Martin Amis' death last week at the age of 73 brought a shock of recognition.
I saw the British writer expatriated to the United States as perpetually youthful. In my mind, he had never changed from the brash novelist who shocked the literary world in the late 1980s and early '90s with his novels "Money," "Time's Arrow" and "London Fields."
That Amis was a only year older than me when he died at his home in Lake Worth, Fla., was a memento mori.
Like his close friend and literary combatant Christopher Hitchens, Amis was a victim of esophageal cancer. All of those cigarettes, alcoholic binges, sarcastic jokes and literary battles took their toll on England's former literary outlaws.
As with Monty Python's comedy, Amis' novels were too smugly British for me. But "Experience," his 2000 memoir, was one of the best books of his generation, and I consumed the literary essays collected in Amis's "The War Against Cliche" like a plate of fine oysters.
"Experience" warmly praised Amis's father, the lauded novelist Kingsley Amis, and Kingsley's contemporaries Philip Larkin and Saul Bellow. The book also presented a lively account of literary London in the 1970s and 1980s, including Hitchens and other then young stars.
Martin Amis showed a compassionate side with his expression of grief for his murdered cousin, Lucy Partington. Reading his heartbreaking lament for the young woman, I also felt deep sorrow and sense of loss.
Over the years, I read accounts of Amis and his circle in memoirs by Hitchens and noted biographer Claire Tomalin, one of Amis's paramours when they were both young literary celebrities.
Like Hitchens, Amis moved to the United States and proved himself an acute observer of American politics and culture.
A longtime resident of Brooklyn with his second wife, Isabel Fonseca, and children, Amis was a leading figure in the borough's re-emergence.
While I didn't care for Amis' later books, including his last novel "Inside Story," I followed his career when he made news with comments perceived as anti-Islamic and through profiles in The New York Times and other publications.
Amis's death does mark the end of an era, to resort to one of his hated cliches. Amis was one of the few writers who still commanded attention on the international stage.
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