a wunderkind who would realize his genius in "London Fields". Read it for the fun, the style, and the stomach pains.

This book is thoroughly stylish, threatening while seemingly light-hearted and funny. Although written awhile ago the characters are all around us. The drugs, sex and life of such amount to an emptyness so vast the mind boggles and Amis has done a supreme job ripping the heart out of the illusions. Amis goes deep and then even deeper. It has been an absolute pleasure translating this book.

This book touched me in places no other novel could. I felt so impressed by Amis' ability to handle drug abuse in a way that wasn't belittling or mocking as far as the victims went. He makes it very clear that these are people who deserve all the help and sympathy we can give them. Page after page, Amis' empathy flows while he presents truly alive characters who any one of us would want to meet and help. If you want a book that makes you feel like life is worth living again, this is your book. You could make the difference. Help an addict today!

In the Rachel Papers, Amis claims that as a modern writer one can no longer write seriously about such things as love, the moon's reflection in the pond, the stars... This may be the case, but that doesn't mean that you are confined to writing only about pornographers, seedy, violent urban people and wise-acre nihilists. These types of people (and they are merely types) fit better in movies and TV than they do in fiction. Because they're boring and wooden, is why. The dialouge in this book (and man, is there a lot of it) is comprised of the characters (or caricatures) all trying to be more witty and nihilistic than each other. The reader comes away with feelings about how essentially boring human conversation is. Also there is something old-fashioned about the fascination in this book with sex and drugs... If you've already had sex and experimented with drugs (as presumably most of Amis's readers have) then this book just often seems juvenile.

Also, a bone to pick re: Amis's Americans: They are wooden and reflect common Euro misconceptions about what Americans are like.
Amis seems to cling to these stereotypes (eg. all Americans are tall, tan, and filled with "American resolve" as he says in the Information, his best novel (I think)). His Americans, at least in his early fiction, are absolute cartoons, even more cardboard-like than his other characters. You can't understand a culture by watching its TV and reading its newpapers. As the kid says below, so much for the War against the Cliche. From reading Amis's fiction, I'm surprised by the fact that he actually has been here... Plus, gritty urban America is merely one facet of the country, and even within this small section, there is endless variation (eg. the world of Seattle is far from the world of Chicago).

Boy, I don't want it to seem like I don't like Amis; he's great and really funny, but this is the weakest novel of his I've read, so everything that bothers me about him kinda stood out.

His influences are so clearly felt (Bellow, Nabokov, Updike, Delillo) that you can almost pick any paragraph and easily see which of these four comes through the most. I'm not saying Amis is derivitave, though; he's got his own thing going on...

The cool thing about Dead Babies is the "time situation": in the narration, the events that you are reading are still off in the future; "now" all the characters haven't even met, the situations have barely even come together. So there is a subjunctive, elusive feel to the narrative...cool.

Personally, I'd suggest the Information if you've never read him before. And really maybe the reason his characters grate on me is because I'm too "tender and wooly" as Updike has said of himself.

This is Martin Amis at his misanthropic best. An enjoyably mean-spirited nose-thumbing in the direction of those oh-so-British comedies of manners, with an ending as dark and unpleasant (and surprisingly funny; it's one of Amis's most satisfying punchlines) as you might expect from a book called 'Dead Babies.'

Come on Martin, you can do better than this! It took me ages to read this book, which in truth is more of a play than a novel. The structure heaved, and the ending was easy. NO real surprises either, for an apparently 'shocking' book. I always look forward to the bit where Martin enters the fray though, in his little authorial asides. Nothing compared to Money.

This book was very interesting. It is about a strange assortment of people with a propensity for casual drugs and sex. Their mischief is upset when each of them finds a message about their greatest fear from an anonymous author. It's a good read if you can keep your mental images from becoming too graphic.

Yep - this is minor Amis - the two goals (that I could detect) are both fairly modest - a satire of the sex-and-drug debaucheries of the young and beautiful in mid-1970s England, and a literary satire that combines spoofs of a very English kind of drawing-room whodunnit with a very American sort of post-60s new-journalism wooziness.

Those goals are (in the first instance) a bit morally arrogant - Amis' satire gleefully rampages straight over into some abyss of merciless cruelty without the faintest hint of remorse, and (in the second instance) his targets are so narrowly drawn as to be fairly irrelevant to most readers.

But it's still very, very good - Amis' use of language is almost as sharp as that of his great hero, Vladimir Nabokov, and his very, very ruthless sense of humor could've almost made Richard Pryor or Frank Zappa cringe.

All of which is to say that this book is extremely funny - you may want to take a long shower afterwards, though Amis generally selects his targets well. Just not for the faint of heart.

-David Alston

You have to be an Amis fan to appreciate this. Along the lines of the drug infested Brit-Lit invasion (see also Irvine Welsh), this just gets a little tiring in the middle. For a better Amis read, check out Money first. If you've read that, this is a good little read.