By: Martin Amis Publisher: Vintage Average Rating: Binding: Paperback Label: Vintage Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 220 Publication Date: April 03, 1991 Release Date: April 03, 1991
Product Description: If the Marquis de Sade were to crash one of P. G. Wodehouse's house parties, the chaos might resemble the nightmarishly funny goings-on in this novel by the author of London Fields. The residents of Appleseed Rectory have primed themselves both for a visit from a triad of Americans and a weekend of copious drug taking and sexual gymnastics. There's even a heifer to be slugged and a pair of doddering tenants to be ingeniously harassed. But none of these variously bright and dull young things has counted on the intrusion of "dead babies" -- dreary spasms of reality. Or on the uninvited presence of a mysterious prankster named Johnny, whose sinister idea of fun makes theirs look like a game of backgammon.
pleasantly nauseating Worth reading if only for Keith, the repugnant dwarf. The book is usually funny and occasionally disturbing, like most of Amis' work. Read it. Please.
Shallow & Savage, but also fun Yep - this is minor Amis - the two goals (that I could detect) are both fairly modest - a satire of the sex-and-drug debaucheries of the young and beautiful in mid-1970s England, and a literary satire that combines spoofs of a very English kind of drawing-room whodunnit with a very American sort of post-60s new-journalism wooziness.
Those goals are (in the first instance) a bit morally arrogant - Amis' satire gleefully rampages straight over into some abyss of merciless cruelty without the faintest hint of remorse, and (in the second instance) his targets are so narrowly drawn as to be fairly irrelevant to most readers.
But it's still very, very good - Amis' use of language is almost as sharp as that of his great hero, Vladimir Nabokov, and his very, very ruthless sense of humor could've almost made Richard Pryor or Frank Zappa cringe.
All of which is to say that this book is extremely funny - you may want to take a long shower afterwards, though Amis generally selects his targets well. Just not for the faint of heart.
-David Alston
Minor Amis I think the other reviews here for this Martin Amis novel are very apt. "Dead Babies" is a glib, superficial novel, not up to Amis's usual standards and obviously written early in his career. Characters are barely developed, the plot is obscure at best and at times completely incomprehensible, and Amis's disgust and nastiness (always present in his writing) is undisciplined here and overshadows everything else.
However, that said, even less than stellar Amis is fun to read, because he has a writing style that is so unquestionably unique and he writes phrases that pop like firecrackers. He's also scathingly funny, if your sense of humour leans a certain way.
The complaints about Amis's shallow treatments of Americans in this novel are justified, but his treatment didn't bother me too much, since he doesn't paint a much rosier picture of the English.
Like others here have said, if you've never read Amis before, I probably wouldn't start with "Dead Babies," as you might not want to read anything else. However, if you're an Amis fan, this novel lends an interesting look into the early development of a great writer.
Horrific happiness I bought this book on a whim. I wasn't expecting what I read. I couldn't put it down. It has been along time since I read something full of such detail. I truly enjoyed this book and since have had several of my friends read it. They feel the same way. I wasn't even aware of what I was reading until the end. I thought it was one thing and it turned out to actually be a completely different kind of book. If you enjoy exciting details and thrilling endings this is the book for you!!!!
I'm still not quite sure.... If I could make a general statement about Martin Amis' writing, I'd have to say that I do like it, but I still have mixed feelings about the four novels of his that I've read, and my feelings are maybe the most mixed about Dead Babies. First:assuming that it's not bothersome(and I can understand why it would be), the humor in here is great:vicious, caustic, and completely absurd(one character's predicament pretty much sums it up:Keith Whitehead,a "dwarf", tied to a tree with an unnvering amount of syringes hanging from various places, and this is one of the less nasty outcomes of this group's adventures). As satire, it's more than adequate, and I love the way he fools around with tense(no action in the book actually 'happens', but it 'will', says the narrator). It does it's job there, I've got no complaints with that. I think my real difficulties with the book are TECHNICAL ones. The central plot(and its subplots), such as they are, don't decide to settle in until it's almost too late, making the book seem perhaps more shapeless and repetitive than it really is, and that impression isnt helped by the fact that the plots don't gel the books elements very well. You get the feeling that Johnny and the conceptualists would still be doing what they were doing, regardless, and given that AMis prattles on about moral fiction as often as he does, youd think the aforementioned elements would have some sort of effect on their lives, but I dont quite buy it. having said THAT, I discovered upon reading Amis' essay on Joan Didion in The Moronic Inferno that this book is stylistically a satire of the KIND of writing produced by Joan Didion and Bret Easton Ellis, 'transgressive'. Slightly plotted, syntactically appalling("the only thing poetic about this book is that it's filled with line breaks") attempts at 'satire' that usually veer too far into humorless and boring decadence. A formal satire! Knowing that helps, but it doesnt totally make for an smooth or totally enjoyable read. Still, give it a chance. Though I see I haven't gone on too much about them, Dead Babies does have a lot of good qualities. It's just not necesarily for everybody. I don't even quite know if it is for ME yet.
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