SOURCE: "What Life Is: The Novels of Martin Amis," in PN Review, Vol. 7, No. 6, 1981, p. 42-45.

In the following essay, Powell provides overviews and analyses of three of Amis's early novels, The Rachel Papers, Dead Babies, and Success.

Success is a funny thing. In literature (as K.W. Gransden observed in an amiable poem on Poetry Now recently), there are those notable popular successes which turn up, still in their paper jackets but a little tatty, cluttering the shelves of second-hand bookshops a couple of decades later, their authors either forgotten or remembered merely as instances of the fickleness of reputations. Then there are the successes which enjoy a quite different kind of life, even though their 'literary' reputations may stand hardly higher than those of the first sort: books which are distinctively of their time and which, though by no means great works of art, succeed through...