Martin Amis, The Rachel Papers and the lost pleasure of writers telling us exactly what they think
I've just reread The Rachel Papers, Martin Amis's first novel, and somewhere in the middle of enjoying it, being irritated by it and occasionally wondering how on earth a 23-year-old got away with some of it, I found myself thinking about criticism. Not criticism of Amis, but Amis as critic.
That might seem an odd response to The Rachel Papers, a novel published in 1973 about Charles Highway, an extraordinarily self-absorbed, arrogant character pursuing a place at Oxford and Rachel Noyes with the sort of strategic planning normally associated with a minor military campaign.
But one pleasure of rereading an early novel by a writer whose later voice became so recognisable is noticing that the machinery is already there. Charles doesn't simply experience the world. He reviews it, albeit through an arrogant, romanticised lens of literary and bodily functions. People are assessed, books are judged, bodies are inspected, sentences are mentally revised. Everything that passes through his consciousness receives a verdict. He is vain, thinks he is the cleverest person in the room, cruel, funny, ridiculous and totally lacking in empathy.
Which made me wonder whether one reason The Rachel Papers feels so unmistakably like an Amis novel is that Martin Amis was already becoming a critic. This led to a larger question.
Whatever happened to the literary critic?
When writers had opinions
I don't mean that literary criticism has disappeared. Obviously it hasn't. Newspapers still review books. Literary journals still exist. Academics, essayists, newsletters, podcasts, BookTube, BookTok, Goodreads, and probably more people publicly discuss books than at any previous point in history. We are surrounded by opinions about books.
But I'm not sure that's quite the same thing.
There was a particular kind of literary critic who once occupied a much more visible place in British and American culture. Often a novelist as well as a reviewer, the critic wasn't simply there to tell you whether a book was worth buying. The review was a piece of writing in itself. You read it because you wanted to spend time inside that critic's intelligence, even when you had no intention of reading the book under discussion. It was often more about the writer than the subject.
Martin Amis belonged emphatically to that tradition. So did his father, Kingsley Amis. So did Gore Vidal, Mary McCarthy, Edmund Wilson, Clive James, Susan Sontag, Christopher Hitchens and many others who disagreed violently about almost everything except, perhaps, the idea that books were worth arguing about. The critic had a voice and, more dangerously, the critic had a judgement.
Before Martin Amis became Martin Amis
There is something enjoyable about returning to The Rachel Papers because the Martin Amis who later became MARTIN AMIS, capital letters almost unavoidable, hasn't quite arrived yet. There is no Money. No London Fields. No The Information. No decades of arguments about his prose, his teeth, his advances, his friendships, his father, his opinions or his position in British literary life. There is just a very young novelist with an alarming amount of confidence.
Who was back only two years later with Dead Babies winning praise but shocking some critics in the process. With tht book and its successor (Success) he demonstrated that he was a writer who was not going anywhere.
Amis wrote The Rachel Papers in his early twenties, and the novel won the Somerset Maugham Award. What strikes me on rereading it now isn't simply the cleverness, although clever it certainly is. It's the appetite for discrimination. Charles Highway is forever distinguishing between things. This person is interesting; that person is boring. This sentence works; that one doesn't. This cultural object raises his status; another diminishes it. He approaches life as though somewhere, at the end of it, he will be required to submit a review.
He's also frequently wrong, and that's important because judgement is interesting partly because it creates the possibility of being wrong. Martin Amis would go on to build an extraordinary amount of his writing life around precisely that act of judgement.
The novelist who reviewed novels
Amis didn't treat reviewing as something a novelist did reluctantly between novels. Criticism became a substantial part of his work. His essays and reviews, collected in books including The Moronic Inferno, Visiting Mrs Nabokov and The War Against Cliché, range across fiction, politics, sport, celebrity and literary culture. Again and again, though, he returns to writers: Nabokov, Bellow, Updike, Roth, Austen, Dickens, Joyce.
Reading Amis on another writer is very different from reading a consumer review because the fundamental question isn't simply: Should I buy this book? It is: What is this writer doing with language?
That distinction matters. Amis could be savage, sometimes unfairly so, and he could also be extraordinarily generous. But whether praising or attacking, he treated prose as something that deserved close attention. A sentence mattered. A metaphor mattered. A cliché mattered. A writer choosing one word rather than another mattered.
Perhaps that sounds obvious. Of course words matter. We're talking about books. But spend enough time around contemporary book culture, and you begin to wonder.
From criticism to recommendation
Much of the language surrounding books now is the language of recommendation: five stars, one star, must-read, overrated, underrated, books I loved this month, books that destroyed me, books I wish I could read again for the first time. None of this is inherently bad. Quite the opposite. One of the genuinely wonderful things about BookTok, Bookstagram, Goodreads and online reading communities is the sheer enthusiasm they generate around reading. People recommend books because they want other people to experience something they loved.
But recommendation and criticism aren't the same activity.
Recommendation asks whether I liked something. Criticism asks what the thing is doing, how it is doing it, and whether it succeeds. The best criticism may eventually tell you whether the critic thinks a book is good, but the judgement means something because you've watched the argument being constructed. You have been shown the evidence.
That is why you can enjoy a great review of a book you will never read. Sometimes you can enjoy it more.
The pleasure of being told you're wrong
I miss another thing about the old literary critic: disagreement. Not outrage, because we have plenty of that on scoial media. I mean the experience of reading somebody intelligent making a case you think is completely mistaken and discovering, several paragraphs later, that you're no longer quite as certain.
A critic doesn't have to agree with you. In fact, there isn't much point having one if they do. Amis could make this particularly entertaining because his criticism often has the energy of someone who has just noticed something appalling and cannot believe the rest of us haven't noticed it too. That confidence can be infuriating, but it is also part of the pleasure.
The critic is effectively saying: Look at this. Look again. You're missing something, and then they have to prove it.
This is quite different from the instant certainty of the online verdict. A judgement becomes interesting when the critic has to stick with it long enough to build an argument. You may still think they're completely wrong by the end, but at least you've been given something worth disagreeing with.
Style isn't decoration
This brings us to perhaps the most Amis-like aspect of Amis's criticism: style. For Amis, style wasn't something added to the substance after the serious work had been done. Style was the serious work.
This is one reason Nabokov mattered so much to him, and why his criticism repeatedly returns to the sentence. The quality of the prose isn't separate from what a writer thinks. The prose is how the thinking happens. You can see an early, exaggerated version of that belief in The Rachel Papers. Charles Highway is obsessed with performance, presentation and verbal control. He wants to write the right sentence, make the right joke and create the right version of himself.
The joke, of course, is that his apparent control doesn't make him wise. Quite the opposite. But Amis already understands something he would spend the rest of his career demonstrating: how somebody says something tells you something about how they see the world.
Which is why criticism itself had to be stylish. If you're going to judge somebody else's sentences, yours had better be good.
The review as literature
This is the part I think we've lost most. At its best, the literary review wasn't merely information about another piece of writing. It was a literary form in its own right.
You could read Clive James on a television programme you'd never watched, Gore Vidal on a politician you'd barely heard of or Amis on a novel you had no intention of buying. The ostensible subject was often just the doorway. What mattered was the mind moving around behind it.
This is one reason collections of old criticism remain readable decades after some of the books being reviewed have disappeared from conversation. A recommendation expires surprisingly quickly. Criticism can survive its occasion. Nobody needs to know whether an obscure 1980s novel is worth buying in hardback anymore, but an interesting argument about what novels can and cannot do may still be interesting forty years later.
There is something wonderfully extravagant about that idea of the review. Thousands of words spent on a book that may itself be forgotten because the act of thinking about literature was considered worth reading in its own right.
Of course, there was a downside
We shouldn't romanticise this too much. The world of literary criticism that produced figures such as Amis could be clubby, overwhelmingly male and concentrated around a relatively small number of publications and social circles. Certain writers possessed enormous cultural authority partly because relatively few people were allowed access to the microphone. The same ecosystem that produced brilliant criticism also produced gatekeeping, score-settling and plenty of showing off.
Amis himself could certainly show off.
But perhaps the answer to a narrow critical culture wasn't to become suspicious of judgement itself. It was to let more people make judgements. That, potentially, is what the internet should have given us: thousands of critics, each bringing different tastes, experiences and assumptions to books that might once have been discussed by a remarkably small group of people.
Instead, sometimes it feels as though we got millions of ratings.
What Goodreads can't tell you
A star rating is incredibly efficient. It is also almost completely uninteresting. Imagine two people giving the same novel three stars. One thinks it contains magnificent prose but fails structurally. The other hates the prose but loves the characters. A third thinks the whole thing is boring except for one chapter they will remember for the rest of their life. All three responses collapse into the same number.
The number obliterates the interesting part.
Criticism begins where the rating stops. Why did that sentence work? Why did that character feel false? Why does one writer's elaborate prose sing while another's feels unbearable? Why does a novel you dislike stay in your head for twenty years? Why do you sometimes find yourself recommending a flawed book more enthusiastically than a technically accomplished one?
These are harder questions than “Did you enjoy it?”, but they're also much more fun. They require us to work out what we actually think rather than selecting the nearest number.
Maybe the critic hasn't disappeared
Perhaps I'm being unfair. Maybe literary criticism hasn't vanished at all. Maybe it has simply fragmented.
The old critic had a newspaper column. The new critic might have a newsletter, podcast, YouTube channel or TikTok account. Some of the most interesting conversations about books now happen far outside traditional literary pages, and there is something genuinely democratic about that. You no longer need an editor at a national newspaper to decide that your opinion about a novel deserves an audience.
But something changes when criticism becomes content. Speed matters. Algorithms matter. The hook matters. The thumbnail matters. The immediate emotional reaction matters. None of these things automatically prevents good criticism, but they create pressure towards immediacy.
Books are slow objects. Sometimes the interesting thing about a novel only becomes apparent after you've lived with it for a while. Sometimes you finish a book convinced you dislike it and find yourself thinking about it six months later. Sometimes a novel you adored at twenty looks completely different at fifty.
Sometimes, as I've just discovered with The Rachel Papers, it takes rereading something years later to realise what you were actually reading.
Rereading Martin Amis
I don't read The Rachel Papers now as I did when I was the same age as Charles Highway's, and at university, partly because I'm not Charles Highway's age. Thank God. I had a very different view of the novel back then, and it is certainly a novel that is of its time.
But it's also because I know what Martin Amis became. I grew up reading him, gobbling up his early novels. I can see things in the young writer that only become obvious because I've read the older one: the fascination with style, the horror of cliché, the comic cruelty, the status anxiety and the obsession with language as a way of arranging the world.
And behind it all is judgement. Charles Highway wants to judge everything because he thinks judgement demonstrates intelligence. Martin Amis became more interesting because he learned that judgement requires something else: attention.
You have to look closely enough to explain why. That, perhaps, is the difference between having an opinion about a book and writing criticism about one.
So whatever happened to the literary critic?
Maybe nothing happened. Maybe we're still here. Anyone who writes seriously about a book is practising criticism. Anyone who stops at a sentence and asks why it works is doing the same essential thing Amis did. Anyone who argues with a novel rather than simply rating it is participating in the tradition.
Perhaps what disappeared wasn't the critic so much as the assumption that criticism itself could be entertaining: that a review could contain jokes, personality, prejudice, argument, style and the occasional completely unreasonable opinion. That you might read somebody on a book not because you needed help deciding whether to buy it, but because you wanted to know what happened when that book collided with that particular mind.
That's what I find myself wanting after rereading The Rachel Papers. Not more verdicts, but more arguments. Not more stars, but more sentences.
And perhaps that's the real lesson of Martin Amis the critic. You don't have to agree with the person writing about the book.
You just have to want to keep reading them.
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