This 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. Ideally I'd like Inside Story to be read in fitful bursts, with plenty of skipping and doubling back – and of course frequent breaks and breathers. My heart goes out to those poor dabs, the professionals (editors and reviewers), who'll have to read the whole thing straight through, and against the clock. Of course I'll have to do that too, sometime in 2018 or possibly 2019 – my last inspection, before pressing SEND.
I've noted before that when it comes to memoir, I either want writers to tell me a life story that is so unusual that I learn something new about how others live, or alternately, I want them to use their personal biographies in order to illustrate something universal about all of us; either give me some new knowledge or unveil something relatable. That's it. With Inside Story, Martin Amis doesn't satisfy my (admittedly personal, perhaps unfairly limited) brief regarding memoir, and despite his reminder throughout that this is actually a novel, it reads like a celebrity autobiography; and a frequently dull and self-indulgent one at that. I appreciate the space that Amis devotes to the passing of his closest friends, I like his reflections on the craft of writing, and I suppose it has value for “Martin Amis scholars”, but I cringed every time the narrative returned to Amis' relationships with women (and particularly so with “the alluringly amoral Phoebe Phelps”, as described in the publisher's blurb; what a creepy and exploitative relationship that seemed, and especially as dissected with Amis' pals), and as for the rest (Amis' thoughts on politics and religion and literature), not much is sticking with me a few days after finishing this. I can see how Inside Story might be more engaging for another reader, but it didn't really work for me. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
“Yes, that's the way to go about it,” said my pal Salman (oh, and I apologise in advance for all the name-dropping. You'll get used to it. I had to. And it's not name-dropping. You're not name-dropping when, aged five, you say, “Dad”).Good line, that – and there are, admittedly, plenty of good lines to be found here. Essentially, Inside Story seems to be about how Amis was shaped by the most important relationships in his life – not only did he grow up in a literary household (his father and stepmother, the successful novelists Kingsley Amis and Elizabeth Jane Howard, were often visited by the celebrated poet Philip Larkin), but Martin Amis' own circle of friends included such heavyweights as Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes, and his BFFs Christopher Hitchens and Saul Bellow. If some combination of these men represent a Holy Trinity of influence, then certainly poor Phoebe Phelps played the part of a doomed Magdalene – not the kind of girl one marries, but also not the kind of girl who disappears from history. Whether discussing Zionism with Bellow in Israel or atheism with Hitchens during his chemotherapy treatments, Amis uses this book to illustrate the development of his own ideas. As an example regarding his literary beliefs:
The first serious life-writer – come to think of it – was someone Saul and I always argued about (Saul having the higher opinion of him): David Herbert Lawrence (1885-1930). D.H.L. started it and he started much else. In actuarial terms Lawrence (like Larkin, one of his greatest admirers) died without issue; culturally, though, he left behind him two of the biggest children ever to be strapped into highchairs: the sexual revolution and life-writing.Amis discusses, admiringly, the work of many male writers, but other than his second wife's nonfiction and his stepmother's novels and perceptive advice, women writers don't come off so well – Virginia Woolf is evoked (more than once) only to describe her antisemitism, Alice Munro avoided contractions to the detriment of her short stories, and Iris Murdoch seems to only come up so Amis can compare her documented descent into dementia against Bellow's final years (to be fair, Graham Greene is also dismissed as a hack who “could hardly hold a pen”). I've previously stated that the continuing thread about Phoebe Phelps made me uncomfortable, but so did all of Amis' recounted discussions with Hitchens about his sex life. On the other hand, Amis was consistently charming when writing about his wives and children.
Inside Story includes some “essayistic detours” on craftsmanship and offers such advice as to avoid writing about the three great flow breakers in fiction – “certain sizable and familiar zones of human existence that seem naturally immune to the novelist's art” – sex, religion, and the recounting of dreams. And there is much on training the inner ear to avoid unnecessary clunkiness (as the tone deaf Graham Greene apparently indulged in):
When I'm at my desk I spend most of my time avoiding little uglinesses (rather than striving for great beauties). If you can lay down a verbal surface free of asperities (bits of lint and grit), you will already be giving your readers some modest subliminal pleasure; they will feel well disposed to the thing before them without quite knowing why.(And I will happily agree that there is a pleasure to be found in reading Amis line-by-line.) To achieve this proper flow, Amis writes with a thesaurus and a dictionary at hand in order to find the exact right words (“just to vary the vowel sounds and to avoid unwanted alliterations”), but despite writing that choosing purposefully obscure words is a habit that immature authors eventually grow out of, Amis sent me often to my own dictionary looking up words like cafard or titivate; writing about a couple of Phoebe's friends, he notes their “talk was unswervingly footling and plutocentric” and I can't even find a definition for “plutocentric” (but, of course, can construct the meanings from its roots). It just feels so indulgent to decry the obscure while also employing it.
The book in your hands calls itself a novel – and it is a novel, I maintain. So I want to assure the reader that everything that follows in this chapter is verifiably non-fiction.And ultimately, it feels so indulgent for Amis to keep insisting that this is a novel when it doesn't read like one. Inside Story didn't appeal to my tastes in memoir or novels, but once again, I'll acknowledge that it might be more engaging to others.
