Booker Prize Longlist Once Again Excludes Martin Amis. Will He Ever Win?

(July 28) -- Another year, another Man Booker prize long-list, and another one without Martin Amis.

Bestowed to international novelists from the British Commonwealth and Ireland, the Booker Prize is the second most prestigious literary award outside of the U.S. (the Nobel Prize for Literature being the most coveted, despite honoring many a dud).

Amis, whose new novel "The Pregnant Widow" is out in stores, isn't the only notable name missing from this year's list. Both Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie also were not among the 13 authors being considered. Rushdie's hotly anticipated new book "Luka and the Fire of Life: A Novel" is forthcoming later this year (and thus eligible).

By contrast, McEwan's latest, "Solar," is his weakest effort in years, a plodding tale of an imploding misanthrope that reads like Saul Bellow-lite. (Walter Kirn's review describes "Solar" well, if harshly: "Instead of being awful yet absorbing, it's impeccable yet numbing, achieving the sort of superbly wrought inertia of a Romanesque cathedral. There's so little wrong with it that there's nothing particularly right about it, either. It's impressive to behold but something of a virtuous pain to read.")

But while McEwan and Rushdie have won Bookers, for "Amsterdam" and "Midnight's Children," respectively, Amis has not. And given that his recent stretch of novels -- from "Yellow Dog" (2003) on -- has been so inferior to his early work, it's not certain he ever will.

For my money, Amis' best novel is "Money," a send-up of trans-Atlantic greed that offers a livelier, more inventive take than later presented by Tom Wolfe's "The Bonfire of the Vanities." (Apologies to David Foster Wallace, but "Money has the best, and funniest, tennis scene in literature.) But "Money" was published in 1981, the same year as "Midnight's Children."

He stood a better chance against two "Road" books that took the prize. Amis' "Time's Arrow," a portrait of a World War II concentration camp told in reverse chronology (turning the Holocaust into an event not of mass horror but healing), was shortlisted but fell to Ben Okri's "The Famished Road." The "Information" (1995), a favorite of some fans but not universally well received, was overshadowed by the petty literary-world events surrounding it (Amis dumped his longtime agent) and wasn't shortlisted. Pat Barker's "The Ghost Road" won that year.

Amis has long been characterized as the enfant terrible of British letters, due to his literary pedigree -- his father, Kingsley Amis, won a Booker (for "Old Devils"; his best book, "Lucky Jim," preceded the prize's inception in 1969) -- and his precocious debut novel, "The Rachel Papers." While the label has stuck, Amis is no enfant -- he's 60. But he still has time.

Hot on HuffPost:

Will Martin Amis Ever Win the Booker Prize?

Hot Leads

ON FACEBOOK

News From Our Partners

Also on AOL >>>

Depp's Dames

Alicia's Evolution

Lip-Sync Fun

They Hooked You