Stranger Than Fiction

All this will be painful for the legion of Amis fans who still love him for novels like "The Rachel Papers" and his masterpiece, "London Fields." Those books were hateful, too. But Amis's rage was always balanced by his inky sense of humor and delight in playing with language: he read like a hip mash-up of Dickens and Nabokov. His targets—Thatcherite fat cats, criminals or pompous literary critics —always deserved it.

No longer. Many novelists—George Orwell, Norman Mailer, Joan Didion and, most recently, Nicholson Baker—have tried their hand at political commentary. But few have been truly great at both (even Orwell didn't manage). That may be because the skills aren't as transferable as many writers believe; you can produce a great novel from your armchair, but not great reporting. Whether that's Amis's problem, or just that he's undone by his own pique, the result is grim and unenlightening. Amis's most redeeming trait as a writer—his humor—is gone. In 1990, he explained the importance of comedy in his work by saying: "If you laugh at it, it evens things out, makes them easier to live with." Amis isn't laughing any longer. All that's left is his rage.

© 2008