Sure, Martin Amis is well-known to be arrogant and over-prone to self-importance, but I have a really hard time working out what is supposed to be rude about his remarks:
Quote:
...the idea of being conscious of who you're directing the story to is anathema to me, because, in my view, fiction is freedom and any restraints on that are intolerable.
I would never write about someone that forced me to write at a lower register than what I can write.
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Amis' style (at his best) is quite complex. He's saying that he'd be unable to convert that to something that children would grasp. Some authors can do that (James Joyce wrote a children's story a few years before finishing Finnegans Wake), but some can't, and Amis is in the latter group.
This episode is typical Amis, though, and I bet he's laughing his pants off at all those who've chosen to take umbrage - although there's no actual insult, it's easy to
infer one, but that's just falling into the trap.