Much has been made of the rock and roll manner of such writers, but let’s not forget their writing could be pretty punchy, too. It seemed that there was a point when anyone was fair game for Hitchens – Bill Clinton, Henry Kissinger and even Mother Teresa. She “is less interested in helping the poor than in using them as an indefatigable source of wretchedness on which to fuel the expansion of her fundamentalist Roman Catholic beliefs,” he wrote in 1995’s The Missionary Position.
Amis has attracted controversy in several quarters, though I would suggest that when it comes to the accusations of Islamophobia, his views have often been misinterpreted (his views in the wake of 9/11 were anti-Islamist not anti-Islam). He also authored one of the most fundamentally kind books I have ever read – Experience, written in response to the death of his father Kingsley. Yet the image of provocation, enhanced by a rather colourful private life and some very expensive dental surgery, remains.
In the current climate, it seems unlikely that literary provocateurs will find their voice (unless they are sounding off in the culturally moribund Twittersphere, of course).
If you look hard enough there are works out there which certainly don’t lack for punch. There’s Isabel Waidner, for example, whose latest novel Sterling Karat Gold is a surreal satire (anti-LGBT activists are allegorically transformed into bullfighters!), but she is published by the pioneering publishers Peninsula. I wonder if someone like Random House would produce something of such daring. Badly written autofiction now dominates, which means that the cult of the self is arguably as important as it was at the height of Amis’s fame. It’s just that now, in Britain at least, it’s a lot more dreary.
