Dreamer Easy

Last month I posted something incoherent about Martin Amis' collection of essays, Visiting Mrs Nabokov, the writing in which just knocked me over. In the staggering Nuclear City: the MegaDeath Intellectuals he describes "the lit brain, the scorching shower, the moronic fist of the mushroom cloud". He somehow manages to convey the way that nuclear weapons are "everything and nothing", an unthinkable absolute of destruction, "everything becoming nothing, all at once"; how with those weapons in play, we are all in the miltary: "Our babies are born, not in their birthday suits, but in little uniforms". You find yourself thanking the gods of war that the incestuous Washington bureaucrats never got their antimatter bomb. And wishing eternal damnation on every one of them.

Much of the anthology is lighter stuff - such as the awful truth about chess, after you realise just how much work it would take to make you into a genuinely good player: "Quickly you relapse into the kind of player who knows one opening to a depth of three moves, who flounders into the middle game hoping for errors more egregious than his [sic] own. That is the amateur game: an uninterrupted exchange of howlers."

And on reading Isaac Asimov's massive two-volume autobiography: "I went along to meet Asimov having just let In Memory Still Green crash to the floor, and having just winched In Joy Still Felt up onto the lectern."

I picked this book up completely at random from a local library, and now he's on my list of authors to sniff about for, along with Niall Griffiths, Tom Wolfe, and rather a lot of men, actually, I need to read more women.