Changing Lights

Inside Story, Martin Amis, Jonathan Cape, pp. 576, £20.00 (hardcover)

Suppose a Sentence, Brian Dillon, Fitzcarraldo Editions, pp. 160, £10.99 (paperback)

For almost forty years, Martin Amis has been the foremost novelistcritic of his generation. The hyphen is important. In both their unvoiced assumptions and direct observations, most novels give a sense of the writer that stands behind them. Amis’ writing, however, seems to be irradiated with his psyche: who he is, what he believes, what he likes and dislikes. ‘If you’ve read my novels you already know absolutely everything about me’, he writes, at the beginning of Inside Story: How to Write. This isn’t quite true. We don’t know everything about him, but we do know everything he is about. His novels, like his essays, are a flood of quintessence.

Inside Story, its author insists, is a novel, albeit one that is ‘not loosely but fairly strictly autobiographical’. The narrator and protagonist is Martin Amis. The only character who can’t be googled is ‘Phoebe Phelps’, a beautiful, distant woman, who Martin shacks up with for five gasping years. She seems to have a wound; ‘her hands were beset by small fears’. The rest of the large supporting cast includes Philip Larkin, Christopher Hitchens, Kingsley Amis, Elizabeth Jane Howard, Saul Bellow and Amis’ wife, Isabelle Fonseca, chivalrously pseudonymised as ‘Ines’. It’s a starry credits roll, but that was his life. ‘You’re not name-dropping’ writes Amis in the prologue, ‘when, aged five, you say “Dad.”’

This is a bit of a tease. As the promotional copy for the book made clear, Inside Story contains, among its many plots, asides and digressions, an intriguing literary bloodline caper. Was Philip Larkin, not Kingsley Amis, Martin’s father? It won’t spoil things to say this turns out to be a shaggy dog: you wouldn’t read Inside Story for the plot, any more than you would read a James Patterson novel for the prose. It is a rangy beast, leaping associatively between remembered conversations, political essays

and critical digressions. Amis moves back and forth in time, traducing past and present. One moment, the young Christopher Hitchens is dropping in for a knowing, vainglorious chat: ‘I’m a true friend of the Cypriot people,’ he declares. ‘Whenever I go to Cyprus there’s a front-page headline in the

Nicosia Times saying “HITCH FLIES IN.”’ A few pages later, he is calling from Washington with news of stage four oesophageal cancer. ‘Dah,’ he says over the phone, ‘it’s my fucking tits now’.

One senses they were the loves of each other’s lives. The chapters about Hitchens’ illness and death are immensely touching, and they are paired quietly with Amis’ recollections of the end of Saul Bellow’s life. When Amis and a friend teach a class with the aged Bellow, he gives us a wistful, Flemish-school portrait of the writer in age:

The airy float of white hair, the broad mouth, the fine nose, the bicycle spokes of indentations on either temple (laugh lines) – eyes oystery with time but still rich and concentrated, full of things you badly needed to know...

By now, Bellow is in the full throes of Alzheimer’s. He stays silent for the entire class: his mind has bid him goodbye. At the end of the seminar, a professor asks him reflexively, ‘Saul, what’s Augie March about?’ Bellow answers, ‘About two hundred pages too long’.

Which brings me to my next point: this book, all five hundred-plus digressive pages of it, has the authenticating defects of an original Amis. Onward they come again, the flimsy, cardboard women, the walk-on caricatures, the sermons on Islam and geopolitics. But it also has bounties to impart, and Amis the narrator feels, here, a gentler, less swashbuckling figure than in other works. To adapt Isiah Berlin’s formulation about hedgehogs and foxes, if this novel has many small, burrowing defects, then it is also imbued with one overwhelming virtue. This man can write. Phoebe Phelps is ‘an image of middle-class probity, till slit by her lawless smile’. Monica Jones has a ‘room-flooding quiddity’. You have to be quite a figure to subtitle your memoir How To Write. Amis has the goods, even if he might, in this case, be lacking a book that could adequately package them.

‘Cleanse your prose of anything that smells of the flock and the sheep dip’ writes Amis, in one of the teacherly passages that prompt the book’s subtitle. By contrast: ‘one more thing this book would not do’, writes Brian Dillon, in Suppose a Sentence: ‘is tell you how to write a great sentence.’ Or, he says, how to avoid writing a bad one: ‘I wanted to write a book that was all positives, all pleasure, only about good things. Beautiful sentences, William H. Gass wrote, are “rare as eclipses”. I went chasing eclipses: those moments of reading when the light changes[.]’

The book consists of short chapters, each of which is a short critical response to a beloved sentence. These responses are personal but not confessional, and often playfully imitate their sources. The texts themselves range from the tragic abstraction of Hamlet’s ‘O, o, o, o’ to withering put downs, like James Baldwin’s report of how Black Parisian jazz musicians saw the bombastic and prejudiced Norman Mailer. ‘They thought he was a real sweet ofay cat, but a little frantic.’

That last confirms the receptive suppleness of Dillon’s ear (he notes its ‘neatly affianced sounds’). Eschewing the canon for the most part, many of his texts derive from the classic, mid-century era of American journalism. The pen portraits of these lesser-known writers are delightful. This is his sketch of longtime New Yorker jazz critic, Whitney Balliett: ‘there he is in his horn-rims, every inch the studious WASP enthusiast for the hottest nights and hippest cuts. Whitney Balliett, what a name. I have read that he frequently wore a bow tie.’

Dillon’s quick wit and exuberant fellow-feeling for his authors are the book’s most appealing facets. Often, taking his cue from an inspired turn of phrase or unusual grammatical feature, he moves beyond observation into a more kinetic, Barthesian form of response. For instance, a dash in a passage from Virginia Woolf ’s ‘On Being Ill’ ‘denotes a passage from the dream-fugue of sickness, depression, and undirected reading into the dirigible madness of writing’.

In close-reading exercises, the path of least resistance tends to have a recursive shape, and Dillon’s excursions often bend back towards the act of writing itself. When Ruskin writes that a cloud looks ‘as if it were made of dead men’s souls,’ he reflects that ‘one begins to think that Ruskin’s prose – and maybe this lecture itself – is a rhetorical cloud, exquisitely

formed and likely any moment to turn ragged’. George Eliot describes the red drapery in St. Peter’s, ‘spreading itself everywhere like a disease of the retina’. Dillon: ‘Maybe the world of the novel – and maybe the world – is like a densely woven fabric.’ When Annie Dillard writes of ‘ the universe as a clockwork of loose spheres flung at stupefying, unauthorized speeds’, the author asks if this is a reflection on ‘the fragile machinery of words and sentences and paragraphs’. By the third iteration, the reader feels less certain that this is an insight demanded by the text.

Dillon goes looking for moments ‘when the light changes’. But limited as he is to individual sentences, he can’t convey that transformation, which always emerges from what comes before. The sentences become snapshots of texts in motion – which any piece of writing, despite its inky stillness, always must be. You cannot photograph the light’s change. In this sense, the project feels less critical, more ekphrastic: a curated appreciation of objets d’art, the collector’s tour of his treasures.

The question that asserts itself in the reader’s mind is about clarity of vision. Is Dillon really seeing the thing in all its thingness? I thought of the essays of T.J. Clark, which are so adept at creating mysteries within a small pane of canvas. Clark’s doubt about what he sees is always a central feature of how he looks. For all its question marks, its performative uncertainty, Suppose a Sentence feels obliquely but unremittingly didactic. ‘What is style’, writes Dillon, ‘if not precisely the oscillation, a refusal to choose, between mastery and accident, between determined artifice and ineludible character?’ Elsewhere, a Claire-Louise Bennet sentence, describing a party, unspools through a set of precise equivocations. ‘Isn’t this oscillation between the exactingly exact and the falling-to-bits vague – isn’t this all rather like the shape or structure or very point of a party?’ At these moments the stream of thought turns reflective and glassy, like the gaze of someone who, as they look you in the eye, is still only watching themselves. There is a difference between being invited into the space of wonder, and simply watching a man register the intensity of his amazement. ‘A slight sense of quotation marks hovers in the air,’ begins one of his chosen sentences, from a Janet Malcolm profile in The New

Yorker. ‘What is this “sense” exactly?’ He asks. ‘Where, how and by whom is it felt?’ I don’t think he wants an answer.