[In the following interview, Amis discusses his work, literary influences, and techniques, and his reputation as a misogynist, among other topics.]

"Look, we're not running this."

That's what Martin Amis said to his London publishers when they showed him a proposed advertisement for his new novel, London Fields. Over a picture of a rancid meat pie crawling with maggots, the ad read: "Today, in London, the average man will think about sex 20 times. One man in three will masturbate. One person will be murdered within three days. A woman will be sexually assaulted every three hours. And five children will die from parental abuse within the week. London Fields … [is] a novel about ordinary, everyday life."

Amis wanted to lose the meat pie.

Long hailed—and heckled—as the enfant terrible of English fiction, Martin Amis is no longer an enfant (he's forty) and less terrible than ever (he changes diapers—"but only the damp ones"). Nonetheless, his sixth and most ambitious novel is a whopping nightmare of spiritual and planetary decay. What many critics have failed to point out, though, is that far from being a daunting or depressing nightmare of spiritual and planetary decay, London Fields is enormously fun. And funny.

Set on the eve of the millennium in Amis's own neighborhood of West London, the novel follows a frighteningly intelligent femme fatale named Nicola Six and the trio of clueless lunks that she has cast as accomplices in her own exquisitely art-directed murder: Keith Talent, the lowlife hustler who fills his days with lifeless sex and a viscous liqueur called porno; Guy Clinch, the ardent upper-class wimp so out of touch with his own drives that he hauls his Nicola-induced erection around third-world London like an unfamiliar crutch; and Samson Young, the terminally ill and terminally pretentious American narrator, who thinks he's stumbled across the perfect real-life murder to novelize. Along with Nicola and Sam (as in Uncle), the planet is dying, too, and Amis draws on his dazzling arsenal of sometimes soaring, sometimes lurching, always merciless prose to describe its last pathetic chugs and sputters.

The literary community has been split down the middle about Martin Amis for the better part of two decades, ever since the publication of his first novel, The Rachel Papers, a scatological swoon of wise-guy adolescent horniness. Saul Bellow, a mentor, has compared him to Flaubert and Joyce, and to his many lay fans he is nothing short of a cult hero. But other readers and critics, particularly among his countrymen, find him and his work gratuitously malevolent; the judges of Britain's Booker Prize last year snubbed London Fields, presumably for what some perceived as the novelist's bad attitude toward his female characters. Though he enjoys a close relationship with his father, Kingsley, the author of Lucky Jim, Amis is hardly a literary lion at home: The father rarely finishes the son's novels, complaining of their "compulsive vividness"; and Antonia, Martin's American wife of six years—"not by any means a fanatical fan of mine"—will only read the books he's written since meeting her.

At the time of this interview, Amis had been talking to the press about London Fields for six months, and though clearly ambivalent about the novelist's obligation to be a human Cliffs Notes, he was gracious, gentler than advertised and disarmingly polite. We met at his office—actually a paper-strewn converted bachelor pad draped with Indian print bedspreads—on the second floor of a tumbling-down Victorian house a mile from where he conducts his family-man life with his wife and their two young sons. Compact and well proportioned, and capped with what looked like a hastily self-inflicted haircut, he could have passed for a hard-living American college boy, in his tennis sneakers, hemmed jeans and white button-down shirt. He folds himself up tightly as he talks, and he says the word yeah often, drawing it out for maximum American street-smart effect.

Amis has done time as a reporter, and in an article about meeting Saul Bellow, he confessed that "as a journalist, you hope for lunacy, spite, deplorable indiscretions, a full-scale nervous breakdown in mid-interview." I had no such luck with Amis, but I did discover some things just as shocking, given his reputation as a sneering little tough guy: He cries at movies; he likes Lite beer; he drives to his daily tennis game in the family station wagon wearing a Fauntleroyish get-up of linen blazer, white shirt and shorts; and, most endearing, every now and then he lisps a little. Which isn't to say he's not acerbic, incisive, quick with a derisive laugh and fully capable of writing words that send the squeamish running for their Barbara Pym. And he says he has terrible tennis manners.

[Morrison]: In London Fields, the narrator makes the point that people would rather read about misfortune than happiness. Why?

[Amis]: As the narrator says, who else but Tolstoy could make happiness swing on the page? It's dreadfully difficult to write about happiness in a way that makes you smile. When everything's just fine in a novel or in life, we're usually thinking, "Yeah, yeah, yeah." It's like the letter home from the holidays: "Having a nice time" isn't what you want to read really, is it? What I am interested in is heavy comedy, rather than light comedy. It's a wincing laughter, or a sort of funky laughter, rather than tee-hee-hee. Sort of a hung-over laughter, where it hurts.

Reviewers often call your books mean spirited or misanthropic, ignoring the fact that they're also incredibly funny.

The comedy is the main thing, and I feel best as a writer when comic invention is flowing. There's a bit in London Fields where one of the characters, Keith, is sitting around with all these sachets of perfume that he's bought, and they turn out to be water; then he sells the water and gets counterfeit notes for that; and then he buys vodka with the counterfeit notes, but then the vodka turns out to be the perfume. And when I'm doing that, I think, "God, this is just great stuff. Where did it come from?" It just sort of flows. You're in a bit of trouble if you're trying to think up snappy one-liners. Humor can't just be a foam on top of things. It has to be an undercurrent and emerge naturally from the situation.

But you're dead right in that that is how I would like reviews to begin and end—with talk of this. If you start off with the premise of me being a comic writer, you are taking an interesting line because there are clearly things in my novels that shouldn't really be in comic novels. And there are people who don't like that, who just want the comedy. But I think that comedy never works when all it is, is comedy. Then it's just Fran Lebowitz.

What do you find funny?

Conversations with friends. I find my children quite funny. Children are, of course, very funny. I was very amused by this little piece about me in one paper that began, "Martin Amis is a vile little fuck who loves his children."

Do you laugh a lot?

Yeah, quite a lot. It's my theory that when you're about thirty-eight, your laugh divides—you have the big laugh, which is really you, and then you have this other laugh, the one you've developed for social occasions. And to my horror, I sometimes hear this second kind of chortle come out of me. But whenever you hear someone really laugh, then you're seeing them the way they truly are, the way you don't often see them. I like to think that I make myself laugh like that quite a lot. Laughter takes place in there [gesturing to his office]. But it isn't a polite chortle.

Are the writers who influenced your comic sensibility different from those who had the most impact on your writing style?

One and the same, really. The sort of haughty tone is definitely Vladimir Nabokov, who has a glacially haughty tone about everything. But only in a few novels is it allowed to lead the pack, and they're my favorites: Lolita, Despair, Laughter in the Dark. The Philip Roth of Portnoy's Complaint, Joseph Heller certainly—those sentences turning around on themselves that he did so wonderfully in Something Happened. Dickens has had a very deep influence on me—the Mandarin rhythms of his sentences. Even Wodehouse, Waugh.

Last fall Tom Wolfe caused quite a stir with an essay in Harper's magazine in which he chastised America's fiction writers for writing tiny and anemic novels of private experience rather than big realistic novels based on the kind of exhaustive reporting that he does. Do you agree?

I thought Wolfe's essay was one of those pieces where the writer is saying, "Everyone should be more like me." I'm sure lots of writers wish they were more like Tom Wolfe. But what is his ratio—that a novel should be sixty-five-percent research, thirty-five-percent inspiration? With me, it's now ten-percent research and ninety-percent inspiration, which I think is harder work, really. I keep meaning to research things, to go to prisons and child-abuse centers, but in the end I just make it up. You take a bit of experience and pass it through your psyche.

But Wolfe's emphases are right, society is your subject. Salman Rushdie wrote a piece in praise of George Orwell called "Inside the Whale," in which he says that writers can't live inside the whale; they've got to be out in the big sea. And Salman pointed out: "There is no whale. You are in the sea, whether you like it or not."

You have said that the thing that prevents your father from finishing your books is your love of a kind of postmodern literary prankishness—having a character called Martin Amis in Money, giving characters your initials in London Fields, and that sort of thing. How would you defend it?

Well, it all comes under the main heading of "Fucking Around With the Reader." My father thinks that there's an orderly contract between writer and reader, which has very much to do with his generation, and he's incensed by any breach of those rules. I would justify it very simply and pragmatically by saying that once a lot of writers have become interested in something, then it's useless to say to them, "Snap out of it; you're just annoying." Because it's clearly an evolutionary development, and this is what writers need to do. And this doesn't come naturally to my father. He's in the position of someone in fifteenth-century Venice or Florence saying: "You know, I don't like this perspective stuff. Get back to when we didn't know about perspective. Stop fucking around and get back to what we know." On the other hand, perspective was such an obvious gain for painting, whereas this kind of literary innovation is, even to me, not such an obvious gain. But it has happened, and it will last for a certain time before writers move on to something else.

It's funny that I have always done it up to a point, even in my first novel. I'm all for this intense relationship with the reader. I really want the reader in there. I don't know who the reader is, but I really want him close. In The Rachel Papers the narrator-protagonist says coyly at one point, Here come the sexy bits, Are you sitting comfortably? And suddenly the reader is not just reading but is individualized. My narrators have always been shadowy figures. I've always been a kind of shadowy figure hanging around my novels. Then eventually, in Money, I myself come in as a bit part. Actually, I think in my case, and perhaps this is part of the reason why all this happened, I feel a sort of guilt about creating characters, guilt about making them suffer.

So it is important for you to show that you're the puppet master, so that readers won't think that your characters are real?

I learned very early on that no matter how much you do to forestall it, the reader will believe in the characters and feel concern for them. That's an unstoppable thing. The reader is doing a huge job of assigning life to characters, imagining what they look like. Nabokov used to say that what the reader shouldn't do is identify with the character. What the reader should do is identify with the writer. You try and see what the writer is up to, what the writer is arranging and what the writer's point is. Identify with the art, not the people.

Do you start with characters? Theme? Plot?

I start with characters, really. Situations. I like to let my characters get up a head of steam and have a bit of life of their own. I like to let the characters lead me a bit. When I start, I know quite a lot about the beginning and quite a lot about the end and usually quite a lot about some key bit in the middle. And that's it. I do a lot of piecemeal doodling in longhand for a long time, for years. I do this scene. I try that. Bits from the end might be written quite early on. I write on the left-hand side of these big notebooks. The right-hand side is blank, and there I just jot down thoughts, good observations. Some are labeled "Beauties"—things I've got to get in, scenes that have to be fitted in at some time, things that may not have much to do with what's on the left-hand side. Then it's a huge job of transferring the longhand onto a typescript. By which time, there are still great holes in it. Then for a year I just do the last draft, adding a lot of new stuff and organizing it.

What are you working on next?

It sounds ridiculous in summary, but it's a novella about a Nazi doctor. The ridiculous thing about it—although I'm pretty sure that I have got something to say with it—is that it's done backwards in time. And I mean literally backwards. The whole physical universe is backwards. People walk backwards, wake up in the evening and then go through the day and then go to bed in the morning. What you're always looking for is a way to see the world differently. So you do it through the eyes of a drunk [as in Money] or an amnesiac [as in Other People]. With this one, the point is that moral acts are reversed if you reverse time. For instance, the giving of a gift is in fact the taking of a gift. Thus, by the time you get to Auschwitz, there's a miracle of beneficence. And the narrating voice of course doesn't see that it's all over, that he's going backwards.

After this is over, I'm going to write what feels at the moment like a light novel about literary envy. This will be a way of getting at the humorous end of self-conscious postmodern fiction. It's going to be about two writers who sort of love-hate each other and their varying fortunes. It's about (a) the writer's ego, which I'm afraid is a shamingly vast subject, and (b) middle age. My novels are really about what it's like to be a certain age—the midthirties in London Fields, the early thirties in Money, et cetera.

This literary-envy novel is going to be an awful lot about the subsidiaries of writing, rather than writing itself. These are giving interviews, being photographed, talking to TV crews, everything that gets in the way of writing. Of which there has never been as much as there is now. At no point in history has the writer spent so much time telling everyone what he's saying. I don't really think this can be terribly good for a writer, if only because it signifies a loss of innocence. Also, it tips the reader. It makes the reader concentrate too much on your so-called ideas. I don't have Idea 1 when I'm writing a book. I have a situation, and I have a preoccupation. But I don't have an idea about the end of the planet, nuclear weapons, any of that stuff. That's the stuff you talk about in interviews. It's a bit of lit crit from the author. But there's been so much of that, that by the time the reader—and this would include the reviewer—gets going, he thinks that what you're doing is trying to flesh out ideas with fiction. And it's not even the other way round. The ideas are just in your head. They're not part of an agenda or a program. They've nothing to do with what you're trying to say. You're not trying to say anything. What you're trying to say is the novel, that 470 pages of work. People say, "What did you mean by it?" I meant that [points to book]. I didn't mean something you could put on a badge. It's starting to screw up the emphasis of reading.

Why did the satirical British magazine Private Eye used to call you "Smarty Anus"?

Just because it sounds quite like Martin Amis, I suppose [laughs]. And, well because of the dirty stuff in the books. Here in England success is regarded with narrow-eyed suspicion rather than wide eyes. They had me as this guy with a word processor who was rattling out stories to get big advances. It seems to me a despairing view of the world. I think that's the depths of despair, to think that everyone is in everything for the money.

In Money and London Fields, there is a sense of real anxiety about money, the force of money replacing the class system. Do you think there's something comforting in the order of the class system that is slipping?

I have nothing but hatred and contempt for the class system. But it does have a redeeming feature, in that it directs you towards cultivation. When Magic Johnson or some other American sports star has got his ranch house and his three cars and all that, he is not going to feel that he is missing out on anything, because he lives in a money society, a pleasure society. But when one of our sports stars has got the house and the tennis court, and he may even dress up on weekends and ride a horse and chase a weasel or a rabbit, he still knows that there's an awful lot of ground to go. And this has to do with reading and not being ignorant, not having this terror of ignorance—the chasm where you have nothing to grip on to. So the class system is always directing you there.

Various critics have described this book as your most X rated, but in fact it's a long, long tease, and sex is conspicuously absent.

There isn't that much sex in my stuff. There's a lot of talk about it, but not a great deal of bump and grind. There used to be more. I would defend my interest in it, though. My father, for instance, says that sex is a dead end in fiction. But I think that just as you find out something about someone when they laugh—when they really laugh—you find out a lot by seeing them in a sexual situation. Almost the first thing I ask about a character that I am about to get going on is "What are they like in the sack?" Not "Are they good in the sack?" but "How in touch with themselves are they in the sack?" That dimension is always there. At the age of seventy, I can't see myself going on about it quite so much. I do expect there to be a natural evolution away from it.

So you think the fact that there's no real sex in London Fields is a function of your own—you used the term first—middle age?

Well, there's still too much of it in there to be … [Laughs] There's life in the old boy yet—from that point of view. Come on, I now find myself in the position of saying there actually is quite a lot of sex in the book. There is a lot of fantasy, a lot of necking and petting. Even if there were 470 pages of gross pornography, it still wouldn't be the real thing. It would still be all an act, an artifice.

When you do write about sex, it's always described as terribly self-conscious, solipsistic and even unpleasurable. During a sex scene in The Rachel Papers, the character Charles Highway says he wishes he could stop for "a cup of tea and a think." Your characters seem uneasy and preoccupied during sex, and they're mocked if they hope for any kind of transcendence. Is your view of sex so bleak?

It's part of a genuine idea about modern life—that it's so mediated that authentic experience is much harder to find. Authentic everything is much harder to find. In all sorts of areas of our behavior, even in the sack, we're thinking, "How does this measure up? How will this look?" We've all got this idea of what it should be like—from movies, from pornography. I'm interested in two extremes. The first is the idea that the earth moves, this great union is found, and the self is lost. That comes from D. H. Lawrence and Romantic poetry and is what we all devoutly hope for. The other extreme is sort of athletic—the hot lay, where the self is in fact not lost in the moment but is masterful and dominant. And that comes at us from another direction—from advertising and pornography and trash fiction.

You think that's the more prevalent view?

I think it is. Although I do think romantic love is the self's most urgent quest. Young Charles in The Rachel Papers is looking for love. Certainly, when I was that age, love was the quest. Of course, there was a slight suspicion that maybe you were really interested in love because you heard that you got better sex that way.

Again and again you've had to fend off the charge of misogyny in your work. How does it make you feel personally when people say that you hate women?

If it's a woman saying it, and she really means it, then I'm sad. I'm disappointed. But I wouldn't change a word of anything I've written or I am going to write. I would say that my first three books are not antifeminist but prefeminist. Gloria Steinem's book Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions slightly changed the way I thought about feminism. Just her simple technique of switching the sex roles, saying imagine if a man could have a period, he'd brag about how long and how heavy it was, et cetera. All that is great, and I just assented to that. You've got to get past the idea that there are all sorts of risky, alarm issues in my books—rape, masturbation, pornography—and see what's really going on. Then the woman reader has got to look into herself and say, "Is there an undertow here of this guy despising women?" I think the opposite is true.

I consider Money my feminist book. The hero does start to see the light, and being the kind of person he is, he fails to move into the light. In London Fields another kind of novelist wouldn't have had two extremes like Keith and Guy. He would have had one character, half of whom wants to sexually enjoy and even abuse Nicola and half of whom wants to overvalue her and adore her. These are two warring instincts in every man. Even in the best love you've got in you, there is a defiling element.

In your earlier work there don't seem to be any sacred cows, but in London Fields you are newly politicized about the environment, about nuclear issues and about child abuse. Perhaps feminist readers are thinking, "Well, he's got some issues now. Why not feminism?"

The reason I write about nuclear weapons and about the environment in London Fields has nothing to do with an ameliorist attitude towards them. It's just that they excite my imagination. Feminism doesn't excite me in that way—although I am profeminist. The trouble is, it doesn't swing on the page. You know the old saw about "What is a feminist's sexual fantasy"? It's not that she's sitting in the desert when a sheik rides past and swings her onto the back of his horse, takes her off to some sumptuous cave and sleeps with her forty times in twenty-four hours. The feminist's sexual fantasy is that while she's having a cup of coffee in a cafe, she strikes up a conversation with a man who runs a kindergarten in Hampstead, they go to a couple of Bulgarian films, and then, when the time is right, they begin to have very caring sex. It doesn't really swing, does it, as a sexual fantasy? Give me the sheik with his glistening voice.

There is an implication in London Fields that the world isn't inherently screwed up but that we've screwed it up and that perhaps we have the power to fix it.

We've screwed it up. The earth is four and a half billion years old. Imagine it as a forty-five-year-old person. Nothing is known about the first sixteen years of his life. Last week apelike creatures evolved into man. Agriculture began at the weekend. In the last sixty seconds, industrialization began, and in that one minute we turned paradise into a toilet. Certainly it's man who's done it. But it may be that it's idle to do anything but witness this process. It may just be deeply and essentially human to self-destruct. It's our nature. But I would say also that that's a counsel of despair, and I don't see how anyone with children can believe it. You've got to love those who will come after.

What would be your prescription for fixing up the world?

As an experiment, I rather like this Vaclav Havel idea—rule by artists. I think that, particularly in America, the career politician is now such an atrocious figure that, as Gore Vidal said, anyone who is prepared to run for president should be disqualified from doing so. So I'd change the whole ballgame.

There's Havel in Czechoslovakia, and Vargas Llosa now in Peru. Who would be your philosopher-kings in England and America?

Not Norman Mailer. What a thought! You'd have gladiatorial games probably—a sort of Caligulan rule by men. No, it would have to be someone who's prepared to do it. And you don't want someone with too much vision. I wouldn't want to do it. I'd hate it. I wouldn't let my dad do it. Someone like [British novelist] David Lodge would be a perfectly good prime minister. Pragmatic. Good at administration. And for America, maybe David Mamet.

Though he's a Thatcherite now, your father was an Angry Young Man in the Fifties. Do you ever worry that as you get older, you'll become conservative, too?

I really do doubt it. He was a Communist, which I never have been; he was a member of the party. But the key thing about him and his contemporaries—these former Angry Young Men, all of whom tend to be rightwing now—is that while they weren't born into poverty, they didn't have much money. Then they made some money, and they wanted to hang on to it. And they lived through a time when the left was very aggressive and when union power made life unpleasant. There are many aspects of the left that I find unappealing, but what I am never going to be is right-wing in my heart. Before I was even the slightest bit politicized, it was always the poor I looked at. That seemed to be the basic fact about society—that there are poor people, the plagued, the unadvantaged. And that is somewhere near the root of what I write about.

I really do believe that people are nice, one at a time. Even Germans. I am surprised by it. The bigger the unit, the worse it gets. Small may not be beautiful, but big is crazy. I fear for loss of individuality. In any kind of socialist utopia, one that worked, writing would become a very dull business. Because writers thrive on disparity. The reason that this preposterous notion of communism had such a long run is because it's deep in the human heart to want equality, to want everyone to be happy. It's a disaster as a political system, but the desire will always be there. But human nature wasn't made for that. Human nature was destined for disparity.

Who intimidates you?

Philosophers do. Their style of mind is different from mine, and I admire it, although I don't understand it. My wife does philosophy. It amazes me, the sort of things she's dealing with. My wife's first husband was a prominent linguistic philosopher, so she has lots of philosopher friends who have become my friends. And anyone who knows more than I do about anything intimidates me. My wife's area is the philosophy of art. Those who know about fine art, who really feel and understand it, intimidate me.

You've written two books about the United States—Money and The Moronic Inferno—and you seem to have a kind of passionate ambivalence about the country.

I love America. I think it's great. Even Ronald Reagan is great—personally. On the other hand, it's quite right to say that for years he got away with this image that he never told a lie, that all he did was tell a blooper. No, they were lies, and he is a liar. But he's got charm, and I am not resistant to it, the sort of amazing American serendipity in it.

The bit of America I've come to know best is the little-town America of Cape Cod and Wellfleet [Massachusetts]. My wife's father has a turkey camp there, which we take for a few weeks a year. It's full of the sort of couples that might be on the target list for a thrusting new magazine: "He is a child psychiatrist; she illustrates children's books." But there's an awful lot of general, everyday "I'm okay, you're okay" small-time American good humor. I love the exotic names on the mailboxes, these names that are all s's and j's and w's and k's.

Did your fascination with America begin during the year you spent in Princeton when your father was teaching there?

Oh, definitely. It was 1958 or 1957; I was eight. On Christmas Day, I looked at the presents I got, and I just thought, "This is an incredible country." My parents gave parties for the faculty crowd, and I'd get three dollars for being a drinks waiter. I had a crew cut. I had fat whitewalls on my bike. It was a great time. Also, I didn't spend my time watching junk TV. There were cartoons, but not the sort of stuff that kids watch now. Not Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, not Transformers.

Why do you live in London?

I don't want my children to be American children. One of the things I don't like about America is this ten-minute-childhood idea—that childhood lasts for ten minutes and then what you've got is a wised-up little monster who is six years old and no longer a child. I saw Batman with my wife, and we loved it. But she turned to me and said, "It would make me sick to think of a child of mine seeing this." And I know American five-year-olds who have seen Batman eight times. No, the hell with that. I want my children to have more innocence than America seems to allow.

You were an infamous bachelor. How has marriage and fatherhood changed you?

It changes things so completely that you lose your point of comparison. It's relaxing for the ego somewhat, to have something that you'd so gladly die for. You get out of the self a bit. The real reason that one does it is because it's just the next thing. Like leaving home—it might be very nice at home, but you have to leave and go on to the next thing. If you're going to do a job of being a human being, then you just do these things. And in my case, by the time you're thirty-something, you're ready, you're desperate, really. You've had enough of those middle years. What's so great about having children is that it's the ordinary miracle; it's the miracle that happens to everyone. Two of you go into that room, and three come out.

Of course, being married and having children does cut into your dating.

Has it been a burden to have been so precocious, to have been a boy wonder?

I hope to Christ I'm not an aging boy wonder. I am forty now. It slightly alarms me when people call me "the bad boy of English fiction." I'm not a boy. I don't mind the "bad" really. It's the "boy" that is embarrassing. And I feel that this "bad boy" stuff denies me readers. I think there are a lot of people who think that my work is just a stew of used condoms. I'm a bit more interested now in feeling that I am a middle-aged writer with a body of work. I still feel the same, though. I believe that we don't really change much. Time moves past you, but you're still the same.