Martin Amis, a British novelist and essayist, was introduced as being qualified to speak at the American Writers Museum by virtue of his having lived in Brooklyn the last seven years. The room was full. I don’t think anyone cared where he lived.

He opened by telling us that Brits don’t go to listen to authors, that if your brother had just written a number one bestseller and was next door talking about it, you wouldn’t go. Perhaps that’s why Amis moved to Brooklyn.

He then read from his latest book, The Rub of Time, a collection of past pieces. The headline from The Guardian review of the book said it’s “brilliant, except when it’s not.” That’s the way I felt about Amis. His choice of passages to read was odd, given that a lot of what he read consisted not of his own writing, but of quotes from Donald Trump. That would be like Tina Fey simply reciting a Sarah Palin speech. Oh, wait.

Amis extolled the virtues of Melville’s Billy Budd, which caused a man behind me to suggest that there should have been a spoiler alert before Amis revealed the book’s ending. Given that the book was published in 1924, it made me wonder what the statute of limitations is on spoiler alerts.

A man in front of me asked a question that led Amis to suggest that a certain man in the news didn’t have sex with a certain woman, but rather engaged in some behavior in her presence not seen twice in human history. My imagination was at a loss, but I laughed anyway.

Amis’s favorite authors are Bellow and Nabokov, though Amis suggested that Nabokov wrote four too many novels involving 12-year-old girls (out of the seven such novels he wrote). Seven! It seems like one should have been enough. (I remember walking into a college interview with a copy of Lolita in hand to read while in the waiting room. Nothing like making a good first impression.)