Martin Amis in search of gravitas

A smart essay on Slate about Martin Amis's recent slide away from satire into puffed-up moralizing.

In our own time, no writer has been so obviously, so publicly confused by his warring impulses—to observe what he sees on the one hand and to moralize on it on the other—as Martin Amis. He has written works of corrosive satire almost breathtaking (and breathtakingly funny) in their nihilism (Money and The Information), but he has also, especially of late, written works of a weirdly moralistic bent, denouncing such people as Stalin, Mohamed Atta, and male chauvinists who write abusively about women for the porno-tabloid press. It was as if the rich material he had been handed by life—the world of the high-British, high-Postmodern, Baby Boomer elite—was too flimsy, and he needed sterner stuff. Perhaps it is just the perceived weightlessness, these days, of being British—in the best post-imperial novels of Martin's father, Kingsley, being British consisted primarily in getting scrupulously drunk. (Martin's innovation, in his best novels, was to get his characters drunk and send them to America.) The political critique of the son's refusal to take his own people seriously would be that it implicitly ignored the damage they were doing to the world—even in America, after all, their intellectual support of the Iraq war (including in these Internet pages) was not without effect.

Catch that dig at Christopher Hitchens at the end there?