2 - Class Acts: Dead Babies and Success

Summary

‘Perhaps, like everything else, it's all a question of class’ (S 45)

Many of Amis's novels are interested in the shifting dynamics of social class in the period from the 1970s onwards. This interest establishes itself early in his fiction. It is there in The Rachel Papers, but forms a central part of his next two novels, Dead Babies and Success. Each of these novels has characters from different social classes, and contrasts the upper-middle class and lower-middle class as well as characters drawn from workingclass backgrounds, although his working-class characters tend to be one dimensional and are often based on exaggerations of popular stereotypes.

DEAD BABIES (1975)

James Diedrick, in his book Understanding Martin Amis, refers to Amis as ‘a postmodern Jonathan Swift’ adding, ‘consistent with his scepticism toward totalising explanations and moral positions, however, Amis's irony is far less stable than Swift's’. This reference to a sceptical attitude in Amis's work towards all totalizing theories indicates something of the postmodern form of satire that Amis employs in his fiction. In Amis's early novels in particular, the representation of a morally ambiguous universe delivered to the reader by an ambivalent narrative voice produces a radical form of satire that threatens to explode the genre completely. In several of the novels from The Rachel Papers in 1973 to London Fields in 1989, this satirical ambivalence in the narrative voice is formally represented in Amis's penchant for metafictional twists and turns that often serve to implicate the author (and by extension the implied reader) as a member of the group or attitude that is being satirized. This is produced, as Richard Todd has argued, by a series of doubles and doubling effects in these novels that often pairs characters with narrators and by implication with the author. This kind of satire, where the grounding for the satirical attack is itself made unstable by the ambiguous positioning of the satirical voice represents a postmodern version of the genre, and it is in Amis's 1975 novel Dead Babies that this kind of postmodern satire on social class is most clearly identified.