Rating: 
Summary: Better than reading a Dog.
Review: Amis' Dead Babies is short & punchy & good on deplicting characters. Far better reading than his later stuff, Yellow Dog et. al.
Rating: 
Summary: Horrific happiness
Review: I bought this book on a whim. I wasn't expecting what I read. I couldn't put it down. It has been along time since I read something full of such detail. I truly enjoyed this book and since have had several of my friends read it. They feel the same way. I wasn't even aware of what I was reading until the end. I thought it was one thing and it turned out to actually be a completely different kind of book. If you enjoy exciting details and thrilling endings this is the book for you!!!!
Rating:
Summary: Horrific happiness
Review: I bought this book on a whim. I wasn't expecting what I read. I couldn't put it down. It has been along time since I read something full of such detail. I truly enjoyed this book and since have had several of my friends read it. They feel the same way. I wasn't even aware of what I was reading until the end. I thought it was one thing and it turned out to actually be a completely different kind of book. If you enjoy exciting details and thrilling endings this is the book for you!!!!
Rating: 
Summary: Minor Amis
Review: I think the other reviews here for this Martin Amis novel are very apt. "Dead Babies" is a glib, superficial novel, not up to Amis's usual standards and obviously written early in his career. Characters are barely developed, the plot is obscure at best and at times completely incomprehensible, and Amis's disgust and nastiness (always present in his writing) is undisciplined here and overshadows everything else.However, that said, even less than stellar Amis is fun to read, because he has a writing style that is so unquestionably unique and he writes phrases that pop like firecrackers. He's also scathingly funny, if your sense of humour leans a certain way. The complaints about Amis's shallow treatments of Americans in this novel are justified, but his treatment didn't bother me too much, since he doesn't paint a much rosier picture of the English. Like others here have said, if you've never read Amis before, I probably wouldn't start with "Dead Babies," as you might not want to read anything else. However, if you're an Amis fan, this novel lends an interesting look into the early development of a great writer.
Rating:
Summary: Minor Amis
Review: I think the other reviews here for this Martin Amis novel are very apt. "Dead Babies" is a glib, superficial novel, not up to Amis's usual standards and obviously written early in his career. Characters are barely developed, the plot is obscure at best and at times completely incomprehensible, and Amis's disgust and nastiness (always present in his writing) is undisciplined here and overshadows everything else. However, that said, even less than stellar Amis is fun to read, because he has a writing style that is so unquestionably unique and he writes phrases that pop like firecrackers. He's also scathingly funny, if your sense of humour leans a certain way. The complaints about Amis's shallow treatments of Americans in this novel are justified, but his treatment didn't bother me too much, since he doesn't paint a much rosier picture of the English. Like others here have said, if you've never read Amis before, I probably wouldn't start with "Dead Babies," as you might not want to read anything else. However, if you're an Amis fan, this novel lends an interesting look into the early development of a great writer.
Rating:
Summary: I'm still not quite sure....
Review: If I could make a general statement about Martin Amis' writing, I'd have to say that I <i>do</i> like it, but I still have mixed feelings about the four novels of his that I've read, and my feelings are maybe the most mixed about Dead Babies. First:assuming that it's not bothersome(and I can understand why it would be), the humor in here is great:vicious, caustic, and completely absurd(one character's predicament pretty much sums it up:Keith Whitehead,a "dwarf", tied to a tree with an unnvering amount of syringes hanging from various places, and this is one of the less nasty outcomes of this group's adventures). As satire, it's more than adequate, and I love the way he fools around with tense(no action in the book actually 'happens', but it 'will', says the narrator). It does it's job there, I've got no complaints with that. I think my real difficulties with the book are TECHNICAL ones. The central plot(and its subplots), such as they are, don't decide to settle in until it's almost too late, making the book seem perhaps more shapeless and repetitive than it really is, and that impression isnt helped by the fact that the plots don't gel the books elements very well. You get the feeling that Johnny and the conceptualists would still be doing what they were doing, regardless, and given that AMis prattles on about moral fiction as often as he does, youd think the aforementioned elements would have some sort of effect on their lives, but I dont quite buy it. having said THAT, I discovered upon reading Amis' essay on Joan Didion in The Moronic Inferno that this book is stylistically a satire of the KIND of writing produced by Joan Didion and Bret Easton Ellis, 'transgressive'. Slightly plotted, syntactically appalling("the only thing poetic about this book is that it's filled with line breaks") attempts at 'satire' that usually veer too far into humorless and boring decadence. A formal satire! Knowing that helps, but it doesnt totally make for an smooth or totally enjoyable read. Still, give it a chance. Though I see I haven't gone on too much about them, Dead Babies does have a lot of good qualities. It's just not necesarily for everybody. I don't even quite know if it is for ME yet.
Rating:
Summary: I'm still not quite sure....
Review: If I could make a general statement about Martin Amis' writing, I'd have to say that I do like it, but I still have mixed feelings about the four novels of his that I've read, and my feelings are maybe the most mixed about Dead Babies. First:assuming that it's not bothersome(and I can understand why it would be), the humor in here is great:vicious, caustic, and completely absurd(one character's predicament pretty much sums it up:Keith Whitehead,a "dwarf", tied to a tree with an unnvering amount of syringes hanging from various places, and this is one of the less nasty outcomes of this group's adventures). As satire, it's more than adequate, and I love the way he fools around with tense(no action in the book actually 'happens', but it 'will', says the narrator). It does it's job there, I've got no complaints with that. I think my real difficulties with the book are TECHNICAL ones. The central plot(and its subplots), such as they are, don't decide to settle in until it's almost too late, making the book seem perhaps more shapeless and repetitive than it really is, and that impression isnt helped by the fact that the plots don't gel the books elements very well. You get the feeling that Johnny and the conceptualists would still be doing what they were doing, regardless, and given that AMis prattles on about moral fiction as often as he does, youd think the aforementioned elements would have some sort of effect on their lives, but I dont quite buy it. having said THAT, I discovered upon reading Amis' essay on Joan Didion in The Moronic Inferno that this book is stylistically a satire of the KIND of writing produced by Joan Didion and Bret Easton Ellis, 'transgressive'. Slightly plotted, syntactically appalling("the only thing poetic about this book is that it's filled with line breaks") attempts at 'satire' that usually veer too far into humorless and boring decadence. A formal satire! Knowing that helps, but it doesnt totally make for an smooth or totally enjoyable read. Still, give it a chance. Though I see I haven't gone on too much about them, Dead Babies does have a lot of good qualities. It's just not necesarily for everybody. I don't even quite know if it is for ME yet.
Rating:
Summary: me and Amis
Review: In the Rachel Papers, Amis claims that as a modern writer one can no longer write seriously about such things as love, the moon's reflection in the pond, the stars... This may be the case, but that doesn't mean that you are confined to writing only about pornographers, seedy, violent urban people and wise-acre nihilists. These types of people (and they are merely types) fit better in movies and TV than they do in fiction. Because they're boring and wooden, is why. The dialouge in this book (and man, is there a lot of it) is comprised of the characters (or caricatures) all trying to be more witty and nihilistic than each other. The reader comes away with feelings about how essentially boring human conversation is. Also there is something old-fashioned about the fascination in this book with sex and drugs... If you've already had sex and experimented with drugs (as presumably most of Amis's readers have) then this book just often seems juvenile. Also, a bone to pick re: Amis's Americans: They are wooden and reflect common Euro misconceptions about what Americans are like.
Amis seems to cling to these stereotypes (eg. all Americans are tall, tan, and filled with "American resolve" as he says in the Information, his best novel (I think)). His Americans, at least in his early fiction, are absolute cartoons, even more cardboard-like than his other characters. You can't understand a culture by watching its TV and reading its newpapers. As the kid says below, so much for the War against the Cliche. From reading Amis's fiction, I'm surprised by the fact that he actually has been here... Plus, gritty urban America is merely one facet of the country, and even within this small section, there is endless variation (eg. the world of Seattle is far from the world of Chicago). Boy, I don't want it to seem like I don't like Amis; he's great and really funny, but this is the weakest novel of his I've read, so everything that bothers me about him kinda stood out. His influences are so clearly felt (Bellow, Nabokov, Updike, Delillo) that you can almost pick any paragraph and easily see which of these four comes through the most. I'm not saying Amis is derivitave, though; he's got his own thing going on... The cool thing about Dead Babies is the "time situation": in the narration, the events that you are reading are still off in the future; "now" all the characters haven't even met, the situations have barely even come together. So there is a subjunctive, elusive feel to the narrative...cool. Personally, I'd suggest the Information if you've never read him before. And really maybe the reason his characters grate on me is because I'm too "tender and wooly" as Updike has said of himself.
Rating:
Summary: A Disappointment
Review: Initially, this book looked rather promising. Amis's stylistic touches were nice as usual and for the first hundred or so pages it seemed as though this was really building up towards an intense and revealing climax. Unfortunately, Amis failed to make the plot nearly as interesting as the setting or characters. The ending was horrid and sudden and although it appeared to say something, it really said nothing about either our condition or the mindset of the characters. All in all, an easy read with its fair share of good lines and amusing scenes, but ultimately as unsatisfying as the drugs the characters intake.
Rating: 
Summary: Feelgood hit of the century.
Review: okay, i admit, I ignored age-old advice and bought this book because it's cover appealed to me. (Not the cover shown here, but a different one. It was white with vibrantly coloured jelly Babies on the front, and back. BOY was I sucked in!) This book is...pointless, to say the least. It left me with a distinct lack of the 'customer satisfaction' feeling, which I considered it my right to experience after spending £5 on a book(this amount is quite significant if you are a struggling student such as myself). People who think this book is a 'good read' need to put it in perspective by reading authors such as Irvine Welsh or Chuck Palahniuk. ('Fight Club' would be a good start). Amis tries to be outrageous and shocking with Dead Babies, but only succeeds in seeming to try too hard. There is no depth to the story or the characters. It felt like i was reading an amateurs first attempt at a novel, and one thing I do know about Amis (if I know nothing else), it's that he has experience. I have granted Dead Babies 1 star because there is one opinion which holds strong through the Literature and Art worlds alike, and that's "Any reaction, even a bad one, is better than no reaction at all".I do own a copy of 'Night Train' by Martin Amis, and I will probably read it sometime, with the lagging hope that the praise I've read about this author is remotely true...(and perhaps 'Dead Babies' is just a slump in his career. who knows?)
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