Martin Amis: a new chapter in America

Tom LAMONT

When Martin Amis moved to New York it gave rise to reports that he loathed England. Not so. His new novel is, he says, no "V sign" to Britain…

It was death that urged Martin Amis to America – though not, as reported in parts, some sort of death of the England left behind.

"My mother died the year before last, and we were thinking about that," says the novelist, 62, waistcoated, meeting the evening with a bottle of beer in his home in Brooklyn, New York. "My mother-in-law [a Brooklyn resident] was the same age, and her husband of 40 years was ailing too. He died quite suddenly, before we'd even got here. But we'd been thinking for months: they're not going to be here for ever."

So Amis and family – wife Isabel Fonseca, daughters Fernanda and Clio – left London for New York, at first to commandeer the mother-in-law's floor and later to take up residence in a towering, turn-of-the-20th brownstone in Brooklyn. "There was a half-hearted attempt to make it look as though this was out of disaffection for England," says Amis. "Me saying, 'England can go fuck itself.'"

He means newspaper reports, published around the time of the move last summer, that framed it as a demonstrative emigration: a flounce out. "There wasn't an iota of that."

The reports were prompted, though, by an interview Amis gave to a French magazine. Wasn't he quoted in Le Nouvel Observateur, complaining of his homeland's "moral decrepitude"? Didn't he say he would prefer not to be English?

"That French interview caused a lot of trouble. They misattributed and mistranslated. It was a mess, that interview. Still, you think: ah, it's only France. None of my friends will see it.

And then of course it comes back all warped and upside down." The relocation, he insists, "was purely for familial reasons. I'm still English. I still have a flat in England. And this is indefinite, but not permanent."

The new house is in an area of Brooklyn called Cobble Hill. There's a small expat population here (one bar nearby serves an approximation of fish and chips, others broadcast the FA Cup at odd hours), but the neighbourhood, for the most, is ideally American. There's a beer shop a block away called just that: AMERICAN. Grid-laid roads are named after pioneering landowners and lawyers, and along the length of each there's a little iron fire hydrant for every dozen lamp-posts. Not far from Amis's triple-stepped front porch, a little boy in a peaked cap is actually tossing around a baseball.

"I gave it more than a passing thought that when Philip Roth came back to New York he had an explosive three years and wrote three long novels," says Amis. "It was a tremendous stimulus to him, and it is that for me, I think. But with its elements of terror."

Fonseca – in the kitchen and letting brew a cup of PG Tips, joking about the local mark-up on tea, prawn cocktail crisps, "unspecial British things you didn't think you would miss" – grew up in New York but lived in the UK for the majority of her 50 years. Amis has done long stints here in the past. "But it's only when you come to live in America that you feel the continental size of the country. It's daunting. You look at a map and think… Ohio? What's that? It's huge. You feel microscopic."

Amis is a Londoner, a London writer – his fiction antagonistic, contemptuous, bleakly funny, lots of grubby topsoil obscuring beauty for those patient enough to root. His novels are usually staged in the capital – the new one, Lionel Asbo: State of England, in a fictional London borough called Diston – and regular readers are well used to that promo page: "Martin Amis has written 18 [19, 20] books… He lives in London." What will baseball-kid Brooklyn do to him?

"People asked, 'Are you going to write about Uruguay?' Because we spent three years living there [from 2003]. But I don't think so. Maybe a paragraph, somewhere. You're so locked into your personal evolution by now. I don't think it's very likely I will write about Brooklyn."

Lionel Asbo, certainly, plays out a long way away from Cobble Hill. In impoverished Diston Town, "where calamity [makes] its rounds like a postman", we meet Lionel Asbo, né Pepperdine, his name changed to honour a record as the youngest ever recipient of an antisocial behaviour order. Lionel is serving time for criminal damage and affray when he wins the national lottery. A cheque for £140m takes him out of remand prison and into a farcical second life of wealth and celebrity. He moves into a fortified, fame-compulsory hotel in Soho. He thumps paps. He and his glamour-model girlfriend become so warped by publicity concerns they consider the abortion of their first child an "exit strategy", a way to story line a scheduled break-up for the gossip mags. As a novel, Asbo is witty and brutal and that mix, perhaps, will skew towards the latter for some readers. But it's no "V-sign" to England, Amis says. "Someone read it and told me, this novel is full of disgust for England. I reeled back from that. You can't write a novel with feelings of disgust. Writing is a much more amorous business than people think, perhaps."

Won't the subtitle – State of England – invite people to see the book as a judgment? "I just liked the phrase," he says, pointing out it's a line lifted from dialogue within. Still, he says, "my wife thinks I should forget the subtitle". And his 12-year-old, Clio, recently told him: "Dad, enough with the subtitles, for crying out loud!" He relishes the telling of this. "Really passionately. How has she got any views about subtitles?"

Hey – it's a literary household. As well as Amis's body of work, Fonseca has put out a book of social history (1995's Bury Me Standing, about gypsies) and a novel.

The family's wider library takes up three floors: fiction upstairs, history down, the expansive ground floor shelves given to poetry, travel, biography and a general, crammed-in miscellany. A box of unwanted books in the front hall awaits not the tip or the charity shop but – Fonseca's word – "deaccessioning". Earlier, fascinatingly, Amis's 15-year-old daughter joined a kitchen counter chat about the writer Clive James, whose marital infidelity had been crudely exposed on Australian TV during the week.

"Busted," said Amis. "He's already been chucked out of home."

"What? Really?" said Fernanda, chipping in from a chair in the living room.

Amis angled his head around a dividing wall to engage his daughter properly. "His wife made a pre-emptive strike."

Beneath the aggressive satire in Lionel Asbo there is, throughout, a sense of how satisfying it is to be a father to daughters. Lionel's nephew, Des Pepperdine, struggles to adjust to parenthood at 21. Then "the love bomb explode[s]", and a first babysitting mission ends thus:

He walked out into Diston with all ten digits raised to his brow [...] People looked his way wonderingly, as if for all the world he must be on something, and three different Distonites sidled up and asked him if he was selling any.

"Have a girl," he earnestly told them, as he swivelled and went home for more. "It isn't difficult. Go on. Just have a girl."

That "went home for more" is about as bluntly sentimental as this novelist gets; the character of Des a creation of uncharacteristic sympathy.

Though he starts the book as one of Amis's grotesques (semi-literate, guiltily enjoying a fling with his own grandmother), Des becomes the most softly drawn male character in Amis's catalogue – a nice guy, an innocent. Midway: "He was having one of his neurasthenic episodes (for half a day at a time, the world seemed too much for him, too many for him, too full, too rich, too strong)."

Amis looks from his front windows on to pretty Cobble Hill, and says: "Every day I go, mid-afternoon, and get my younger daughter from school. And it's almost embarrassing how much pleasure you take in that little stroll… I more and more come to feel that the opposite of an artistic temperament is the temperament that takes everything for granted. If you have an artistic temperament, everything has an edge of novelty on it. That feeling has been very intense these last few months. Everything looks very fresh," he says, and then: "I think it's probably a fair bit to do with Christopher Hitchens's death."

Hitchens – writer, political commentator and Amis's best friend – was diagnosed with oesophageal cancer in 2010. He died last December. "I've talked to some people who say the world looks really shitty to them, now that he's not there. But I think that's a sort of minority view.

I think the death of a friend – and I could go on about how horrible it is – the job it does is to say: I've stopped. But you're still in the insanely privileged position of going on living.

"What it does is revivify the world," explains Amis. And where better to be, in a period of revivification, than New York? He has not been shy of the city in recent weeks. A few days back, he screened a favoured Gary Oldman-starring film, The Firm, at an event in SoHo. Last night, there was an award ceremony in the Flatiron District, and soon there will be a literary round table in Times Square.

He even agreed to take part in a fashion shoot for the New York Times, outfitted in expensive Louis Vuitton and photographed in black and white.

- The Guardian