LIONEL ASBO by Martin Amis

Martin Amis doesn't appear to have spent much time on Lionel Asbo. It's a slight, careless, phoned-in performance that shuffles distractedly through several years of narrative time, distractedly shuffles a few insufficiently imagined characters, and evinces a writer who seems, more than anything else, bored with his job. Indeed, Amis fils, one of the premier prose stylists of 1980s and 90s England, here seems hardly to be writing at all: the prose is weak, limp, repetitive, and rarely rises more than a notch above good commercialese. A critical defender of the novel--and Amis does have defenders, although these days they mostly limit their 'defenses' to trolling Amis-haters on the Guardian website--might say that Amis has 'opened' his prose to the degraded, dumbed-down discourse of the tabloid-ridden, tabloid-raddled world he represents. If that's the case, Amis detractors might charge him with an excess of suck-cess. Lionel Asbo is minor Martin, Amis at his most forgettable.