Twenty years ago in Experience Martin Amis observed that the claim that everyone has a novel in them is slightly untrue. It is more accurate to say, the novelist pointed out, that everybody has a memoir inside them. With Experience the novelist wrote his own memoir, chronicling the story of his upbringing, life, friends and career up till 2000.
Written as the author was turning 50, Experience felt like a book that it would be important for Amis to have written. He described his relationship with his father, Kingsley Amis, in hilarious and often moving detail. He also described his “missing”, including his cousin Lucy Partington who disappeared in the 1970s and whose body turned up two decades later beneath the house of Fred and Rosemary West.
It had been expected that Experience would unblock something in Amis. His style in fiction and criticism had always been notoriously tinder-dry, as though the novelist could not trust himself to break a smile or laugh in public. In his memoir he trusted himself — and trusted the reader enough — to do this among other things he had not previously done. He was willing to recount details with slapstick humour, such as escorting his father from the pub, so that the reader could burst into generous, unadulterated laughter.
And he opened his heart in a way that was not just surprising but perhaps needed. In Experience he described the emotion that he felt surge through the attendees at the funeral of his cousin. It felt as though for the first time on the page Amis had trusted his readers, and so had given them a glimpse into places that he had spent decades guarding.
But a protective-layer still remained. At this time I shared an American publisher with Amis, and we did the same publicity rounds after each other. I remember a photographer who had done a session with Amis just before me recounting a detail I always found telling. However hard the photographer tried and however much he insisted, he said he could not get Amis to stare straight into the camera. Repeatedly the novelist would make sure that even when he was staring head-on, his pupils would catch just to the side of the lens. It was telling because it spoke to an element that existed in his fiction: Amis had spent years making sure that his readers could never stare — never see — straight into him. Even when they imagined they were doing so he would in fact be slightly evading them.
Twenty years later he has done it again. Inside Story self-describes as a novel, though it is no such thing and after the briefest early protestations never again really tries to be. The result of an earlier false start, it is in fact a follow-up volume to Experience, with all the earlier book’s virtues and occasional flaws.
Perhaps the flaws can be got out of the way first of all. They are of one piece, which is that Inside Story is too long, digressive and takes on too much. Several books lie within. At first it seems to be a memoir of the novelist’s intellectual and emotional engagements over the last two decades. Then a set of accounts of his friendships with Saul Bellow and Christopher Hitchens take over. Slightly strangely, as Amis writes the late lives and final years of both these men his father’s great friend Philip Larkin gets caught up in the narrative and ends up coming along with the accounts of these other two writers’ final years.
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