The Conceptualists

 A group of rich kids and their hangers-on, none of whom seems to need to work for a living, get together for a weekend of sex, drugs, and ultra-violence in a country manor. One of them may be not quite what they seem. Such is the by no means unpromising premise on which Martin Amis constructs his insanely readable second novel, Dead Babies (1975). 

The plot of the novel has been compared to a parody version of an Agatha Christie weekend murder party. But the compulsive aspect of the novel does not stem from its mystery or suspense (though there is plenty of that too). As with other Amis novels, it derives above all from the virtuoso prose.

A paragraph of Martin Amis is like the verbal equivalent of a snort of crystal meth (or whatever I, the uninitiated, imagine that to be like). (And that simile right there, my friends, is my own poor attempt at what Amis in this novel calls the "inimitable Yes style," referring to the pugnacious undergraduate periodical edited by one of the central characters.)

But it's not just the words. It's also the characters, each of whom comes across as both a predecessor of Amis's later larger-than-life creations and as shards of his own personality. There is the rich, self-doubting, good-natured, and ineffectual Giles Coldstream, who is a remote ancestor of the later Amis character, Guy Clinch (down to the shared initials), and who shares with Amis a profound lifelong struggle with his own teeth. 

(See Amis's memoir Experience for more on the subject. He also addresses there his most notorious tooth-related incident. In what once passed for a literary tabloid scandal at the time, Amis dared to spend a literary advance on dentistry—imagine! This violated some code of ethics for the British literary establishment that is exceptionally difficult for outsiders to grasp.)

There is Diana Parry, who shares in common with Amis an unsettled childhood as the offspring of divorced celebrities. 

There is also Andy Adorno, who seems like the first working draft of the later Keith Talent, the working class autodidact/street thug who reads Konrad Lorenz and Elias Canetti in order to fathom the inner sources of his own violent propensities. Like his later iteration, Adorno (yes, named for the philosopher) is an intellectualized walking Id, whose reading leads him to take an admiring interest in the more refined artistry of mayhem. 

The particular object of Adorno's adoration is a mysterious group of nihilo-terrorists named The Conceptualists. A more extreme version, you see, of the Situationists. In order to gain membership, one has to be over six foot and possess a "humanities degree." And whereas the latter had disruptive but non-violent "Happenings," the Conceptualists take it a step further. They go out and perform "Gestures," which often involve random assassinations and other atrocities. 

The Conceptualist "Gesture" is the ultimate embodiment of the acte gratuit. It is what Coleridge called "motiveless malignity." And in their humbler way, the rich brats in Amis's book behave with the same purposeless and idle sadism—if only to stave off the ennui. They kick homeless people in the street and shoot birds and torment an elderly working class couple living on the same estate. 

It should be clear by now, in short, that the twenty-something tyros and enfants terribles in Amis's novel belong to those "worst of the younger generation" that D.H. Lawrence once wrote about in a poem: "those Latter-Day Sinners / they calmly assert: We only thrill to perversity, murder, suicide, rape—bragging a little, really, / and at the same time expect to go on calmly eating good dinners for the next fifty years."

Amis's novel is thus a commentary, one could say, on the sexual revolution, the more well-heeled members of the counterculture, and the other elite social changes of the late '60s. It is therefore very much a book of the 1970s, and appears at first to be set in the then-present—except that one of the characters is described as twenty-four years old, but as having been christened in the year 1972, which means the novel must be set a couple decades into the future. 

Dead Babies is therefore about the mood of the mid-1970s, in the depressing afterglow of the counterculture—but extrapolated forward into an even more nihilistic future, in which the same cultural trends have been blown up to still more appalling and grotesque extremes. 

Amis—himself the product of a louche environment, and who could by no means be said to have had a normal childhood (though it does not seem to have been an entirely unhappy one either)—is perhaps in this novel registering some indirect protest at how wide the cultural gyre had turned by the time he came into the world. As one elder character in the book describes the effects of the sexual revolution—ultimately the older generation just used the younger as a pretext to free themselves of sexual "hang-ups," and it all happened at the latter's expense. 

"Well, our sexual natures were formed," he says, "so we could never suffer from anything worse than ennui. I think that's why we let you do this to yourselves. To liberate us. But your lot [...] you thought you'd get free. You didn't get free."

Indeed, this must have been what it felt like to be young in the 1970s, when no one could believe anymore that the counterculture was about to establish a reign of universal "love" and consciousness (the characters in Amis's novel are forever denouncing such rhetoric as "hippy shit"), and all it had left behind it was a sour aftertaste of nihilism, depravity, and Manson-style murders. 

Undoubtedly, the younger generation really did feel that they had been used, and that while their parents were busy "freeing" themselves of "repressions," they were left—like one of the characters—to crawl around looking for warmth in communal lofts, to fend for themselves as the unwanted "foster child of a hundred postnatal wards, the cosset of a dozen itinerant rhythms guitarists[.]" 

As this same character observes in the novel, he can only be glad he was born as early as he was. The kids younger than him still have it even worse. 

Doubtless, Amis speaks for himself here. Writing this book in 1975, and projecting its events twenty years into the future, he tries to imagine what will happen to the kids who were conceived in communal flower child living arrangements across England and America during the "summer of love," when they finally come of age. And if we look at what twenty-somethings did in fact grow up to become in the mid-90s, we can say that Amis wasn't entirely wrong. 

(Now, in 2026, these nihilistic Gen Xers have gone on to produce a perhaps even more "cooked" generation—people who grew up during the pandemic and the Trump era, when the short-lived idealism of the Obama period perhaps seems as absurd and inaccessible to them as the 1960s belief in "peace and love" did to the Andy Adorno generation. And we, the older, are once again undoubtedly to blame. I have no doubt whatsoever. They, too, "didn't get free.")

As the elder character in the novel says earlier, in the same monologue I quoted above, "I've always thought that fucking was a godsend to us oldsters and a bane for you youngsters who came up with the idea in the first place. Bloody marvelous! All these people suddenly willing to do it, and no guilt! That was the really new thing for us." 

This is the voice not of Amis's generation, but of his parents'. I am reminded of the words of one member of that older generation—Amis’s father's friend from college days, Philip Larkin. As the latter wrote in "High Windows": 

When I see a couple of kids
And guess he’s fucking her and she’s
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
I know this is paradise

Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives—
Bonds and gestures pushed to one side
Like an outdated combine harvester,
And everyone young going down the long slide

To happiness, endlessly. [...] He

And his lot will all go down the long slide   

Like free bloody birds. 

And immediately
Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

Martin Amis's second novel, Dead Babies, could really be seen as an extended commentary on Larkin's poem. It shows us what happens when a generation goes "down the long slide" like "free bloody birds" and emerges on the other side into the boundless empyrean of "freedom"—only to find that there is nothing and no one there, and it is empty, and it is endless.