I just finished “Koba the Dread” by Martin Amis. Following that, I read this review of it in The Atlantic | September 2002 | “Lightness at Midnight” | Hitchens. It makes sense to read a review by Hitchens: he is minor subject in the book, and he clearly knows the subject matter itself. I think both the book and the review are great: Amis writes much better than most historians, and Hitchens writes much better than most reviewers. I don’t think Hitchens answered Amis’s criticisms of him fully, but he does a thorough job of pointing out the many limitations of Amis’s work. Despite that, I highly recommend you read both.
I brought Sebald into this, however, because I think the critics of Amis make a mistake similar to those made by those criticizing Sebald’s On the Natural History of Destruction. In both cases, you have superb novelists writing about history. In both cases, the reviewers were criticizing their historical skills. However, I think in both cases, that misses the point. Both Sebald and Amis do not give up being novelists when they are writing their histories. If anything, they are creating a new genre that is the reverse of historical novel. I think that new genre could be criticized, but to not see that this new hybrid and not analyze both aspects of the work is to miss out on a substantial part of it. If anything, it is closer to the New Journalism of Capote, Thompson, Wolfe and others.
I’d be interested to know if people who have read Koba the Dread and On the Natural History of Destruction thought the same thing.
Smart People I Know 