Martin Amis and Satire

I read a Martin Amis novel for the first time this year, and so this interview with him caught my eye. It's super long, and interesting only in sections, but there were numerous times when I was reminded of Juvenal's (and to a lesser extent Horace's) satires. Here are a few bits that piqued my interest:

...the book is a kind of satire of contemporary England—a member of its underclass wins the lottery and enters its tabloid class. Satire is—I wonder how helpful it is as a category. It was once defined in apposition to irony, in that the satirist isn’t just looking at things ironically but militantly—he wants to change them, and intends to have an effect on the world. I think that category just doesn’t exist in literature. No novel has ever changed anything, as far as I can see. And the great satirists, like Swift and Dickens, tend to write about abuses and injustices that have already been partially corrected—you write about it after it’s over. I would say I’m an ironist not a satirist. All you do is you take existing tendencies and crank them up, just turn up the volume dial.