Heavy Water: And Other Stories
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Authors: Martin Amis
Heavy Water: And Other Stories
Martin Amis
Vintage (2000)
Tags: Fiction
Fictionttt
Amazon.com Review
These nine stories span a period from 1975 to 1997 and are a good reflection of the range of Martin Amis's writing, which is always skillful and consistently seductive--sometimes irritatingly so. Amis lures his reader into an intense interest in his characters, and then, in some unsettling way, encourages us to patronize or disparage them. It's an odd strategy, but it holds our attention. By making us uncomfortable about our own less admirable attitudes, he focuses us intently on his story line.
In "Coincidence of the Arts," the targets are the feckless painter Sir Rodney Peel and his black doorman, aspiring novelist Pharsin Courier, who turns to him for artistic encouragement. When Peel embarks on a curious affair with a black waitress, it is sheer coincidence that she should happen to be Pharsin's wife. The consequences reflect well on neither man. In "State of England," we smirk knowingly at Big Mal, a bullshitting East Ender trying to sort out his life at his small son's sports day, but we are nevertheless compelled to find out what will become of him. Familiar stories about obsessive bad sex such as "Let Me Count the Times" have not stood the test of time, and Amis's tales of literary agents, aspiring novelists, and spoiled bestseller writers may only interest an inner coterie. Still, when he is on form, Amis's work is as deeply alluring as it is amusing.
--Lisa Jardine, Amazon.co.uk
From Publishers Weekly
Amis is an ingenious short story writer, and this collection of tales, three of which have not been seen here before, offers a good sampling of his range. This includes, of course, tone-perfect mimicry, which is evident in "State of England," about a disco bouncer with a son at a posh English boys' school, and "What Happened to Me on My Holiday," told in the misspelled, petulant voice of a hurt child. Then there is sharp, edgy comedy based on the notion of role reversal. In "Career Move," much admired when it appeared in the New Yorker six years ago, poets swagger around Hollywood in an atmosphere of big movie deals and heroin-fueled script conferences, while screenplay authors attend eager readings of each other's work and vie desperately for publication in ephemeral little magazines that never pay. "Straight Fiction" supposes that the world is predominantly gay but that outposts of heterosexuality remain in areas like New York's Christopher Street and San Francisco's Castro, exerting a malificent influence on the predominant, comfortable culture. "The Coincidence of the Arts" has an aristocratic and evasive English artist in New York trying to avoid reading an ambitious novel thrust upon him by his black doorman. "The Janitor on Mars" is a satirical science fiction yarn. Amis's work is wonderfully clever and often extremely funny, but there is no escaping a certain steely-eyed coldness at the heart of it. Author tour.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
ACCLAIM FOR
MARTIN AMIS
“Wildly diverse.…
[Heavy Water and Other Stories]
showcases Amis’ extravagant talents and splashy intellect.”
—
Time
“[Heavy Water and Other Stories]
demands to be read and re-read.”
—
The Economist Review
“Count on Martin Amis to take risks. He is contemporary Britain’s shape-shifter of fiction.”
—
Newsday
“Amis is hilariously eloquent.”
—
The Plain Dealer
“Martin Amis [has] persuasively established himself as one of his generation’s most ambitious and technically daring writers.”
—The New York Times
“Amis throws off more provocative ideas and images in a single paragraph than most writers get into complete novels.”
—Seattle Times
ALSO BY
MARTIN AMIS
FICTION
The Rachel Papers
Dead Babies
Success
Other People
Money
Einstein’s Monsters
London Fields
Time’s Arrow
The Information
Night Train
NONFICTION
Invasion of the Space Invaders
The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America
Visiting Mrs. Nabokov and Other Excursions
MARTIN AMIS
HEAVY WATER
AND OTHER STORIES
Martin Amis’s books include
Money, Dead Babies, The Rachel Papers, The Moronic Inferno, Einstein’s Monsters, London Fields, Time’s Arrow, The Information
, and
Night Train
. He lives in London.
FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, MARCH 2000
Copyright © 1998 by Martin Amis
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape Ltd., London, in 1998, and subsequently in the United States by Harmony Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage International and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Harmony Books edition as follows:
Amis, Martin.
Heavy water and other stories / Martin Amis.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-78739-2
Contents: Career move—Denton’s death—State of England—Let me count the times—The coincidence of the arts—Heavy water—The janitor on Mars—Straight fiction—What happened to me on my holiday. I. Title.
PR6051.M5H4 1999
823’.914—dc21 98-21779
Author photograph © Quina Fonseca
v3.1
To Delilah and Fernanda
CONTENTS
What Happened to Me on My Holiday
CAREER MOVE
W
HEN ALISTAIR FINISHED
his new screenplay,
Offensive from Quasar 13,
he submitted it to the
LM
, and waited. Over the past year, he had had more than a dozen screenplays rejected by the
Little Magazine
. On the other hand, his most recent submission, a batch of five, had been returned not with the standard rejection slip but with a handwritten note from the screenplay editor, Hugh Sixsmith. The note said:
I was really rather taken with two or three of these, and seriously tempted by
Hotwire
, which I thought close to being fully achieved. Do please go on sending me your stuff.
Hugh Sixsmith was himself a screenplay writer of considerable, though uncertain, reputation. His note of encouragement was encouraging. It made Alistair brave.
Boldly he prepared
Offensive from Quasar 13
for submission. He justified the pages of the typescript with fondly lingering fingertips. Alistair did not address the envelope to the Screenplay Editor. No. He addressed it to Mr. Hugh Sixsmith. Nor, for once, did he enclose his curriculum vitae, which he now contemplated with some discomfort. It told, in a pitiless staccato, of the screenplays he had published in various laptop broadsheets and comically obscure pamphlets; it even told of screenplays published in his university magazine. The truly disgraceful bit came at the end, where it said “Rights Offered: First British Serial
only.”