SOURCE: A review of Time's Arrow, in Partisan Review, Vol. LIX, No. 2, Spring, 1992, pp. 282-95.

In the following excerpt, Bell dismisses Time's Arrow as "offensive" and maintains that Amis "fails to comprehend" what he has "exploited" in his story about Nazi Germany.

Martin Amis's restless ingenuity trips him up in a more serious way in Time's Arrow, a laborious attempt to be "original" about the Holocaust—hardly a subject that lends itself to the artful devisings of literary contrivance, or the sardonic bray of satire that has characterized his earlier work. In his new novel Amis has literally bent over backwards to be different. Reversing the order of time, Amis's portrait of a Nazi doctor, assistant to Mengele in Auschwitz, begins with his death and ends with his birth, taking him from his final days in California through years of medical practice in Boston and New York, to...