Friday, April 02, 2004
BEING MARTIN AMIS
Russell Smith is trying a new genre: the ever-popular post-colonial comedy. The sheer aplomb of Smith and his unsubtle self-promotion, not to mention his shameless penchant for namedropping, is rather off-putting [...and then there was the moment when I forgot that it wasn't Leah McLaren's article that I was reading...].
I guess he's worried that the new book will suffer the same fate as the last one: a slow and painful death on the remainders table at Indigo.
What upsets me the most, however, is the comparison drawn between Smith's latest and Martin Amis's The Information. I suspect that Smith himself wrote this blurb, only because he drops Amis's name in his Globe & Mail article too. This is no co-incidence. If he fancies himself a scribe in the Amisian tradition, let him do so. But alas, he will never be Martin Amis.
Russell Smith is trying a new genre: the ever-popular post-colonial comedy. The sheer aplomb of Smith and his unsubtle self-promotion, not to mention his shameless penchant for namedropping, is rather off-putting [...and then there was the moment when I forgot that it wasn't Leah McLaren's article that I was reading...].
I guess he's worried that the new book will suffer the same fate as the last one: a slow and painful death on the remainders table at Indigo.
What upsets me the most, however, is the comparison drawn between Smith's latest and Martin Amis's The Information. I suspect that Smith himself wrote this blurb, only because he drops Amis's name in his Globe & Mail article too. This is no co-incidence. If he fancies himself a scribe in the Amisian tradition, let him do so. But alas, he will never be Martin Amis.
Comments:
Post a Comment
