Inside Story
Martin Amis [Jonathan Cape]
Well into Martin Amis’s Inside Story, I kept asking myself: what is he trying to do? What is he getting at? This was rooted less in any aversion to, or even skepticism of, what I was reading, and more a manifestation of genuine bewilderment, or rather curiosity.
The book, which Amis teasingly subtitles “a novel”, isn’t a novel in any readily identifiable sense. As Christian Lorentzen points out in his excellent review, Inside Story appears to jump on the “autofiction” bandwagon, yet he suspects – correctly, I’d add – that Amis hasn’t read any of those now reliably categorized as such (save perhaps Will Self and Zadie Smith), and certainly not its more radical French pioneers: Marguerite Duras, Annie Ernaux, Emmanuel Carrère, more recently. Perhaps this is why the book’s genrebending self-reflexivity can feel antiquated, even parochial; it’s hard to get down with the literary kids if every statement devolves into anecdote involving a small coterie of exclusively male septuagenarian novelists (Rushdie, McEwan etc.); and this is not to mention Amis’s more totemic touchstones, grandees Bellow and Nabokov.
Inside Story blends conventional fictional – perhaps “fictionalized” or “novelized”,
(Amis’s term) are more appropriate – narrative, autobiography-memoir, essayistic digression, and literary how-to. The book’s opening gambit is a recognizable Amisism, versions of which he has re-hashed in umpteen interviews: we are invited to “step in” and have a whiskey; the author, for Amis, is analogous to a host, and it is imperative that they be a good one at that. Nabokov and Bellow offer exemplary hospitality; the Joyce of Finnegan’s Wake, not so much. Other riffs and musings on matters of literary etiquette from The War on Cliché and The Rub of Time are also given encores. Self-plagiarism as self-parody? I’m not quite sure.
The book’s most obviously fictional element is a subplot based around Amis’s turbulent relationship with his mercurial and charismatic exgirlfriend, Phoebe Phelps. Explosively – but not actually so – she reveals in a letter that Martin’s father, Kingsley, had tried to seduce her. Rebuffed and rebuked, Kingsley reveals that he isn’t in fact her boyfriend’s father. Rather, Martin was the offspring of his wife and Philip Larkin, with whom she had had a brief liaison.
By far the strongest sections of Inside Story are those devoted to the death from cancer of his closest friend, the essayist Christopher Hitchens. Amis’s account, which retreats to the more familiar and steady terrain of conventional memoir, feels singular and real in a way that redeems the self-karaoke of the earlier sections.
This is quite the irony. Amis, who considers himself a consummate novelist and a connoisseur of its riches, has produced some of his best writing where he is unconstrained by its strictures. In their poignancy, his account of Hitchens’ passing recalls the strongest sections of Experience.
What is certain is that Amis lives up to the high standards of writerly hospitality he demands in others. As expected, the prose is opulent, if sometimes mannered; a cliché, even. LW