Signature and Style

In a long and penetrating review of Martin Amis’s The Pregnant Widow in a recent issue of TNR (July 22).  It’s more a review of Amis’s entire career and corpus, and along the way William Deresiewicz borrows a distinction from Michael Wood between “style” and “signature” to isolate what is wrong with much of Amis’s fiction.

“Signature announces the author’s presence.  Style, Wood says, ‘is something more secretive . . . a reflection of luck or grace, or of a moment when signature overcomes or forgets itself.’  With style, ‘we think about the writing before we think about who wrote it.’”  Deresiewicz adds, “Amis’s style, in his most characteristic works, as glorious as it often is, is all signature, is always signature.  Signature is the whole point of it.  Look at me, it says.  Look at me, me, me . . . . Whatever else [Amis’s] bravura exhibitions do – these image-riffs and diction-dances, these sound-tricks and pun-stunts – they never let you forget about the person who is performing them.”

Deresiewicz thinks this is related to the “aggressive, even punitive” attitude that Amis takes toward his characters: “Before they are betrayed or beaten or bankrupted, before their beds or their kids are defiled, their souls soiled and trashed, his protagonists are roughed up by the language that handles them: sneered at and snarked on, battered with bathos, baited like bears in a pit.  Amis never picks a fair fight . . . . He doesn’t sympathize with his characters, those lowlifes and tough guys, he has contempt for them.  He’s Martin fucking Amis, after all, and who the hell are they?”

Deresiewicz’s point is trenchant despite the ironic fact that the review indulges a good bit of Deresiewicz’s own signature.”