It's fitting that this wonderful collection starts and ends with Saul Bellow, given its title. Bellow tells Amis that he took the phrase 'Moronic Inferno' from Wyndham Lewis but it is so deeply Bellovian and fits the mindset of Charlie Citrine, who uses it in Bellow's 'Humboldt's Gift', so perfectly that I want to carry on believing it has its genesis there. It's also of course a phrase with real Amisian resonance, a perfect description of the universes of 'Money', 'London Fields' and 'The Information'. This collection of Amis's high class literary journalism is contemporaneous with 'Money' and shows how lucky we were to open the LRB or 'The Observer' in the mid 1980s and find Amis given luxurious capacity for his very considerable critical gifts. As I have said before in these 'pages', I think Amis could easily have had a notable career as a literary critic without ever writing a word of fiction and this, his first collection, shows him at his absolute best, not just delivering astute, beautifully, entertainingly, written pieces on the usual suspects - Updike, Capote, Vonnegut, Didion, Burroughs but branching more widely: we see him memorably with Brian de Palma, on the Reagan campaign trail, encountering Spielberg and experiencing the Evangelical right. But the book as I say starts and ends with Bellow. At the beginning is a brilliant, razor sharp review of The Dean's December (which has a later piece on 'Him with His Foot in His Mouth' bolted on) where he anatomises the beginnings of 'late Bellow'. At the end is a piece where he meets Bellow for the first time for an interview. This would become a warm and important relationship for both of them, but it's deeply touching how Amis is transparently nervous at meeting the great man, suddenly vulnerable in a collection where hitherto he has displayed (with complete justification) a raucous confidence and authority. I hope Amis would be touched to know his loss is felt by those who value what he calls 'high style' just as acutely as that of Bellow's was years before. ( )

This is a collection of articles Amis wrote for various magazines. Some of the articles are book reviews while others are interviews with famous people predominately authors. Some of these individuals he interviewed or wrote about include William Burroughs, Gore Vidal, Gloria Steinem, Elvis Presley, Ronald Reagan, Kurt Vonnegut, John Updike, Norman mailer, Truman Capote, Hugh Hefner and Joan Didion. Some of the articles are laudatory and others are critical of the person and their actions.

His article on the Playboy empire of Hugh Hefner is one of the longer articles in the collection and much of it exposes the hypocrisy of the Playboy philosophy. It also contains some fascinating quotes from Hefner. His interview of Saul Bellow is also a fascinating read.

I tried to enjoy this collection, and for the life of me I could not figure out why I wasn't. With few exceptions, I would nod off a couple of paragraphs into every piece. Close to the end of the book, I established why. I had just read what I thought was an absolutely brilliant introductory paragraph, and I looked forward to the rest of the essay. But again, some paragraph later, I realized I was thinking about beans or some other such irrelevant nonsense.
So I went back and reread the initial paragraph, again found it interesting, and then noticed that the transition between it and the following paragraph was largely non-sequitur. I flipped back and saw that Amis had committed this mistake in almost every piece in the book. In attempt to write a great hook, he stretch himself a bit to far in then connecting that hook to the topic of the essay. ( )

Writers have to make money, and most successful authors will write literary criticism for newspapers, either book reviews or features of other authors and their work, and these occasional pieces are often bundled and published in book form. The degree of interest of these books, basically depends on the personality and style of the writer: the more distance to the object, the less interesting, while writers whose selection of authors and subjects, writing more personally and reflecting on their own work almost as much as on the authors described, will result in more lasting work.

Martin Amis papers collected in The moronic inferno, and other visits to America clearly belongs to the former, and has a very temporary, fleeting feel to it. In the introduction, Amis tries to elevate the book to a higher level, by suggesting that it is a book about America, although he himself refers to selection of occasional journalistic writing as disparate pieces. Of his hundreds of thousands of words (...) written for newspapers and magazines in the last fifteen years, about half of them seem to be about America. The other half could be about French poetry, or Japanese translations, but we know Amis is not that kind of writer. The other half is probably British fiction. The choices do not represent his personal interest in any of these writers in particular. They were "not written for his own satisfaction, but for particular editors of particular journals at particular times and at particular times" (and probably for particular rates). "The hack and the whore," etc....

The title seems a bit suggestive of disdain for his object, but is clearly explained in the preface, as a mere contemplation on the human condition in 1985. (Most of Amis' non-fiction is heavily influenced by the Weltschmerz flowing from the Cold War era.)

Thus, while Amis' collection includes all major American authors, and quite a few minor ones such as Gloria Steinheim, Gay Talese and Joan Didion. Not all pieces are on literature, some are on film. Towards the end, pieces become shorter and more disparate to include one on Steven Spielberg, an odd-out contribution on Aids, and even on Ronald Reagan.

The feel of the collection as a was rather disappointing, out-dated and revealing very little about Martin Amis himself, which could have made it of more lasting interest. I surmise that Amis' openness and honesty about the book is the ultimate "moronic irony" of which he is a master, knowing that most buyers would not read the preface before purchase. ( )

The book isn't terrible, but Amis just isn't as smart as he thinks he is. This is more or less a young writer feeling the effects of success, and it's pretty much spoiled him already. The running assumption is that you care what he thinks because he thinks it. I don't and Amis seem unwilling or unable to do much to persuade. ( )