Among the writer Kingsley Amis’s more celebrated productions is the writer Martin Amis. Like his father—and, for that matter, like most of England’s current crop of sassy young men of letters—the thirty-seven-year-old Amis fils is considerably more versatile and prolific than his typical American counterpart; thus far he has published (in the United States) five novels and a nonfiction book entitled Invasion of the Space Invaders. His new book, The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America, is a collection of twenty-seven articles and reviews from the years 1977 to 1985, most of them originally printed in the English newspaper The Observer, all of them concerned with American culture or American writers.[1]The topics include the Playboy mansion, AIDS, life in Palm Beach, the child killings in Atlanta, Truman Capote, Gore Vidal, Kurt Vonnegut, presidential candidate Ronald Reagan (1979), Gloria Steinem, Brian De Palma, and Steven Spielberg. None of these documents—the average length of which is about seven pages—could be described as deeply thoughtful or profound, or even (with one or two exceptions) substantial; at least one, a three-and-a-third-page “profile” of Diana Trilling, is so underdeveloped as to be virtually pointless: Amis doesn’t arrive at the Trilling apartment until the top of the second page, and doesn’t even get a word out of Mrs. Trilling until the middle of the third page. Several of the longer items in the book, meanwhile, arc pastiches of two or more brief scraps. Amis’s seventeen-page-long “Norman Mailer: The Avenger and