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Rating: 
Summary: One of our best critics...
Review: Good criticism is always a pleasure to read. Particularly when it's written with such flair. Amis has a caustic pen - informed and sprinkled with ironic humor. As the title of this collection suggests, his target is literary cliche, and he has an uncanny ability to ferret them out, revealing that our best author's can slide into this lazy habit. It became obvious to me after reading this text that Amis' range of reading is massive in scope. It seems the man will read and review anything if it catches his attention. Like most of us he has his hobbyhorses and favourite writers, but through the years has given us a wide variety of criticism from popular paperbacks to Joyce's 'Ulysses'. We all have our literary heroes and models, and Amis has his - Vladimir Nabokov. In fact we have an entire section devoted to the man, commenting on his lectures, plays, short stories and the novels. The reader can gain greater insight into literature from well-written criticism, and Amis does this for us. After reading his comments on Nabokov, it became evident to me that my reading of this great author was only superficial and required further study. This is what good criticism should do: provide greater insight and prompt further reading.This collection contains subject matter other than literature that Amis appears to have great concern; namely nuclear bombs and the sport of chess. Amis is a child of the sixties, when the threat of nuclear disaster was very real. Our new generation seem now to be more concerned with Globalism than the threat of a nuclear holocaust. But the threat is still eminent and should be talked and written about today. Amis' comments twenty years ago are still relevant and awareness of this impending doom should be kept firmly in the public eye. Amis' reviews on the game of chess were also quite informative, revealing to me a whole other world. A good writer can make the most mundane subjects look interesting, and Amis can do this effortlessly. As a practitioner-critic, Amis is one of the best we have...and this collection more than proves it...good reading.
Rating:
Summary: Commentary from a Smartmouth
Review: If Martin Amis were in your creative writing class, you would probably love his writing, but hate his guts. The man is a terrific, terrifying critic and it feels almost absurd to concoct a review of his collection of essays and reviews in The War Against Cliche. Amis is a smartmouth--he doesn't hold back, but what he has to say is so witty and clever that it's OK (so long as, I think, it is not your work he is commenting on). His writing is fabulous and he is not afraid to say exactly what he thinks, not afraid to offend anybody. This is a great collection.
Rating:
Summary: Amis, light of my life, fire of my mind
Review: Martin Amis doesn't write for you. He doesn't write for himself. He doesn't write for his wife, or his kids. He doesn't even write for his publisher, or the various periodicals to which he contributes. Martin Amis writes for Vladimir Nabokov. Well, maybe for Kingsley, too, but mostly for Nabokov. You can see it in every labyrinthine sentence, in the complex prose, in the wit, the intellect, and the iconoclastic tendencies that reign over this stunning collection of literary reviews, taken from the last 30 years of Amis' writing career. Okay, he's not only writing for Nabokov. So who is Amis' ideal reader? One who has an "imagination, memory, a dictionary, and some artistic sense." Amis searches to challenge you, but also to entertain. And that passing remark about the dictionary was not made in jest. Amis is the one author whose logocentrism forces me to the dictionary with pleasure. Nearly every paragraph. The collection's title comes from Amis' belief that "all writing is a campaign against cliche", not just in a literary sense, but also in a human sense. He takes his role in this campaign very seriously, as an author, stating that we should expect artists "to stand as critics not just of their particular milieu but of their society, and of their age". Even so, he regrets the advent of the artist-critic, i.e. novelists 'feeling' their way through criticism, rather than using the tools of theory to review literature. Instead, Amis, who could easily have traded on his name and fallen in step with these artist-critics, uses a background of unabashed joy in the face of literary theory to give his reviews weight. If the above makes the collection sound pedantic and tiresome, don't worry. It isn't. Amis may be serious about his job, but he sure can have some fun. In a piece on Hillary Clinton's child-rearing instructional, Amis grumbles about her quaint but queasy neologisms: "'Stomachachy'... is not a campaign stop on the way to Poughkeepsie but Hillary's epithet for a pain in the gut." Later, in a piece on soccer (ahem, football), he begins cheekily: "Readers... who like football probably like football so much that, having begun the present article, they will be obliged to finish it." The rest of the paragraph is spent teasing the reader, threatening to never get to the meat of the article, with full knowledge that the reader isn't going anywhere. In discussing why Cyril Connolly only wrote one novel ("The Rock Pool"), Amis notes that Connolly was "ruined by too much fiction-reviewing: he knew all the larks, and he knew them all too well." Amis, prolific novelist and critic, doesn't fall into this trap. He is able to keep his fiction out of his reviewing. I'm thankful, because I love Amis' fiction. But his reviewing is still loaded with the kind of samurai imagery that Amis is so adept at. Discussing Elmore Leonard's penchant for rejecting the imperfect/present/historic tense, in favour of "a kind of marijuana tense, ... creamy, wandering, weak-verbed." I just loved that when I ran across it: "the marijuana tense". Amis' reviews are alive, vital, and vivid. They are also quite obsessive; his obsessions can be seen quite clearly. Repeatedly, he references: the affective fallacy, the intentional fallacy, the artist manque; his pet peeves concerning writers, which include their lack of talent, their inability to control syntax, their ignorant repetition, and, of course, their use of cliches; his own canon of literary greatness, against which all is to be measured, that includes Saul Bellow, John Updike (with reservations at times), Philip Larkin, J.G. Ballard, and literature's "'complete' player" Vladimir Nabokov. The Nabokov obsession may one day ruin Amis. He just can't get the great Russian writer out of his head. A quick check of the index shows that references to Nabokov appear on 51(!) of the book's 490 pages. He notes on one hand that the word 'Kafkaesque' is losing meaning due to overuse, but with the other hand he does the same thing to the word 'Nabokovian'. It should be no surprise, then, that the collection's last and longest piece is a deconstruction of "Lolita" so brilliant that it almost made me want to read that distressing book once more. I adore Amis. His writing is challenging and thought-provoking, while providing a portal to the world of this curmudgeonly, crusty, snobby author (those are all compliments, I assure you). He's opinionated, and more than able to draft persuasive arguments to prove his opinions correct. And last, but certainly not least, he loves writers and he loves readers. If you are a serious member of either club, I'll bet that you'll love Amis too.
Rating: 
Summary: 3.4 Stars, but should be soooo much better
Review: Martin Amis is the son of the late Kingsley Amis. Half of England's literary critics consider Amis pere to be one of the greatest English novelists of the last half of the previous century. The other half don't disagree, they just find that fact enormously depressing. Martin Amis is the author of several novels which, highly influenced by Nabokov, are very funny, extremely mordant and much better than his father's. Martin Amis is also a skillful and intelligent and amusing journalist, as well as an accomplished memoirist. So surely this collection of literary criticism and essays should belong on the same high shelves with Christopher Hitchens' For the Sake of Argument, Dwight Macdonald's Against the American Grain, Alexander Cockburn's Corruptions of Empire, Conor Cruise O'Brien's Writers and Politics, Alan Bennett's Writing Home, James Wood's The Broken Estate or even Tom Paulin's Ireland and the English Crisis. Yet there is something a bit off about collection. We start off with a collection of reviews on masculinity, looking at Iron John, Hillary Clinton, Nuclear War and Pornography. Then it's on to a collection of reviews of English writers, then to an extended defence of his father's closest friend, the poet Philip Larkin. We proceed to reviews of more canonical writers, then a review of popular novels, then a whole section on Vladimir Nabokov. We then go on to a section on American writers, a section labelled "obsessions and curiosities", a whole section devoted to John Updike, another section that is mostly about V.S. Naipaul and then five concluding essays on great novels. Surely there is much for everyone to enjoy. It's not that Amis isn't amusing. Consider this passage on Michael Crichton's The Lost World: "Out there, beyond the foliage, you see herds of cliches, roaming free. You will listen in 'stunned silence' to an 'unearthly cry' or a 'deafening roar'. Raptors are 'rapacious'. Reptiles are 'reptilian'. Pain is 'searing'." Or consider this comment on George Steiner's book on the 1972 Fisher-Spassky match: "Yet one of the more attractive things about Steiner's new book is how refreshingly unSteineresque it is...Page after page goes by without any reference to Auschwitz." All this is well and good, but something about is palls. Perhaps there is something too easy in making fun about a book as unrelievedly wretched as Richard Rhodes' book on sex life. One can't help by comparing it to Katha Pollitt's review of the same book in the New Republic to note that something is off. Sometimes Amis' attacks suffer from the passage of time. Did people really think two decades ago that John Fowles was one of the great living English novelists, and that D.M. Thomas was one of the most promising writers around? Good of Amis to recognize that wasn't true, but his criticisms lack the stylistic brilliance and moral indignation that marks Dwight Macdonald's polemic against James Gould Cozzens. And what is the point of writing four reviews about Iris Murdoch if at the end she is not perforated like a pincushion, but leaves her to write still more novels? Amis despises bad writing but he is kinder than his hero Nabokov to the offenders. But one does not sense a genuine sense of outrage at the sight of a literature slowly poisoned by the middlebrow and the bland. Karl Kraus's writings were once praised to be like "public executions." Amis' own comments are surprisingly genteel in contrast. Other thoughts? There is a review of an anthology of modern humor that promises to be very cruel against the poor editor, the late Mordecai Richeler. But by the end of it Amis' review seems to have turned into an example of what he is criticizing. And one of his examples of bad humour, a passage by Stephen Leacock, undermines everything by showing signs of being amusing. The defence of Larkin does benefit from the fact that saying Larkin was one the last half-century's great English poets is less depressing that saying Kingsley Amis was one of the last-half century's great English novelists. But it is striking that Larkin and Amis sr were among the last people on earth who would look beyond the ungenerous, self-pitying and spiteful surface and praise the poetry. Can't imagine them being so nice about Brecht and Neruda, but then Brecht and Neruda had the misfortune of being dedicated Communist and superior poets. And I think Amis is quite wrong to think Martin Seymour-Smith unusually exotic and esoteric to consider Pirandello the last century's greatest writer of short stories. The praise for Ulysses does remind us of Joyce's considerable talent for the striking image. But literature is more than a series of brilliant metaphors and striking images. Amis does not really confront those like Dreiser, but also Dostoyevsky, whose style does not match Nabokov's peerless sheen but whose achievement is so much greater. At least Martin Amis appreciates Kafka, which is more than you can say for his father.
Rating:
Summary: Highly intelligent writing!
Review: Oh, to be able to write like Martin Amis! The intelligence! The wit! 'The War Against Cliche' is packed with literary criticism that sparkles on its own as outstanding non-fiction and it is immensely pleasurable to read! This collection of Amis' writing spans 30 years of his work. One can see how the writing has matured along the way, but even in the beginning he was already great. I have not read most of the authors that Amis covers. 'The War Against Cliche' has helped to put a few more titles on my wish list, as books that I absolutely must read, and it has also helped me to whittle out a few authors, as ones I'll probably never be interested in reading. Do read this book! Warning: have a dictionary nearby!
Rating:
Summary: Excellent
Review: perhaps the funniest, most acutely perceptive book i've ever read. Amis is excellent on style, wide-ranging in scope (early on, we have the unforgettable depiction of the new man, nappy in one hand, pack of tarot cards in the other), and amusingly critical of his youthful self (he lambasted a new collection of Coleridge's work without bothering to thoroughly acquaint himself with its contents). i didn't agree with all of his 'findings'. while Amis makes an excellent case for the undeniable stylistic mastery of Bellow's 'The Adventures of Augie March', he doesn't acknowledge the rambling nature of the book, the great lists of characters that are wheeled on and off all the time so that the reader struggles to remember anyone but the narrator and his brother, the boring avuncular tone. overall - leaves other literary critics fumbling with their trainers in the starting blocks while he's already run the race, picked up the medal, and is taking his shower in the changing rooms.
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Summary: Wit and - well deserved - criticism
Review: This collection of Amis'best essays cover a wide variety of topics from reviews of good and bad writers to Hillary Clinton, a hilarious endictement of Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, The Space Shield, Chess and an outline of the books he most admires from Nabokov to Vidal. i have yet to read all the essays and have thus far concentrated on the less litertay ones, those that deal with public figures and issues. i found thee alone to be worth the price of the book. As the title of the book suggests Amiks aims his criticism toward uncritical and banal thinkers. it is not, however, a necessarily political book. Amis criticizes art on its own merit and not its relevance to a social or political cause. In this sense it is different than an another excellent essay collection by Christopher Hitchens, Unacknowledged Legislation, who stresses the political obligations of writers.
Rating: 
Summary: Martin Amis at His Best
Review: This collection of essays and reviews should be recommended to everyone who has a healthy disdain for the elitism of the literary establishment. Amis writes solely from the conviction of his mind and nothing else; whatever tradition and well-regarded beliefs, he uses for his own argument (which often goes against the tradition). His essay on Cervantes, and the endless boredom that is "Don Quixote" is merciless, funny, and surprisingly well-founded. His reviews for Updike, Bellow, and Ballard read fine as a balanced retrospectives for their oeuvres, and his essays on Joyce's "Ulysses" and Nabokov are must-reads. There are times when he's given to much rhapsodizing and exaggeration. For instance, his analysis of Bellow's "Adveuntures of Augie March", although beautifully written, is hardly objective. It's not much of a review but a paean. These unsavory moments appear in his evaluation of Updike as well. This man loves his Americans. But all in all, these essays represent what best criticism can be: intelligent, highly informative, and always rooted in the common sense.
Rating:
Summary: Very funny
Review: This is a collection of reviews and essays written over a long period. Most of them are brief, but all are intelligent insightful and many highly amusing. Only Amis could say something like, writers are now accorded their biographies whether or not anything happened to them?.E.M.Forster who lived 91 years utterly devoid of incident has recently been the subject of a two volume biography. Apart from the sheer joy of reading the reviews Amis has a deeper message about literary criticism. He is a person at war with the schools of criticism, which inhabit the towers of academia. In his view the study of Literature should not be something which is as hard as philosophy or physics. Literature is something that is interesting in it self and each reader can have his own view. For instance describes the eminent critic Dr Leavis as a person completely without a sense of humour and his followers as the thought police. His essay on Joyce?s Ulysses is a revelation. He freely admits to only being able to struggle through half of it and demonstrates that rather than a book that has been written to read, it has been written for an academic audience. Finegans wake being the logical progression is close to incomprehensible. Yet Amis freely admits that Joyce was a talented writer as shown by Dubliners and the Artist as a Young man. Amis is also willing to have a dig at the classics. He suggests that Don Quixote is not really a novel and to try to read it from cover to cover is a huge effort. Rather it is a book of its time and would probably only have been read part by part in a group setting. Instead of the accepted classics Amis like Nabakov, J.G. Ballard and Saul Bellow. An entertaining read and an interesting one.
Rating:
Summary: Collected Amis
Review: Very few write more engagingly on writing than Martin Amis. His mix of trenchant wit, dazzling prose, and earnest love of literature make for a powerful combination, the depth of which may suprise those who've made only a cursory reading of his seemingly caustic novels. This is a collection of essays and reviews from nearly thirty years, so all his favorites are well represented. Lots of Nabokov and Bellow and Updike, but also hilarious pieces on the likes of Michael Crichton and Thomas Harris. The opening take on Iron John is laugh out loud funny even for those who don't entirely recall that particular pop culture moment, and Amis' takes on chess and football are as learned and lively as ever. As in any reprint collection, there are pieces of more and less interest depending on your own reading, but I could have done with another couple hundred pages -- surely Amis has written enough over the years to fill a few more signatures. If not as exciting as a new Amis novel, War Against Cliche makes a nice stopgap until his next fiction.
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