Martin Amis has built an entire career out of being the smartest smart-ass on the block. For the last quarter-century he has steadily honed his considerable skills and talents until he has become England’s coolest, highest-profile writer, and one of its most technically proficient.

He is fiercely intelligent, and the swiftness with which he digs his fangs into the jugular can hardly be matched. But his works are proof that intelligence and wit are not enough; even talent is not enough. Fiction that aspires to be really good must also possess a heart. Without that invaluable commodity an author can be brutish and nasty, but not tragic.

Amis has never been able to overcome an essential heartlessness, and so, gifted as he is, he has not reached the level of contemporaries like Pat Barker or Ian McEwan. An author must love even his most dreadful characters to bring them to life; Amis does not. Take, for example, his description of a club bouncer:  

Fat Lol: he provided dramatic proof of the proposition that you are what you eat. Fat Lol was what he ate. More than this, Fat Lol was what he was eating. And he was eating, for his lunch, an English breakfast—Del’s All Day Special at £3.25. His mouth was a strip of undercooked bacon, his eyes a mush of egg yolk and tinned tomatoes. His nose was like the end of a lightly grilled pork sausage—then the baked beans of his complexion, the furry mushrooms of his ears. Paradise Street right down to his bum crack—that was Fat Lol. A loaf of fried bread on legs.

Fat Lol is effectively grotesque, but his author never makes him effectively human. The same thing could be said of the better-developed and more complex Mal, Fat Lol’s partner and the protagonist of this story, “State of England,” the longest and most ambitious in Heavy Water. Mal, like Lol, is a bouncer. He has earned enough money to send his son Jet to a trendy school and to keep an Asian mistress as well as a wife; but his accent, attitudes, and lack of couth give him away, and he knows it. Never mind that “class and race and gender were supposedly gone (and other things were supposedly going, like age and beauty and even education); all the really automatic ways people had of telling who was better or worse—they were gone.” Gone they may be, but they are not forgotten, as Mal is only too aware.

In many ways Mal is the prototypical Amis-man (the Martin Amis-man, that is, not to be confused with the entirely different but equally recognizable Kingsley Amis-man). He is spiritual brother to John Self of Money, Richard Tull of The Information, Terry Service of Success. An Amis-man experiences not love but a queasy mixture of lust, fear, and need. He fatally confuses pleasure with joy, and has no use whatever for mere contentment. He hankers after status and success, although he is sharp enough to know that they are not, in themselves, sufficient. He is haunted by a feeling that he has taken a fatal misstep, but can’t remember where or how, rather like the hero of another story in this volume, “Denton’s Death”: “It seemed to him that all his life he had been tumbling away from his happiness as a young boy, tumbling away to the insecurity and disappointment of his later years, when gradually, as if through some smug consensus, people stopped liking him and he stopped liking them.”

Amis’s special strength, one in which he has few peers, is in laying bare the sheer abjectness of the human animal. (Especially the male animal: one of my primary sensations in reading a Martin Amis novel is always one of relief at not having been born a man, with their apparently unappeasable appetite for success and sex.) He does have a point; as a species we are indeed abject, as well as being venal and just generally pathetic. But this is not all we are, and it is not enough to make first-class fiction, despite the claims of sycophantic critics or fellow-writers like Patrick McGrath, who in his New York Times review of Amis’s recent Night Train gushed that “a tone of deep sadness, of grief even, has always been apparent in his work, lending depth and edge to a prose crackling with wit and invention.” Actually, the tone always strikes me as being not so much one of grief as nastiness. If it is grief, though, to give it the benefit of the doubt, it is grief without the balancing awareness of joy or beauty that gives grief its impact in fiction.

Heavy Water consists of nine stories, two of which appear here for the first time. As a group they are standard or substandard, and offer no surprises for readers familiar with Amis’s fiction. Two of the stories are alternate-world gimmick pieces, along the lines of his 1991 novel Time’s Arrow, in which time runs backward. In “Career Move” screenplay writers struggle in poverty to get their works published in obscure journals while poets jet back and forth between London and Hollywood, attending top-level meetings and screwing starlets. Technically, at least, no one in the world does this sort of thing better than Amis, and while it is strictly a one-joke effort there are plenty of laughs in “Career Move.” Here, for instance, is a Hollywood production meeting about a new sonnet: “Now. Don has a problem with the octet’s first quatrain, Ron has a problem with the second quatrain, Jack and Jim have a problem with the first quatrain of the sestet, and I think we all have a problem with the final couplet.”

This is ingenious tomfoolery, and so is “Straight Fiction,” in which homosexuality is the social norm and heteros live a furtive, underground life. (“Christ, where do they get off calling themselves straight?” says one of the gay characters. “They take a fine old English word and fuck it up for the rest of us.”) This type of gimmick cannot sustain an entire novel, as the abysmal Time’s Arrow demonstrated, but it works well enough for this sort of lightweight magazine piece.

A couple of stories in this collection do not even have Amis’s usually reliable cleverness going for them. The aforementioned “Denton’s Death” is a disgustingly pretentious little squib about suicidal depression, while “Let Me Count the Times” is a trite tale about an unimaginative businessman and his carefully calculated sexual escapades. (“Vernon made love to his wife three and a half times a week, and that was all right,” it begins.) A sterile character has possibilities, of course, but not when the story is itself as sterile as the character it so condescendingly describes.

Only two of the stories in Heavy Water are worth much: “State of England,” described above, and “The Coincidence of the Arts.” In the latter, an English portrait painter who has flopped in London emigrates to New York in search of greener pastures. Sir Rodney Peel is fortyish, a mediocrity and a wimp. A sexual scavenger, he is “the first on the scene after the big cats had eaten their fill”; socially, he survives by laying on the butter. “He believed in flattery and was always trying to deploy it. But something went wrong with the words: they came out, as his mother would say, just a bit off.”

Having spent most of his adult life trying to shed the accent and mannerisms that mark him, in England, as the overbred sissy he is, in New York Rodney hopefully brings them out of mothballs, for Americans are impressed by this sort of thing; he even follows his agent’s advice and has cards printed up bearing the tacky legend “Sir Rodney Peel, Baronet.” At the same time, he tries to cultivate a veneer of New York cool, though when he attempts a street-guy handshake he looks, as ever, “like someone slowly and painfully learning how to play Paper, Scissors, Stone.”

Rodney is the kind of person Amis usually treats ruthlessly; this story, however, rises above the usual by letting the ignoble Rodney eventually behave rather better than we, or he himself, might expect. Alone among the collection, “The Coincidence of the Arts” succeeds in making its hero a human being rather than a marionette.

Still, it is a far from perfect work, for in it Amis indulges in two vices that sit very badly with him but for which he has often displayed a weakness: bathos and sanctimony. In this story he adopts a high moral tone about racism that, and forgive me if I do him an injustice, I find hard to take very seriously. This sort of preachiness in accordance with the received opinions of his generation crops up fairly often in Amis’s fiction, and it always seems both perfunctory and insincere.

Possibly it is not. But that it seems so is the fault of the author and the way he uneasily combines a pose of moral uprightness with his trademark nastiness and with a brand of humor that more than one critic has labelled sophomoric. Not that there is anything wrong with sophomoric humor. On the contrary! But it tends to ring hollowly in a story or book with pretensions to being so much more. It is this ill-matched juxtaposition of attitudes that leaves the reader, after Heavy Water as after so much of Amis’s work, with a distinctly sour taste in the mouth.

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