Martin Amis, author of "The Rachel Papers" and "The Information" and "Time's Arrow", doesn't write for you. He doesn't write for himself. He doesn't write for his wife, or his kids. He doesn't even write for his publisher, or the various periodicals to which he contributes. Martin Amis writes for Vladimir Nabokov. Well, maybe he writes for Kingsley Amis, too (Amis pere; author of "The Old Devils" and "Lucky Jim"), but mostly he writes for Nabokov. You can see it in every labyrinthine sentence, in the complex prose, in the wit, the intellect, and the iconoclastic tendencies that reign over this stunning collection of literary reviews, taken from the last 30 years of Amis' writing career.

Okay, he's not only writing for Nabokov. So who is Amis' ideal reader? One who has, as the author himself delineates, an "imagination, memory, a dictionary, and some artistic sense." Amis searches to challenge you, but also to entertain. And that passing remark about the dictionary was not made in jest. Amis is the one author whose logocentrism forces me to the dictionary with pleasure. Nearly every paragraph.

The collection is divided into eleven sections: "On Masculinity and Related Questions", which tackles a variety of non-literary subjects, some British and some American, that have crossed Amis' mind at one point or another; "Some English Prose", which spotlights British authors, ones not necessarily part of the literary canon, whose works are usually problematic for Amis; "Phillip Larkin", which discusses the works of the Amis family friend and unwilling Poet Laureate; "From the Canon", which deconstructs our most-studied authors; "Popularity Contest", which gives even crowd-pleasing writers like Michael Crichton and Thomas Harris a turn under the Amis microscope; "Vladimir Nabokov", which gives Amis a chance to probe into the man's lesser works; "Some American Prose", which evaluates the talents of the most notable American authors of the latter half of the twentieth century (DeLillo, Vonnegut, Mailer, etc.); "Obsessions and Curiosities", which lets Amis' non-literary obsessions roam free; "John Updike", which details Amis' rocky relationship with the works of the "Rabbit" author; "Ultramundane", which shifts the focus to literature and issues found on the outer reaches of the Commonwealth; and "Great Books", which gives Amis an opportunity to let his literary geek flag fly, by examining his own personal canon at great length: "Don Quixote", "Pride and Prejudice", "Ulysses", "The Adventures of Augie March", and, of course, "Lolita".

The book's title comes from Amis' belief that "all writing is a campaign against cliché", not just in a literary sense, but also in a human sense. He takes his role in this campaign very seriously, as an author, stating that we should expect artists "to stand as critics not just of their particular milieu but of their society, and of their age". Even so, he regrets the advent of the artist-critic, i.e. novelists 'feeling' their way through criticism, rather than using the tools of theory to review literature. Instead, Amis, who could easily have traded on his name and fallen in step with these artist-critics, uses a background of unabashed joy in the face of literary theory to give his reviews weight.

If the above makes the collection sound pedantic and tiresome, don't worry. It isn't. Amis may be serious about his job, but he sure can have some fun. In a piece on Hillary Clinton's banal child-rearing instructional, "It Takes a Village", Amis grumbles about her quaint but queasy neologisms: "'Stomachachy'… is not a campaign stop on the way to Poughkeepsie but Hillary's epithet for a pain in the gut," he writes. Later, in a piece on soccer (ahem, football), he begins cheekily: "Readers… who like football probably like football so much that, having begun the present article, they will be obliged to finish it." The rest of the paragraph is spent teasing the reader, threatening to never get to the meat of the article, with full knowledge that the reader isn't going anywhere.

In discussing why Cyril Connolly only wrote one novel ("The Rock Pool"), Amis notes that Connolly was "ruined by too much fiction-reviewing: he knew all the larks, and he knew them all too well." Amis, prolific novelist and critic, doesn't fall into this trap. He is able to keep his reviewing and his fiction separate. I'm thankful, because I love Amis' fiction. But his reviewing is still loaded with the kind of samurai imagery that Amis is so adept at. He discusses Elmore Leonard's penchant for rejecting the imperfect/present/historic tense, in favour of "a kind of marijuana tense, … creamy, wandering, weak-verbed." I just loved that when I ran across it: "the marijuana tense". Amis' reviews are alive, vital, and vivid.

They are also quite obsessive. Repeatedly he references: the affective fallacy, the intentional fallacy, the artist manqué; his pet peeves concerning writers, which include their lack of talent, their inability to control syntax, their ignorant repetition, and, of course, their use of clichés; his own canon of literary greatness, against which all is to be measured, that includes Saul Bellow, John Updike (with reservations at times), Philip Larkin, J.G. Ballard, and literature's "'complete' player" Vladimir Nabokov.

The Nabokov obsession may one day ruin Amis. He just can't get the great Russian writer out of his head. A quick check of the index shows that references to Nabokov appear on 51(!) of the book's 490 pages. He notes on one hand that the word 'Kafkaesque' is losing meaning due to overuse, but with the other hand he does the same thing to the word 'Nabokovian'. It should be no surprise, then, that the collection's last and longest piece is a deconstruction of "Lolita" so brilliant that it made me want to read that distressing and challenging book once more.

I adore Amis. His writing is challenging and thought-provoking, while providing a portal to the world of this curmudgeonly, crusty, snobby author (those are all compliments, I assure you). He's opinionated, and more than able to draft persuasive arguments to prove his opinions correct. And last, but certainly not least, he loves writers and he loves readers. If you are a serious member of either club, I'll bet that you'll love Amis too.

Recommended: Yes