Chronicler of the Age of Anxiety

Style, linguistic verve and an outrageous comic instinct, evident as early as his first novel, The Rachel Papers (1973), immediately established Martin Amis as a rarity in contemporary British fiction: fast, funny and Swiftian. Time has passed and with it Amis has built up a large body of work including a weighty trilogy, Money (1984), London Fields (1989) and The Information(1995). In tandem with the street-wise satiric dazzle and vivid descriptions of sexual incompetence has been an unapologetic deference to Bellow and Nabokov. There is also a serious side, expressed in a fear for the future, particularly in light of the nuclear threat, as interpreted by a concerned parent and expressed through the stories of Einstein's Monsters (1987). His short novel Time's Arrow, a tour de force of technique, was deservedly short listed for the 1991 Booker Prize - though it is not without its detractors. Many observers disputed Amis's right to address the Holocaust.

Anxiety is now a standard sensation in Amis's fictional world; dread, fear and a terrifying inevitability lurk at the bulky core of The Information. As a writer, Amis hankers after the urgent, pulsating voice of US fiction, so much so he took the biggest U-turn of his career last year with Night Train, an unconvincing foray into the detective genre; for once, he seemed tone deaf, with his narrator, a tough American female cop, saying such things as: "I am a police. I am a police and my name is Detective Mike Hoolihan. And I am a woman, also."

The disappointment of that effort should be countered by the arrival of Heavy Water and Other Stories (Cape, £14.99 in UK). Not all of the nine stories are new, not all of them memorable, but a couple of them, particularly the outstanding "State of England", illustrate exactly how hilariously adroit Amis can be. Parody and satire have always come easily to him; he loves sending up class pretensions. True, he has nothing new to say, but this may be because there is nothing new to say. He is an inspired mimic and is never better than when reproducing the muddled thinking of characters driven by greed, failure and hopeless ambition. The portrayal of the rival writers in The Information approached cartoon frenzy.

However, his real genius is his Hogarthian portrayals of no-hopers. The anti-hero of "State of England" is an Amis variation of Updike's Harry Angstrom. "Big Mal stood there on the running track in his crinkly linen suit, with a cigarette in one mitt and a mobile phone in the other . . . not tall but built like a brick khazi: five feet nine in all directions." Mal is a bouncer, aware that good bouncers never need to bounce. He has run away from home."Ran away? Linzi only lived across the street."

Attending his leering nine-yearold son Jet's sports day, Mal, the sort of dad who reckons a burger can cure all, is still bearing the signs of having been beaten up the night before by furious opera-goers who arrived on the scene as Mal and his buddy, Fat Lol, were illegally clamping cars. The wound on Mal's face is seeping; added to that misery is the disapproval his new domestic arrangements have earned for him. He lines up for the fathers' race with all the other mobile phone-clutching ageing thugs desperate for social acceptance. "It was the gunshot that made the herd stampede. Instantly Mal felt about nineteen things go at once. All the links and joins - hip, knee, ankle, spine - plus an urgent liquefaction on the side of his face. After five stumbling bounds the pain barrier was on him and wouldn't get out of the way. But the big man raced on, as you've got to do."

In "The Coincidence of the Arts", Sir Rodney Peel is an Englishman who has made good in Manhattan, "after many soggy years of artistic and sexual failure in London, SW3". He retains some of the habits born of his period of defeat, the scent of which still lingers in his pyjamas "unlaundered for fifteen years (when he got out of bed in the morning he left them leaning against the wall)", yet America, we are told "had reinvented him. He had a title, a ponytail, a flowery accent, and a pliant paintbrush . . . Rodney now knew the panic of answered prayers."

There are several brilliant setpieces which echo Money. "They were shouting at each other, but not yet in exasperation of anger. The city was getting louder every day: even the sirens had to throw a tantrum, just to make themselves heard." An element of menace dogs Sir Rodney's friendship with Pharsin Courier - "six foot seven, and built like a linebacker in full armour . . . he was deeply black" - who has written a "million word" novel he wants Rodney to read. But Rodney hasn't and Courier has become dangerously impatient. So he pretends to have read it and composes a critique based on Courier's reactions to his speculations.

Elsewhere, a jet-setting poet engages in endless discussions about the form of his latest poem, and composes increasingly vicious letters protesting about the neglect of his genius. As a parody it is far more successful and funnier than "Straight Fiction", a cautionary and often forced tale about the relentless advance of heterosexual sex. Cleve, a Jane Austen-reading fitness freak and career hypochondriac, watches his world collapse. Having discovered a Henry James novel, "one he was sure he hadn't already read . . . it struck him: Jesus, was James straight?" Meanwhile his body building continues achieving results. "Just when it seemed that it could expand no further (where, he wondered, was all this coming from?) Cleve's upper body burst into a whole new category of immensity."

Amis's comedy is grotesque and high-speed; the observations are merciless and exact. It is created by his unfailing ear, at its best when reproducing street argot - "Have a cup of tea and a Nurofen . . . Go back to bed. With them brochures." A gifted mimic, Amis can be lazy, and there is occasional lazy writing in the lesser stories here. But at his best Amis can wilfully exploit language and ordinary observation, arriving at hilarious comic effects no one else would attempt, never mind achieve.