Kinglsey Amis Would Puzzle at Jaundiced Brit View of the U.S.(BOOKS)(LETTER FROM LONDON)

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Byline: Clive Davis, SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES

As Martin Amis recalls in "Koba The Dread," his new study of Stalin's tyranny, his beloved father Kingsley Amis was a member of the Communist Party for a decade and a half, from the palmy, "We Love Uncle Joe" years of World War II until the Russian invasion of Hungary. Like so many members of his generation, Amis Sr. found it hard to renounce his faith in the God that failed.

If his own account is to be believed, it took him a lot less time to fall in love with America. In his memoirs - a wonderful book, published in 1991, that manages to be both hilarious and unbearably poignant - he describes paying his first visit to the U.S. in 1958. (He made his second - and last - journey across the Atlantic a decade later. Only his fear flying, one of his many and varied phobias, stopped him making the trip more often). By the time Amis Sr. and his family had made their way across Manhattan and reached the New Jersey Turnpike - which was, believe it or not, a beguiling, multicolored spectacle to a visitor from post-austerity Britain - he had already been …