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From: blp Category: Art Date: 26 February 2007 Time: 06:07 AM Review: Actually, there was much dissent in the Guardian on this best novelist point. Increasingly, Amis looks like Britain's most disliked author. And rightly so. And yeah, it's true, Britain doesn't have any really good contemporary novelists - not ones whose names are getting out there anyway. I think it's because they have a problem with voice. Amis is always trying to sound tough, apparently because he likes American writers, but most Americans, especially the ones he likes, like Bellow, don't actually sound tough. It's like when people who want to be John Cassavetes make films about off the wall working class criminal types - completely missing the point, that most of Cassavetes' characters were, in the American sense, middle class. In America you can write in a 'normal' voice. You can start from the position of being an ordinary, classless individual and unpretentiously build from there to beauty and insight. In Britain, though less in Scotland, which is why they sometimes come good, every voice is freighted with class associations, and all of them are bad. Amis is probably slightly less in denial about this than many of his peers, but his only solution is to write working class cariacatures and still present the poshos as the normal ones. His own hard-bitten style is presumably supposed to transcend these divisions, but it's such an obvious affectation that it just comes off absurd.