Martin Amis Announces New ‘Autobiographical Novel’ Featuring Saul Bellow & Christopher Hitchens
Image by Frederick M. Brown / Getty Images
Author Martin Amis, perhaps best known for his (in)famous Holocaust novel, “Time’s Arrow,” announced in a recent interview with livemint.com that he is working on an autobiographical novel that he has “been trying to write for 15 years.” Despite calling the novel autobiographical, Amis stated that the book will be less about him than about three other writers – Saul Bellow, Christopher Hitchens, and Phillip Larkin.
Amis had personal relationships with all three authors – he has described Bellow as his “hero and mentor,” and was friends with both Larkin and Hitchens. Since Amis began the book, all three authors have died – Larkin in 1985, Bellow in 2005, Hitchens in 2011. In the livemint.com interview, Amis told interviewer Tishani Doshi that the passing of his friends “gives me a theme, death, and it gives me a bit more freedom. “It’s hard going,” he said, “but the one benefit is that I have the freedom to invent things. I don’t have them looking over my shoulder anymore.”
Martin Amis, though not Jewish, has declared himself to be a “philo-semite,” that is, someone with a love of Jews. Incidentally (or maybe not so incidentally), two of the three authors, Bellow and Hitchens, who will appear in his new book, are Jewish, though Hitchens came to this realization quite late in life.
The novel still does not yet have a title or a release date, but Amis does have a new book of essays, “The Rub of Time,” which will also feature Bellow and Hitchens, forthcoming in 2017 from published Jonathan Cape.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
