In the photograph on the dust jacket of Neil Powell’s Amis & Son, the two of them (whose first names are used throughout, there being no other convenient way of writing about them together) are seated on a sofa under a marble fireplace. Kingsley is giving Martin a fond, fatherly look, very mildly suggesting exasperation with a 1960s teenage son. The father wears modish, brightly polished shoes, a dark shirt with a buttoned-down collar, a tie; such was casual dress, before casual dress abandoned any semblance of correctness to become gratuitously sloppy. Martin, glancing neutrally at his parent, looks like a Mod, in a dark suit and white shirt, a tie likewise – though it’s a thinner example – and what appears to be smart suede footwear.

This posed picture nicely stresses the affinity between famous father and emerging prodigy, but captures as well the absorbing contrast which Powell draws between the two generations, in a volume which is not really a comprehensive “critical biography” of both – Zachary Leader’s Life of Kingsley alone is longer – and yet is much more. Amis & Son (the ampersand, neatly hinting at the “family firm”, as Martin once referred to it, is a good touch) is also about parenthood in the modern British intelligentsia and the huge cultural shift between the 1940s and the 60s, and an analysis of the way in which a celebrated father and son, each producing comic and satiric fiction, could come up with such “disparate results”. It develops into a judicious evaluation of all this by Powell, a poet and critic of almost exactly Martin Amis’s age, who believes with Kingsley (or his character Tristram Hallett in The Russian Girl, 1992) that the question to ask about literature is not “Is it new?”, or even “What does it mean?” or “Is it art?”, but “Is it any good?”.

Another question undermines that principled position and arises out of some of Kingsley’s own enthusiasms. Powell swims against the tide of postmodern intellectual fashion, and doesn’t hesitate to utter truths which now hardly dare speak their names. He believes popular taste, and pop culture particularly, is absolutely no guide to worth in any literary product. For Kingsley to pass through the Universities of Swansea, Princeton and Cambridge and then to lecture at Nashville on the Modern British Novel excluding Forster, Lawrence and Isherwood in favour of Le Carré, Len Deighton and Ian Fleming makes him “a closer off as well as an opener up” (Zachary Leader’s phrase). His blind spots about Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf and Henry James “diminish” him as a literary figure. So is he any good? Yes, he is still the author of at least five admirable novels which “share an undercurrent of magnificently cussed stoicism”. With Martin, Powell goes much further. For his and Martin’s student generation – freer but less happy than Kingsley’s, he thinks – “prosperity, permissiveness and pop” delayed maturity, leaving the novelist son in a far worse sort of “cultural deprivation”, obsessed in his fictions with “men who haven’t grown up, their games and their fantasies, their toys and their cars”. Martin is (so far, at least) the lesser writer of overambitious neo-American novels in which “an appearance of formal daring masks a kind of evasion”. They are only good in parts.

The road to these conclusions, which read as regretful ones since Powell, a close and sympathetic reader, finds plenty to admire in both Amises, begins with the “culpably dull” suburban upbringing of Kingsley. It passes through his army experience of “the cussedness and contingency of things” (valuable to him in his writing), takes in the crucial friendship with Philip Larkin, and proceeds to the marriages and the books produced in many years of astonishing self-discipline. Though he might, in a few places, have planted more reminders of who is who in, say, Girl, 20 or Stanley and the Women, both of which he praises, Powell is adept at providing clear summaries of the novels and offering cautious yet acute judgements; also in discreetly relating themes and characters to Kingsley’s personal life.

Powell traces convincingly a curious long-term conviction on Kingsley’s part that people could not expect much from a boy brought up in lower-middle-class Norbury, an attitude cultivated as something of a public persona. The famous phobias – fear of darkness, of solitude, of flying, of most travelling (he could not bear to travel alone) – were real and disabling, but they never damaged work routines. All the same, a sense of insecurity (and even the younger Martin was “wobblier” than he appeared) recurs in his work. Simplistic notions about class and sex, and a dedication to drink, dominated his mindset, and he could be selfish and insensitive; but nothing embittered, rancorous, or self-pitying is discernible. Kingsley’s health holds out until he injures his head in a fall, and only when he dies in 1995 does Martin, who already has a formidable reputation, emerge to take centre stage.

“Neglectful permissiveness” was the keynote of Kingsley’s attitude towards his children, and for Martin, moved from place to place according to his father’s working locations and conjugal households, it resulted in a feeling of rootlessness. But his devotion to Kingsley is both profound and relaxed, even though he is the inhabitant of another world altogether. No more than in his father’s case is the “high culture”, which Powell regards as essential to the serious intellectual, crucially important. Where Kingsley (who bought Mozart LPs) could pretend not to like certain musical classics, Martin is merely unacquainted with them. The difference between the two is “qualitative” as well as “generational”.

Powell’s conclusion is that, in this case at least, popular culture (especially the music and the language that go with it) may have harmed his literary style (and that of some contemporaries) beyond repair. Kingsley’s output suffered from commercial pressures and his own tastes (“The James Bond Dossier is an impossible book to excuse”), but Martin’s has been completely vitiated by the inescapable influences bearing down on his adolescent years. It follows that Powell is much less responsive to the venturesomeness of Martin’s writing, though he makes an acute point in observing that it displays “unresolved tensions between his accumulation of realistic detail and his disdain for realism”. There is little unqualified approval of individual works, although Powell considers Money “a flawed masterpiece” and Time’s Arrow “the most powerfully moving”. The autobiographical Experience only receives passing mentions, and he surely underrates this cunningly self-revealing book.

Powell allows himself a short postlude in which he writes about his own contrasting parentage and education; this is interesting but doesn’t seem entirely relevant. In a few places he presses his general argument rather too fiercely. Melvyn Bragg unfairly takes the rap for perhaps inspiring the egregious Welsh television personality Alun Weaver, in The Old Devils; and the Beatles are strangely castigated for “an underlying callousness and contempt for other people”. But these are minor weaknesses in a mainly well-judged, helpful and readable survey of two writers whose reputations have waited too long for this kind of blunt appraisal.

Neil Powell
AMIS & SON
Two literary generations
448pp. Pan Macmillan. £20.
978 1 4050 5462 1

Alan Brownjohn’s first collection of poems, The Railings, was published in 1961. His Collected Poems appeared in 2006.

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