"Writers Martin Amis Admires, and He Should Know"
by Michiko Kakutani

At his best Mr. Amis demonstrates an empathetic ability to communicate the feel- the texture, the weight, the tactile energy- of individual writers' work and to explain to the lay reader how these effects are achieved. He describes Anthony Burgess's "panoptic suavity, his chuckling insouciance, his word-perfect putdowns." He points out that Pritchett's "responsiveness to the quotidian is one of the reasons his stories seem formless." And he salutes "Augie March" for "its fantastic inclusiveness, its pluralism, its qualmless promiscuity": "in these pages," he writes, "the highest and the lowest mingle and hobnob in the vast democracy of Bellow's prose. Everything is in here, the crushed and the exalted and all the notches in between."