The Amises, tradition, and influence: genealogical dissent -- Brief anecdotal history: the mid-1980s and mid-1990s -- Tradition, influence, and anxiety -- Realism and revaluation -- I: Critical cartography: charting the artistic allegiances -- 1. The Amises on American literature: Nabokov, Bellow, Roth -- Vladimir Nabokov: style as morality -- Saul Bellow: prophetic realism -- Philip Roth: egocentric narration -- 2. The Amises on English literature: Austen, Waugh, Larkin -- Jane Austen: mannered morality -- Evelyn Waugh: decline and fall -- Philip Larkin: the comedy of candor -- II: Influence and intersection: the interplay of individual works -- 3. The Amises on comedy: Lucky Jim and the Rachel papers -- Lucky Jim: cultural and generational conflict -- The Rachel papers: revaluative inversion and critique -- "The two Amises" -- 4. The Amises on satire: ending up and dead babies -- Henry Fielding and Horatian satire -- Mikhail Bakhtin and menippean satire -- Characterization and closure -- 5. The Amises on realism and postmodernism: Stanley and the women and money: a suicide note -- Chauvinism, feminism, and misogyny -- The autobiographical abyss: Jake's thing and Stanley and the women -- Revaluative reminism? Money, misogyny, and doubling -- The Amises, realism, and postmodernism -- Revaluative realism: money and metamimesis -- 6. The Amises on love, death, and children: the letters of Kinsley Amis and experience: a memoir -- Higher autobiography: experience, midlife crisis, and the unconscious -- Personal realignment: hilly redux -- Professional realignment: the old devils -- Personal realignment: experience -- Projecting a future: the Amises, genealogical dissent, and the British novel since 1950 -- Whither and novel? Realism, postmodernism, and beyond -- After Kingsley: Martin Amis and the event horizons of fiction -- Professional realignment? Love, children, and night train.