The GROTESQUE! Satire can be so uncomfortable, especially when it details deformities, drugs, and sex. If you like Chuck Palahniuk, Irvine Welsh, or Marquis de Sade, all of which I do, read this book. Can’t quite figure out the significance of the motto of “dead babies,” except that it’s crass & unfeeling, a la ‘dead baby jokes’ from grade school (What's funnier than a dead baby? A dead baby in a clown costume!).Though likely published as a comment on the hippies/hedonists of the 1970s, it is completely analogous and characteristic of 2010 twenty-something generation (though there would be more video games or television). As the plot, we follow a group of neighbors through a rowdy weekend of overindulgence and insensitivity, with short contextual background details for each of the characters. I read this book blind (glazing over the Menippus satire quote in the beginning…oops), and my emotions went as follows: appalled at the debauchery, became aware I was reading satire, laughed/cried at satire, and finally, suffered heart palpitations because the end is unexpectedly terrifying and gave me a nightmare. I still love the voice of Amis…a chubby dwarf saying something “fatly”; a bench, “patterned with the amorous graffiti of the local young…Billy fks Jane, Susan Fs Emily…”; the “familiar fat-thighed shuffle” of Mrs. Fry; and [on seeing something pleasing] a character flatlines: “I like this planet.” And the definitive excerpt of the novel:“Everyone is always blacking out at Appleseed Rectory, and they can’t remember farther back than a few days. Everyone tends to be either drunk or stoned or hungover or sick at Appleseed Rectory, and they have learned to be empirical about all sense perceptions. Everything is out of whack at Appleseed Rectory; its rooms are without bearing and without certainty. The inhabitants suffer, too, from curious mental complaints brought on by prolonged use of drugs, complaints that can be alleviated only by drugs of different kinds. And so Appleseed Rectory is a place of shifting outlines and imploded vacuums; it is a place of lagging time and false memory, a place of street sadness, night fatigue, and canceled sex.”
According to Martin Amis, 25 is the age at which I set aside childish things and become a wholly wretched person. I will move into a posh house in the country with my fratish friends and our pretty but willingly vapid chicks. Like all good-looking young people, we will leech off our nebbish but rich housemate, using his seemingly endless funds to maintain a continually bacchanal existence. When we are not rolling the next joint, snorting one more line, popping open one more bottle of champagne, we will amuse ourselves by terrorizing the elderly neighbors, we'll lure birds with seed so that we may unload rifles into their grazing, we'll bludgeon a bull, go to trendy, outsider clubs and watch grandguginolesque performance theater, and even then we'll still manage to find the time to think up new ways to humiliate the poor Danny-DeVito sized sod we let live in the boiler room - our own appointed court jester, if you will. None of us will have anything resembling an actual job - certainly not our chicks, who stalk cattily about the house, taking pleasure in each others physical imperfections, while resenting that they ever hooked-up with guys like us to begin with. (Not that we really give a shit what they think.) Just to spice things up, we'll invite a trio of morally bankrupt and sexually disgusting foreigners, along with this prostitute we all used to bang, to stay a weekend that will quickly descend into violent debauchery and disturbing realizations of self-loathing.We may be grotesquely rendered cartoons and we may find pleasure in cruelty towards others, but that doesn't matter because we are good looking, urbane, we know all the right people, and our parents are wealthy. We are the future, or something like that. 25 is going to be a very good year.
What do You think about Dead Babies (1991)?
After enjoying Dead Babies, I can cheerfully take my chair at the Amis Cultist soiree with no inhibited glances or afterthoughts. Written in the vein of a Menippean satire, Dead Babies sees Martin delineating dishabille libertines of the Bowie-70s and exploring their savage exploits: casual terrorism, gleeful animal abuse, and rapacious drug intake constitute the menial; they exalt vapidity cloaked under the guise of counterculture, deliver glib vituperations upon perceived inferiors, and thoroughly incense all non-bourgeoisie who've matured past nihilistic stock responses to ennui. Not to be outdone by his other walkthroughs through depravity, Amis delectably evokes disgust in the genteel reader: one reviewer claims Dead Babies was the first novel to make her "phyiscally sick", which, like I've said elsewhere, proves Amis's effectiveness at engineering the id for comic design. As a precursor to Success, Dead Babies falls short on vivaciousness, but still sparkles with Amis's usual incendiary baritone and informs the cruelty of spiritual successors a la Will Self; overall, tis a worthy work in the Amis canon.
—Alexander
On the jacket cover of another book by Amis, I read that compared him to John Updike "but meaner." I would add a "whole lot meaner" for it's hard to find a sympathetic character in Dead Babies. Instead it's a menagerie of the self-absorbed with a few con-dependents thrown in. Nearly everyone is privileged, spoiled, self-absorbed and addicted to one thing or another. The "one thing" is in most cases many drugs and/or alcohol, but there's also some serious sexual addiction at play. Which was why I lingered over the book. No, not because of the sexual addiction, certainly not the gutter language, but because I found it difficult maintain interest in such low-life scum. The sex scenes were as harsh, like a low-grade porn movie made in bad lighting. Though I imagine Amis meant them to be darkly humorous, I was not amused. There was one character whom I did have some sympathy: Keith Whitehead, the near dwarf with a multitude of hormone problems. The book is largely set in a communal living arrangement, and Keith is kept around a kind of foil. While the other players have varying degrees of physical attractiveness, Keith is a "horror show," grossly overweight, pimply and having pathological flatulence. But Keith alone in the book is a victim of bad circumstance, unless you count being born with physical beauty or wealth bad circumstance. Amis makes an attempt with backstory to provide rationale for why the characters are what they are. But it was disgusting Keith that only looked good. And he was no spiritual giant, being mainly preoccupied with getting laid, but then he was a young man. But he looked like a saint compared to the rest of the crew.I finished the book, which consisted largely of one debauchery after another punctuated by cruelty. Practically anything else I could say about the book would be a spoiler. The good thing: Amis, like Updike,is a powerful stylist, and his characterizations come alive -- like Frankenstein. Was there a message, or was Amis merely slumming the sex-drugs culture? You tell me.
—R. Burns
Minor Amis work, if you ask me. Having started my Amis reading with London Fields and The Rachel Papers, I am pleased that I didn't read this first. I fear if I had, I'd never have read the (far superior) others. Though this novel is scathing and even darkly comedic in parts, it also feels a little surface, and very hyperbolic. The characters seemed more like sketches than like fully-formed human beings. Drugs, sex, and violence oozing off every page, yet still, I found it remarkably tedious reading.
—Jennifer Barbee
