Amis vs. "Two Bags of Silicone"

Lefteris Pitarakis / AP Photo; AP Photo Amid allegations of sexism and snobbery, novelist Martin Amis has attacked Katie Price, the model-turned-author known as Jordan. Olivia Cole on London's favorite literary feud.

Imagine Tom Wolfe unveiling his latest novel: I Am Anna Nicole Smith. Or the discovery of a late lost work by Saul Bellow about Paris Hilton. Where you’d think that would be pretty exciting, in London, news that Martin Amis has a new muse in the form of Katie Price, a glamour model turned one-woman cottage industry known as Jordan, has raised temperatures.

Since Amis alerted an audience at a London literary festival to the fact that he’s working on a novella, State of England, owing something to his Jordan-fixation (he's read everything she's “written” and follows her antics in the tabloids), he’s been accused of sexism, snobbery, and perhaps most extraordinarily, of being uncontainably jealous of Jordan’s literary prowess. Come again? The Guardian ran a story  under the headline, “Martin Amis’s problem is not Jordan, it is women.” Within minutes, comments flooded in, many wondering as to whether in objecting to Jordan, one can reasonably be accused of sexism.

Perhaps Amis’ error was to joke that he finds the hideous quotes on the front of every Jordan book “Number One Bestseller” the “most terrifying words in the English language.”

Thanks to calendars, clothes, fragrances, lingerie, and an awful lot of ghosted books, Jordan is worth an estimated £40 million. She’s a (fake) double D model, best known for turning her marriage to the pop star Peter Andre into a reality-TV show. Price, as Amis has observed, has an “interesting face”—on TV she looks pretty and endearing, makeup-free, in her tracksuit and a ponytail—but “all we are really worshipping is two bags of silicone.” When she dresses up, she glows orange with a spray tan and the “interesting face” and big green eyes evaporate into a plastic cliché of bling.

Television personality Janet Street-Porter has been on auto-rant: “It must be galling for him that Katie Price’s fans are willing to buy anything with her name on it, but that seems to be the case... every aspect of her life is a roller coaster of tears, tantrums, joy and sorrow.... Could it more irritating for Amis that bestselling fiction is currently dominated by a whole range of female authors?”

Let’s be clear, she is not one of their ranks. On TV, Price is endearingly frank and self-deprecating. Her books catch those qualities but presumably with the aid of a tape recorder. Given that not a line of Jordan’s 23 books is penned by her, the idea that she could be considered a “rival” writer seems willfully wrongheaded. Perhaps Amis’ error was to joke that he finds the hideous quotes on the front of every Jordan book “Number One Bestseller” the “most terrifying words in the English language.” While male novelists traditionally jostle for acclaim and accolades (Updike vs. Wolfe, for instance), it’s a delicious fantasy (but no more than that) that the ranks of Amis, Salman Rushdie, and Paul Auster are crying into a nice glass of red wine over sales figures for Price’s trilogy, Angel, Crystal, and, the latest, Angel Uncovered.