Rating: 
Summary: A Fashion Statement
Review: All of the writing & criticism of Martin Amis has as much credibility as his screenplay for the film Saturn 3 with Farrah Fawcett, Kirk Douglas and Harvey Keitel. If you really must know what the moments gossip is in Manhattan restaurants, skip Amis's laborious attempts at writing and skim through the tabloid Talk to which he contributes. Though personally I think the glossy photos of Gwinneth Paltrow are better.
Rating:
Summary: A Fashion Statement
Review: All of the writing & criticism of Martin Amis has as much credibility as his screenplay for the film Saturn 3 with Farrah Fawcett, Kirk Douglas and Harvey Keitel. If you really must know what the moments gossip is in Manhattan restaurants, skip Amis's laborious attempts at writing and skim through the tabloid Talk to which he contributes. Though personally I think the glossy photos of Gwinneth Paltrow are better.
Rating:
Summary: Utter claptrap.
Review: Amis has got to be the most overrated writer of his generation. My eyes fluttered shut after ten pages. Yawn yawn.
Rating: 
Summary: Rhythm & Blues
Review: As he has descended from the lofty perch of the satirist, Martin Amis's fiction has become--dare I say it?--more soulful. The best stories in his new collection Heavy Water and Other Stories--"The State of England," "The Coincidence of the Arts," "What Happened to Me on My Holiday"--attest to the increasing range and resonance of his fiction. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the final story in Heavy Water, "What Happened to Me on My Holiday." Ironically, the emotional resonance of this intensely autobiographical tale is deepened by means of a linguistic device that may initially alienate many readers. The story is narrated by an eleven-year old boy, a fictional version of Amis's son Louis, whose summer holiday on Cape Cod is shattered by the death of his step-brother (Elias Fawcett, the son of Amis's first wife Antonia Philips, who died at seventeen). Amis represents Louis's response to this loss by means of a highly stylized phonetic speech (part American slang, part British phrasings) that is the verbal equivalent of the estrangement and stupefaction death leaves in its wake: "I dell id thiz way--in zargazdig Ameriganese--begaz I don'd wand id do be glear: do be all grizb and glear. There is thiz zdrange resizdanze. There is thiz zdrange resizdanze." Reading the story aloud to my 10 and 14-year old children, I felt Louis's grief as a physical presence--thick, hard, unyielding. Wordsworth's "still, sad music of humanity" sounds throughout "What Happened to Me on My Holiday," preserved in a meticulously crafted fugue-like structure in which the voices of other characters and nature itself contribute to the theme of loss. Louis plays with his younger brother and his four-year-old cousin, catching crabs and minnows, understanding all too well (as his cousin does not) that a dead sprat will never return to life. He sees in the natural world intimations of the mortality he is now struggling to understand, observing the "gloud of grey" he sees rising from a pond on the day he hears that his stepbrother has died back in London: "nat mizd [mist], nat vag [fog], but the grey haze of ziddies and of zdreeds [cities and streets] . . . and nothing was glear." Elias now inhabits the distant land of memory, where Louis imagines him hurrying about "with bags and bundles . . . jaggeds and hads [jackets and hats], gayadig, vestive [chaotic, festive]". Meanwhile, another of Louis's cousins goes into the pool without his arm-floats and must be rescued. At the end of his holiday, in the car on the way to the airport, the word "grey" returns again, like a haunting melody--the melody of mortality: "Greynezz is zeebing ubwards vram the band. And nothing is glear. And then zuddenly the grey brighdens, giving you a deeb thrab in the middle of your zgull." Now all the notes of the story converge, all the deaths come together, and Louis thinks of his brother: "one vine day you gan loob ub vram your billow and zee no brother in the dwin bed. You go around the houze, bud your brother is nowhere do be vound." For readers new to Martin Amis, Heavy Water will serve as a bracing introduction to his arresting vision and his remarkable artistsry. It will assure the rest of us that his artistic quest is nowhere near its end.
Rating: 
Summary: Clever stuff, if sometimes too clever
Review: Heavy Water is Martin Amis' second collection of short stories. He's really better at novel length, but the stories included here a still enjoyable reading. As we expect from Amis, the prose is very stylish, very clever, very self-aware. A story like "Let Me Count the Times" isn't very "deep" at all, but it's neat just to see Amis ring all the changes he can on his main subject. Even a nominally more serious story such as "Straight Fiction", about a world in which gays dominate and heterosexuals are oppressed, is mostly interesting for the careful inversion of the language. I was most impressed by "The Coincidence of the Arts", in which an aristocratic English painter takes up a mysterious affair with a silent black woman, a beautiful Amazon. Amidst the jokes and the cleverness Amis builds to a subtle and telling moral about race and class. This isn't a collection of great stories, or a great collection of stories, but it's consistently fun and involving, and every so often it's even better.
Rating:
Summary: Clever stuff, if sometimes too clever
Review: Heavy Water is Martin Amis' second collection of short stories. He's really better at novel length, but the stories included here a still enjoyable reading. As we expect from Amis, the prose is very stylish, very clever, very self-aware. A story like "Let Me Count the Times" isn't very "deep" at all, but it's neat just to see Amis ring all the changes he can on his main subject. Even a nominally more serious story such as "Straight Fiction", about a world in which gays dominate and heterosexuals are oppressed, is mostly interesting for the careful inversion of the language. I was most impressed by "The Coincidence of the Arts", in which an aristocratic English painter takes up a mysterious affair with a silent black woman, a beautiful Amazon. Amidst the jokes and the cleverness Amis builds to a subtle and telling moral about race and class. This isn't a collection of great stories, or a great collection of stories, but it's consistently fun and involving, and every so often it's even better.
Rating:
Summary: My Favorite Birthday Present
Review: I received an autographed copy of this book and was hesitant to read it. I am a big fan of Martin Amis and bent the spine and folded corners in it right away! Amis's flexability as a writer is evident in this book. The stories in this book are different from The Rachel Papers and Dead Babies. For those familiar with his work, it fits somewhere in the middle. For those not, this would be a good one to start.
Rating:
Summary: My Favorite Birthday Present
Review: I received an autographed copy of this book and was hesitant to read it. I am a big fan of Martin Amis and bent the spine and folded corners in it right away! Amis's flexability as a writer is evident in this book. The stories in this book are different from The Rachel Papers and Dead Babies. For those familiar with his work, it fits somewhere in the middle. For those not, this would be a good one to start.
Rating: 
Summary: Overbearing, heavy-handed,...Amis
Review: It seems to this reader that when a wordsmith like Amis gets up a head of steam, all we know about good writing and, indeed, literature as a whole gets flung by the wayside. Smug, self-satisfied and so, well, British it's nauseating, my reading time on this one will not exceed the seven minutes I spent on it standing in the New Releases section.
Rating:
Summary: A stone bore.
Review: Martin Amis is overhyped and people apparently buy his books to be trendy; I don't know how they can bear to actually read them.
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