The War Against Cliche: Essays and Reviews, 1971-2000

Spanning three decades, The War Against Cliché showcases Martin Amis’s razor-sharp defense of style and originality, skewering lazy thought and secondhand feeling with wit, precision, and moral intensity.

Martin Amis has long waged his fiercest battles not on the battlefield of fiction, but in the trenches of criticism. In The War Against Cliché, he assembles three decades of essays, reviews, and reflections into a blistering defense of style itself—of clarity, precision, and originality against the deadening forces of lazy thought and secondhand feeling.

Across these pages, Amis appraises the giants—Nabokov, Bellow, Larkin, Updike—with a critic’s discipline and a novelist’s ear, measuring each by the same exacting standard: freshness of mind and language. He skewers pretension, sentimentality, and the counterfeit profundity that passes for wisdom in contemporary letters, his prose gleaming with both mischief and moral seriousness.

From literary obituaries to takedowns of modern mediocrity, Amis writes with the exhilaration of a man who believes words still matter—and that to write well is, always, to think well. The War Against Cliché is a master class in literary combat, brimming with the energy, elegance, and scathing humor that have made Amis one of the defining voices of his time.