With over 170,000 books published every year in the United States alone, it's no wonder that not every deserving work receives its fair share of critical attention. This piece is part of Overbooked, a series of reviews of overlooked and critically neglected books, and Flak's attempt to redress the balance.
Dead Babies
by Martin Amis
Vintage
As a novelist, Martin Amis is undoubtedly Marmite-esque in appeal. For every piece of gushing praise that his work receives, a tactical nuclear strike of defamatory allegations seems simultaneously to be loosed: misogyny, snobbery, Islamophobia, etc. To his credit, Amis seems to withstand these attacks with stoicism, if not always in the best of humour ("Tibor Fischer is a creep and a wretch. Oh yeah: and a fat-arse"), a skill perhaps learned from living and working in the shadow of his father, the late Sir Kingsley.
While Amis' later work (Money and London Fields in particular) remains his most highly regarded, both critically and popularly, it is also the genesis of most of this flak: tearing through the boundaries of narrative unreliability, Amis has never been afraid of, as his father put it, "buggering about with the reader." His prodigious vocabulary can also prove a source of frustration; reading a library copy of Experience recently, I came across the word "unassimilably," underlined and adorned with no less than four exclamation marks by some disgruntled previous reader. Perhaps there's a grain of autobiography in the protagonist of 1995's The Information, a writer of books so unpublishably complex that they prove psychologically damaging to nearly every reader (and there are few). While his second novel, Dead Babies, may not exhibit the fragmented, postmodern tendencies of his more critically attended works, it's an exemplar of Amis' unique prose style; the rhythm that blasts his writing along and divides readers more efficiently than any criticism of content.
The story is set in the stately Appleseed Rectory, a household of "ecstatic materialists" — drug addicts, alcoholics, and general 24-hour party people — who live in a state of near-permanent collective hangover, funded by young millionaire Giles Coldstream's regular fistfuls of £20 notes. The residents consist of two couples (Quentin and Celia, Andy and Diana) and two single men (Keith and the aforementioned Giles), most of whom are, in theory, studying for degrees at various institutions in the University of London. In practice, they're shooting birds, playing darts, self-medicating wildly and drinking a hell of a lot of gin. It's all harmless decadence, but when three Americans are invited for an orgiastic, weekend-spanning party, things become decidedly more sinister.
The delight of this novel does not, however, come in the plot, but rather in the characters. The majority are, quite frankly, ridiculous, but it's this disregard for reality which makes them fascinating; unshielded boreholes into their creator's mind. Nowhere is this more evident than in the case of the novel's anti-hero, Keith Whitehead, a morbidly obese dwarf with severe bowel problems. After a brief tour of the Rectory's rooms, this repulsive figure is introduced thus:
In the fifth and final "bedroom" — actually a fetid nine-by-nine box situated between the garage and the boiler room — Keith Whitehead lay on sandpaper blankets farting like a wizard.
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Keith, and his incredibly optimistic quest for sex, provide much of the novel's humor, as does his back-story (something neatly provided for each resident). Having obesity in the genes, his family are never more hilarious than when attempting to fit into their tiny car ("I don't care whose guts these are, they've got to be moved"), or when Keith's father's career as a chef takes a turn for the worse, it having become "quite impossible for Frank to enter the kitchen without some of him being automatically — by definition — either on the hot plate, under the grill, in the oven, or down the toaster..."
While the women — Celia and Diana — prove to be one of the novel's few faults, seeming scarcely more than moody props, Keith's male housemates are compellingly bizarre. Quentin Villiers, the charmingly upper class hedonist, orphaned by a plane crash, and editor of the university newspaper; Andy Adorno, the consummate alpha male and working class lad; Giles Coldstream, the nervous, gin-soaked and dentally-obsessed millionaire. As for the Americans — Skip, Marvell and Roxeanne — they comprise an amnesiac, a self-professed expert in and prescriber of narcotic chemicals, and a voluptuous nymphomaniac, all rendered with a precise and measured wit.
Indeed, it is this wit which is the novel's defining feature, pinning together scenario after implausible scenario, and creating a book which is by turns horrific, disgusting and darkly funny. While markedly different from Amis' later literary cleverness, Dead Babies is a riot of colors, characters and substances that certainly doesn't deserve to be neglected.
— Louis Goddard (louisgoddard@gmail.com)
