“One of the recurring themes of Amis’s pronouncements over the past few years has been a palpable disenchantment with England and English life: the ‘skanky town’ malice of London’s literary world; his bald declaration to a French newspaper that he would ‘prefer not to be English’; the sense that his homeland is a busted flush; the fact that his new book, Lionel Asbo, is a satire on the shallowness and vulgarity of celebrity-obsessed Britain. All of this may or may not be true, but it is not the reason he has decamped to America.”