American Grandstand

A Stateside collection from Martin Amis

BOOKS

Martin Amis didn't exactly work his nicotined fingers to the nub on The Moronic Inferno (Viking), a casual series of forays into the chewy center of the American muddle, but the book has spots of lazy brilliance, and catches Amis in an in-between mood. (His most recent novel, Money, was nonstop heat and loathing.) A collection of book reviews and reporting pieces, The Moronic Inferno—the phrase comes from Wyndham Lewis by way of Saul Bellow—begins on an apocalyptic note as Amis envisions a possible meltdown of mindless seething "in which the moronic inferno will cease to be a metaphor and will become a reality: the only reality." Happily, Amis doesn't beat the drums of doom for too long. Steadying himself with glances at the works and faces of American authors, he scrupulously takes Joan Didion down a peg, laments the lack of an overseer for William Burroughs's unruly talent ("Burroughs has vacated the control tower, if indeed he ever went up there"), maddens the mountain ram in Norman Mailer (who later called Amis "a wimp" on British TV), and adds a little dab of Brylcreem to the beauty that is Gore Vidal: "Whereas early photographs of the growing Gore are almost embarrassing to behold (who is this strapping exquisite?), he even now resembles a pampered heart-throb cruising easily into mid-career." That "cruising" is awfully naughty, as is Amis's aside that Gay "77ry Neighbor's Wife" Talese thinks a voluptuary "is a woman with big breasts." Amis wears his humble robe and sandals only when calling on Saul Bellow, this book's hard-boiled Buddha on the road to enlightenment. To Amis, Saul Bellow is integrity and brainpower and skepticism under one shiny dome. Only in Amis's meetings with movie directors—Brian De Palma, Steven Spielberg—does the book echo with the dull thud of hackwork. When writers and writing are the subjects, The Moronic Inferno belches fire.

JAMES WOLCOTT