On Martin Amis

Geoff Dyer writes that Amis would be almost inevitably displeased with his biographer, Richard Bradford:

Amis is hyper-allergic to bad writing and seeing his life half-swaddled in Bradford’s sentences must have induced anaphylactic shock. Jeez, they gave me a shock – though with its suggestion of brevity, as in “short, sharp”, it is not the right word, for the sense that this is shockingly bad writing deepens with exposure. This shock came as a bit of a surprise, so to speak, since the late Humphrey Carpenter is quoted as saying that Bradford, in his Kingsley biography, rose “to Amis’s stylistic level” – enormously consoling news for those of us who have never been persuaded to read Amis the elder. Either that or, since Martin has spoken warmly of Bradford’s trawl through his father’s life, the present book represents a precipitous decline in quality.