HUMANITY IS WASHED UP - TRUE OR FALSE?
By
CAROLYN SEE
EINSTEIN'S
MONSTERS
By Martin Amis.
149 pp. New
York: Harmony Books. $12.95.
''I AM sick of nuclear
weapons,'' Martin Amis writes in his introduction to ''Einstein's Monsters,'' a
collection of five short stories about life before, during and after the surely
upcoming nuclear holocaust. ''They distort all life and subvert all freedoms,''
he writes. ''Not a soul on earth wants them, but here they all are.'' And thus,
perversely, he begins his argument with an inaccuracy. The history of the
atomic age has become the thinking man's pro football, filling in
conversational gaps at every level. Nuclear weapons give men teams to root for
and celebrities to talk about, while sounding safely grown-up and important.
Enrico Fermi or Vinny Testaverde, does it matter whom you talk about as long as
it involves the manly arts of competition and destruction? And what is nuclear
winter or doomsday itself if not humanity's final Super Bowl? (Plenty of women,
too, extract a certain nauseating comfort from nuclear weapons. Not since the
grand old days of unnatural childbirth have they had such certain proof that
men are beasts and women comparative saints, that this is a villain-victim
world with strictly laid-out rules: the victim gets her reward in heaven, while
Edward Teller, Caspar Weinberger and their fans will surely simmer for eternity
in hell.) The questions of how and why we've invented nuclear gadgets may be
dealt with solemnly, as in Richard Rhodes's recent book, ''The Making of the
Atomic Bomb.'' Horror and literature and even the nature of the sublime may be
evoked. What could be more serious, after all, than the death of the planet?
But Mr. Amis, the author of ''Money,'' ''Success'' and other novels, takes
another view. In his last story here, ''The Immortals,'' a survivor (who's sure
he's lived forever) says crankily: ''Just as I was thinking that no century
could possibly be dumber than the nineteenth, along comes the twentieth. I
swear, the entire planet seemed to be staging some kind of stupidity contest.''
And it's that point of view that informs all of ''Einstein's Monsters.'' Mr.
Amis's hypothesis is that between the sociopathic right wing and the
softhearted left, 99 percent of the human race has been playing dumb at the
most profound level.
Again, in the introduction
Mr. Amis remembers having asked Graham Greene what life was like before the
bomb and after: ''He said that he had never really thought about it.'' (Never
really thought about it!) And Mr. Amis duly records arguing with his famous
dad, Kingsley, about the subject: ''Anyone who has read my father's work will
have some idea of what he is like to argue with. When I told him that I was
writing about nuclear weapons, he said, with a lilt, 'Ah. I suppose you're . .
. ''against them,'' are you?' '' And Martin suggests (half-kidding?) that maybe
this generation of fathers, who ''emplaced or maintained the status quo,'' will
have to die before we can even begin to look at a future without weapons.
Until that uncertain time,
Mr. Amis takes a look at what it's like to live the way we do. Since no one
cares in the least for women and children anymore, let's start squashing them
up now is the drill in ''Bujak and the Strong Force,'' except that Bujak, a
very strong fellow, decides against revenge when his mother, daughter and
granddaughter are raped and bent like pretzels. It's Bujak, a kind of London
neighborhood Popeye, who has the most articulate thought here about the nuclear
world: ''All peculiarly modern ills, all fresh distortions and distempers,
Bujak attributed to one thing: Einsteinian knowledge, knowledge of the strong
force. It was his central paradox that the greatest - the purest, the most
magical - genius of our time should have introduced the earth to such squalor,
profanity, and panic.''
What kind of men could have
done this? Einstein's disciples must have been ape-crazy, and in ''Insight at
Flame Lake,'' Mr. Amis matter-of-factly follows out this line of thought. A boy
child of a dead (schizophrenic) bomb maven is wildly intelligent but
schizophrenic himself. He vacations with an uncle, his wife and baby. The
wife's sexuality is dreadful to him; the baby visits him nightly in his dreams
- hideously enlarged to monster size. Some deaths have to occur here, and they
do. IS humanity through? (Answer yes or no.) In ''The Immortals'' the answer is
yes, of course, with our last souls dying of loneliness and bad jokes, but in
''The Little Puppy That Could'' (and how Amis pere must have gnashed his teeth
over this one), the author pulls every string, turns evolution upside down to
think up a happy ending for our beleaguered species.
A word about Mr. Amis's
style: it's rough, new-seeming, laconic, lower-class, insolent, careless. You
do not have to wear a three-piece suit to write about the nuclear world, Mr.
Amis suggests, nor must you carry a sign to protest it. Just put your brain
into gear and pay attention. By doing that, Mr. Amis has created stories that
please at least as much as they horrify.
Carolyn See's
most recent novel is ''Golden Days.''
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