Customer Reviews

Heavy Water and Other Stories

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People talk about this Martin Amis as though he's the be-all and end-all of modern literature, like he's the Michael Jordan of fiction (only not retired). Well, guess what? They're right. It's hard to imagine anyone thinking they were truly in touch with literature today not having read Amis. He does push the envelope, the very limits of the form, dazzling with every page. But what, I would ask detractors, is wrong with that? Isn't that what great writers are supposed to do? And, this collection is no exception, showing Amis to be, for the most part, in top form. In fact, some of the pieces in the collection, such as the moving and funny 'State of England', in which a yob struggles to find his place in modern England, rank among his best work in any format. Not to mention, 'What Happened to Me on My Holiday', 'Coincidence of the Arts', and 'Janitor on Mars'. All great great great. Don't think, either, that Amis is all about the writerly pyrotechnics he so handily summons. As other reviewers have noted, Amis' writing lately is displaying a lot of, well, heart. There is empathy and compassion in these stories, mixed in with all the brilliance. Any one who thinks otherwise has probably not actually read them. You might even be a little moved by some of them, in between bouts of being dazzled. Imagine that. Highly recommended. You'll no doubt want more of Amis, so go from HW to 'Money', 'London Fields', 'The Information' and 'Times' Arrow'.

Short stories aren't Martin Amis' thing. It's just impossible to compare Heavy Water to London Fields, Money, The Information and all those other muscular big-budget novels that I find myself dipping into when I need a bit of a lift. Amis' two books of non-fiction are more entertaining. Still, to the dedicated Amis fan, Heavy Water proves that even his cast-off stuff is better than most writers' best; the book displays a tremendous elasticity of style from the hilarious role reversal of the poet and screenplay writer in the first story to the somber and technical science fiction of the 'Janitor on Mars.' Heavy Water is worth the cash outlay, but after this and Night Train, I'm ready for another meaty five hundred pager marinated in the BO of Keith Talent or BS of John Self. And I probably speak for most Amis fans.

The first story is clever and witty until it is repeated in an altered form later on. And the final story will be passed over by some readers, as it is at best annoying and at worst worthless. Mr. Martin Amis clearly is talented and quick with clever prose and he demonstrates this in his book, "Heavy Water And Other Stories". In between these extremes there are a variety of works than taken as a whole are quite good, however these are interrupted by other stories that are not up to the company they keep.

"Career Move", is the first and one of the better installments. The Author takes an aspect of life that everyone can relate to, changes it into an absurdity, and delivers a very funny and clever piece. "Straight Fiction", is a variant on the theme, and it not only seems familiar it diminishes the first story as well. The latter of the two is a bolder change of society, as we know it, for only the heterosexual need to be concerned about their being "outed". Not only does the Author tread a familiar path in his own book, but many others have played the what if game with major demographic changes at the center of their work. The issues are also quite real, and as such require a much more delicate touch, more sardonic than caustic.

"What Happened To Me On My Holiday", is a complete mystery to me. If torn from the book nothing would have been lost from this reader's experience. It may be there is an event that the story was associated with at the time it was published that would decrypt why it should amuse rather than annoy. If there is I am unaware of it.

I will read more of this writer's work but it will be as I find it, not as I spend the days searching.

It seems to this reader that when a wordsmith like Amis gets up a head of steam, all we know about good writing and, indeed, literature as a whole gets flung by the wayside. Smug, self-satisfied and so, well, British it's nauseating, my reading time on this one will not exceed the seven minutes I spent on it standing in the New Releases section.

Heavy Water is Martin Amis' second collection of short stories. He's really better at novel length, but the stories included here a still enjoyable reading. As we expect from Amis, the prose is very stylish, very clever, very self-aware. A story like "Let Me Count the Times" isn't very "deep" at all, but it's neat just to see Amis ring all the changes he can on his main subject. Even a nominally more serious story such as "Straight Fiction", about a world in which gays dominate and heterosexuals are oppressed, is mostly interesting for the careful inversion of the language.

I was most impressed by "The Coincidence of the Arts", in which an aristocratic English painter takes up a mysterious affair with a silent black woman, a beautiful Amazon. Amidst the jokes and the cleverness Amis builds to a subtle and telling moral about race and class.

This isn't a collection of great stories, or a great collection of stories, but it's consistently fun and involving, and every so often it's even better.

Martin Amis is the greatest living writer. Heavy Water is par for the course. It, too, is awesome. 'Let Me Count The Times', 'Career Move' and the other duly noted stories are worth 3 or 4 readings. Before buying though, pick this book up, feel it, touch it, then walk up to the counter and ante up the change.

As he has descended from the lofty perch of the satirist, Martin Amis's fiction has become--dare I say it?--more soulful. The best stories in his new collection Heavy Water and Other Stories--"The State of England," "The Coincidence of the Arts," "What Happened to Me on My Holiday"--attest to the increasing range and resonance of his fiction.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the final story in Heavy Water, "What Happened to Me on My Holiday." Ironically, the emotional resonance of this intensely autobiographical tale is deepened by means of a linguistic device that may initially alienate many readers. The story is narrated by an eleven-year old boy, a fictional version of Amis's son Louis, whose summer holiday on Cape Cod is shattered by the death of his step-brother (Elias Fawcett, the son of Amis's first wife Antonia Philips, who died at seventeen).

Amis represents Louis's response to this loss by means of a highly stylized phonetic speech (part American slang, part British phrasings) that is the verbal equivalent of the estrangement and stupefaction death leaves in its wake: "I dell id thiz way--in zargazdig Ameriganese--begaz I don'd wand id do be glear: do be all grizb and glear. There is thiz zdrange resizdanze. There is thiz zdrange resizdanze." Reading the story aloud to my 10 and 14-year old children, I felt Louis's grief as a physical presence--thick, hard, unyielding.

Wordsworth's "still, sad music of humanity" sounds throughout "What Happened to Me on My Holiday," preserved in a meticulously crafted fugue-like structure in which the voices of other characters and nature itself contribute to the theme of loss. Louis plays with his younger brother and his four-year-old cousin, catching crabs and minnows, understanding all too well (as his cousin does not) that a dead sprat will never return to life. He sees in the natural world intimations of the mortality he is now struggling to understand, observing the "gloud of grey" he sees rising from a pond on the day he hears that his stepbrother has died back in London: "nat mizd [mist], nat vag [fog], but the grey haze of ziddies and of zdreeds [cities and streets] . . . and nothing was glear." Elias now inhabits the distant land of memory, where Louis imagines him hurrying about "with bags and bundles . . . jaggeds and hads [jackets and hats], gayadig, vestive [chaotic, festive]".

Meanwhile, another of Louis's cousins goes into the pool without his arm-floats and must be rescued. At the end of his holiday, in the car on the way to the airport, the word "grey" returns again, like a haunting melody--the melody of mortality: "Greynezz is zeebing ubwards vram the band. And nothing is glear. And then zuddenly the grey brighdens, giving you a deeb thrab in the middle of your zgull." Now all the notes of the story converge, all the deaths come together, and Louis thinks of his brother: "one vine day you gan loob ub vram your billow and zee no brother in the dwin bed. You go around the houze, bud your brother is nowhere do be vound."

For readers new to Martin Amis, Heavy Water will serve as a bracing introduction to his arresting vision and his remarkable artistsry. It will assure the rest of us that his artistic quest is nowhere near its end.

Much of Amis' work makes the reader feel uncomfortable. The adjectives vain, lazy, narcissistic, slobbish, violent often apply to his characters. In Heavy Water, an interesting collection of shorts from a writer more accustomed to the novel form, the grottiness is familiar to experienced Amis readers.

The best stories are 'State of England' and 'Coincidence of the Arts' which focus respectively on a thuggish disco bouncer with a son at an expensive boarding school and a feckless New York painter who becomes embroiled with his black doorman, his novel, and (separately), his wife.

In these two stories in particular Amis' jazzy style, perceptive social comment and dagger wit are on full display.

The other stories are less successful. His earliest two, 'Denton's Death' and 'Let Me Count the Times' palpably flag against his more developed material.

Also, although these stories seem wide ranging in terms of theme and subject matter, they actually are quite narrow. Most of them focus on either desperate, loser males or struggling artists. Amis writes about the petit bourgeoisie and the intellegensia in urban England and New York. He is masterful over his chosen terrain. But it is a narrow one.

I received an autographed copy of this book and was hesitant to read it. I am a big fan of Martin Amis and bent the spine and folded corners in it right away!

Amis's flexability as a writer is evident in this book.

The stories in this book are different from The Rachel Papers and Dead Babies. For those familiar with his work, it fits somewhere in the middle. For those not, this would be a good one to start.

These are hard stories to get involved in, especially the ones that throw out literary agents and such ilk. I like his other work....but this was rather boring.