Bitter Sweets

By R.Z. Sheppard

Martin Amis' Heavy Water and Other Stories (Harmony Books; 208 pages; $21) is a collection of nine short fictions, wildly diverse but related by a gleeful misanthropy that has made the British author one of the most unlikable satirists of his generation. And one of the funniest.

A London-based, bicontinental celebrity, Amis is familiar with customs on both sides of the Atlantic. His sharp eyes and ears are unforgiving of pretense and shortcomings, which appear to include about every activity of his species. Our pathetic preoccupations with sex are always good for a yuk. Let Me Count the Times is about a man who compiles statistics on his love life, which includes an affair with himself.

As a novelist, Amis has demonstrated a facility for inversion (Time's Arrow runs history backward). Here the story Straight Fiction posits a society in which homosexuality is the social norm and heterosexuals are fearful of discovery. Career Move illustrates what might happen if poems rather than prose became movie material. "The only thing we have a problem on 'Sonnet' with...is the form," says a Hollywood producer to a dismayed poet.

Amis' outsize aptitude for mimicry runs rampant in What Happened to Me on My Holiday. It is written entirely in a dialect that sounds like some form of New Yorkese ("We grabbed zum lunj and then went oud to Lang Island in a big goach galled the Jidney"). Not for the starchy or easily offended, these exercises in absurdity showcase Amis' extravagant talents and splashy intellect. But we must also say that a little Heavy Water goes a long way.

--R.Z.S.