Last year, Esquire dispatched Martin Amis to Youngstown, Ohio to cover a rally of Trump supporters. That piece, “Pox Americana,” in which Amis notes Trump’s “flat sneer of Ozymandian hauteur that widens out almost from ear to ear, like a comic mask,” is now collected in Amis’s new book, The Rub of Time: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump: Essays and Reportage, 1994-2017. (Reviewing it in The New York Times, Esquire’s own Dwight Garner, likened reading it to “hurtling down a black-diamond ski run.”)
So, it was only right that Esquire’s editor in chief, Jay Fielden, gathered an intimate crowd of Amis-ites and other notables—including such literary luminaries as Bill Buford, Andrew Wylie, Susan Minot, Huger Foote, Gary Shteyngart, Patrick McGrath, and Shelley Wanger—to toast Amis and a career that began in 1973 with the legendary Rachel Papers.
As Fielden jokingly noted in his toast, Amis is, however, not the first Amis to have written for Esquire. In 1959, when he was ten, his equally-legendary father, Kingsley, moved the family to the United States, and he took a job as Esquire’s movie critic, interviewing grand masters of the cinema such as Henri-Georges Clouzot—the famed filmmaker behind “The Wages of Fear” and “Diabolique”—as well as assessing the talent of the “elfin siren” Brigitte Bardot.
“I remember the day we celebrated his contract,” Amis told the room in response to Fielden’s toast. “Five of us went out for an entire day on the town in Manhattan and spent one hundred dollars. We were amazed.” As are we. Amazed by his talent and honored to publish two generations of Amis’s.
