When Martin Amis moved to New York it gave rise to reports that he loathed England. Not so. His new novel is, he says, no "V sign" to Britain…
Martin Amis at home in Brooklyn: 'I'm not going to tailor things I say in case they get picked up.' Photograph: Mike McGregor for the Observer
It was death that urged Martin Amis to America – though not, as reported in parts, some sort of death of the England left behind
"My mother died the year before last, and we were thinking about that," says the novelist, 62, waistcoated, meeting the evening with a bottle of beer in his home in Brooklyn, New York. "My mother-in-law [a Brooklyn resident] was the same age, and her husband of 40 years was ailing too. He died quite suddenly, before we'd even got here. But we'd been thinking for months: they're not going to be here for ever."
So Amis and family – wife Isabel Fonseca, daughters Fernanda and Clio – left London for New York, at first to commandeer the mother-in-law's floor and later to take up residence in a towering, turn-of-the-20th brownstone in Brooklyn. "There was a half-hearted attempt to make it look as though this was out of disaffection for England," says Amis. "Me saying, 'England can go fuck itself.'" He means newspaper reports, published around the time of the move last summer, that framed it as a demonstrative emigration: a flounce out. "There wasn't an iota of that."
The reports were prompted, though, by an interview Amis gave to a French magazine. Wasn't he quoted in Le Nouvel Observateur, complaining of his homeland's "moral decrepitude"? Didn't he say he would prefer not to be English?
"That French interview caused a lot of trouble. They misattributed and mistranslated. It was a mess, that interview. Still, you think: ah, it's only France. None of my friends will see it. And then of course it comes back all warped and upside down." The relocation, he insists, "was purely for familial reasons. I'm still English. I still have a flat in England. And this is indefinite, but not permanent."
Full story at The Guardian
"My mother died the year before last, and we were thinking about that," says the novelist, 62, waistcoated, meeting the evening with a bottle of beer in his home in Brooklyn, New York. "My mother-in-law [a Brooklyn resident] was the same age, and her husband of 40 years was ailing too. He died quite suddenly, before we'd even got here. But we'd been thinking for months: they're not going to be here for ever."
The reports were prompted, though, by an interview Amis gave to a French magazine. Wasn't he quoted in Le Nouvel Observateur, complaining of his homeland's "moral decrepitude"? Didn't he say he would prefer not to be English?
"That French interview caused a lot of trouble. They misattributed and mistranslated. It was a mess, that interview. Still, you think: ah, it's only France. None of my friends will see it. And then of course it comes back all warped and upside down." The relocation, he insists, "was purely for familial reasons. I'm still English. I still have a flat in England. And this is indefinite, but not permanent."
Full story at The Guardian
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