Martin Amis, Inside Story

 

- Amis calls his new book a 'novelised autobiography'. ‘The book is about a life, my own, so it won’t read like a novel - more like a collection of linked short stories, with essayistic detours’. 

- The ‘novel’ nomenclature simply serves to give him licence to roam freely over events and people in his life that meant something to him. Names are changed, people invented, events described that never happened. A constantly appearing girlfriend ‘Phoebe Phelps’, for example, is fiction, but is, as Amis disclosed in an interview earlier this year, based on a series of real relationships in his youth. So like many historical novels it's a mixture of fiction and fact. The central focus is the ideas canvassed, the insights offered, the erudition displayed, and the well-chosen quotes, liberally sprinkled. 

- I've been an enthusiastic fan of Amis for many years and have read all his 18 novels to date. So of course I loved this book. There are so many stories and conversations and endless name-dropping that contribute to a potent mixture all beautifully rendered with a lightness of touch. It’s a very gentle book. It treads lightly but it has weight. 

- You cannot but be impressed with the erudition, the intelligence and the literacy. In many ways it's a book about writers for writers. Saul Bellow and Philip Larkin are central, clearly being Amis's favourites. They were important and influential literary figures through the 20th century and good friends of Amis. Graham Green makes a few appearances, as does John Updike. Religion and belief is a constant question. He indulges in broad, sweeping critiques and writes with with confidence and authority. 

- Amis has always explored antisemitism and fascism is his writings over the years and he does it here. Bellow he lauds as the ‘first Jewish-American novelist’. There are other brief mentions: D.H. Lawrence, Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes, Clive James, Kurt Vonnegut, Philip Roth, Elmore Leonard. He also offers insights into Islamic terrorism and the rupture of 9/11.

- Dotted throughout is free-flowing miscellaneous advice on writing from a master of the craft. His damning of the frequent use of cliches for example is delightful. Disappointingly, there's no reflections on his own novels or their reviews, given that over the course of his career he’s received plenty of ordinary ones. What were his sales, his bestsellers, even his royalties? We get nothing on the business side of things. This part of the ‘inside story’ is absent. The focus is on personal relationships, wives, girlfriends, families, and the authorial craft. 

- The relationship between Amis (‘Mart’, or ‘little Keith’ as his best friend Christopher Hitchens called him) and the Trotskyist ‘Hitch’ is very affectionate and deep. And his telling of the sad story of Hitchens' slow and agonising death from esophageal cancer is profoundly moving.

- The novel is studded throughout with footnotes which add colourful detail and background to the events being described.

- Despite the fact that the book is supposed to be a 'novel' there is a magnificent index, one of the best you'll see. It's detailed and comprehensive, and provides the structure and storyline of the book. Worth dipping into.