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Amis invented this type of sentence, an interior monologue in which wicked and decorous thoughts alternately keep bubbling up, striving for the mastery of an uneasy conscience. The object of this attention, of course, is a wife, a woman, and such moments of imaginary violence drew severe feminist criticism, particularly as they resonated throughout Amis' novels Jake's Thing (1978) and Stanley and the Women (1985).
Such complaints about Amis' sexism were not entirely misplaced. The men in his books are not always nice to or about women, and vice versa. Given a choice between what ought to be true and what actually goes on, Amis invariably chose to write about the latter.
When he was young, he sensed a false view of life being preached by British conservatism, and he turned his considerable wit against it; as he grew older, he sniffed out totalitarian impulses emanating from the left and opposed them too. Spoon-fed the doctrines of literary Modernism--to be profound is to be obscure, the highest art is only to be understood by a cadre of initiates--Amis made rude noises. Coming across the claim that T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land is "the century's most influential poem" and "a supremely important poem," he snapped, "Importance isn't important. Only good writing is." Many of his pronouncements are debatable. But Amis produced reams of good writing, and he was and is important.