HUMANITY IS
WASHED UP - TRUE OR FALSE?
By CAROLYN
SEE
''I AM sick of nuclear weapons,''
Martin Amis writes in his introduction to ''Einstein's Monsters,'' a collection
of five short stories about life before, during and after the surely upcoming
nuclear holocaust. ''They distort all life and subvert all freedoms,'' he
writes. ''Not a soul on earth wants them, but here they all are.'' And thus,
perversely, he begins his argument with an inaccuracy. The history of the atomic
age has become the thinking man's pro football, filling in conversational gaps
at every level. Nuclear weapons give men teams to root for and celebrities to
talk about, while sounding safely grown-up and important. Enrico
Fermi or Vinny Testaverde,
does it matter whom you talk about as long as it involves the manly arts of
competition and destruction? And what is nuclear winter or doomsday itself if
not humanity's final Super Bowl? (Plenty of women, too, extract a certain
nauseating comfort from nuclear weapons. Not since the grand old days of
unnatural childbirth have they had such certain proof that men are beasts and
women comparative saints, that this is a villain-victim world with strictly
laid-out rules: the victim gets her reward in heaven, while Edward Teller,
Caspar Weinberger and their fans will surely simmer for eternity in hell.) The
questions of how and why we've invented nuclear gadgets may be dealt with
solemnly, as in Richard Rhodes's recent book, ''The Making of the Atomic
Bomb.'' Horror and literature and even the nature of the sublime may be evoked.
What could be more serious, after all, than the death of the planet? But Mr.
Amis, the author of ''Money,'' ''Success'' and other novels, takes another
view. In his last story here, ''The Immortals,'' a survivor (who's sure he's
lived forever) says crankily: ''Just as I was thinking that no century could
possibly be dumber than the nineteenth, along comes the twentieth. I swear, the
entire planet seemed to be staging some kind of stupidity contest.'' And it's
that point of view that informs all of ''Einstein's Monsters.'' Mr. Amis's
hypothesis is that between the sociopathic right wing and the softhearted left, 99 percent of the human race has been
playing dumb at the most profound level.
Again, in the introduction Mr. Amis
remembers having asked Graham Greene what life was like before the bomb and
after: ''He said that he had never really thought about it.'' (Never really thought about it!) And Mr. Amis duly records
arguing with his famous dad, Kingsley, about the subject: ''Anyone who has read
my father's work will have some idea of what he is like to argue with. When I
told him that I was writing about nuclear weapons, he said, with a lilt, 'Ah. I
suppose you're . . . ''against them,'' are you?' '' And Martin suggests
(half-kidding?) that maybe this generation of fathers, who ''emplaced or
maintained the status quo,'' will have to die before we can even begin to look
at a future without weapons.
Until that uncertain time, Mr. Amis
takes a look at what it's like to live the way we do. Since no one cares in the
least for women and children anymore, let's start squashing them up now is the
drill in ''Bujak and the Strong Force,'' except that Bujak, a very strong fellow, decides against revenge when
his mother, daughter and granddaughter are raped and bent like pretzels. It's Bujak, a kind of
What kind of men could have done
this? Einstein's disciples must have been ape-crazy, and in ''Insight at
A word about Mr. Amis's style: it's
rough, new-seeming, laconic, lower-class, insolent, careless. You do not have
to wear a three-piece suit to write about the nuclear world, Mr. Amis suggests,
nor must you carry a sign to protest it. Just put your brain into gear and pay
attention. By doing that, Mr. Amis has created stories that please at least as
much as they horrify.
Text taken from http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/02/01/home/amis-einstein.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=login
(Viewed on November, the 5th,
2008 at 21:45)