Martin Amis on book reviewing

“I think you have a duty to contribute, to go on contributing to what Gore Vidal calls ‘book chat.’ For certain self-interested reasons, you want to keep standards up so that when your next book comes out, it’s more likely that people will get the hang of it. I have no admiration for writers who think that at a certain point they can wash their hands of book chat. You should be part of the ongoing debate.”

That’s from Martin Amis’ interview in The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. III. After my last two posts, I keep thinking that I should write something more structured and unified about this collection, add a bit of book chat of my own.

But I don’t have much beyond enthusiasm to contribute, and all these wonderful quotes. It’s nice finding numerous contradictory opinions regarding what a writer should be, how one should write, and so forth, which primarily tell you that the primary thing that writers have in common is that, somehow, some way, they get the writing done and published. Everything else is gravy, random, individual, idiosyncratic. Insert your own analogy to another activity here.