Martin’s sweet sorrow

Inside Story: A Novel / How to Write

By Martin Amis

Jonathan Cape £20

The title of this book says it’s ‘a novel’. Well, it isn’t.

The author makes this clear almost as often as he claims the opposite. No doubt he’s changed a few names. Probably moved things round a bit. Sometimes he’s written himself into the third person. But so what? In his own words, ‘At least Mystic Meg [went] to the trouble of making it all up.’

Nor is it – contrary to the subtitle – a book on ‘how to write’. Nobody wants an Amis book on how to write. And if they did, they wouldn’t be looking for the difference between ‘I’ and ‘me’ (I kid you not).

Lastly, it isn’t principally about his lifelong, close relationship with Christopher Hitchens – despite the jacket’s clear suggestion otherwise, which shows the two of them together.

No. Inside Story is a rather baggy assemblage of loving reminiscence, tough self-examination, hero worship, historical enquiry, quotation, a 2015 New Yorker article on the German migrant crisis and, yes, some scattered writing tips. With footnotes and a 13-page index.

Aware that he himself has not exactly lived the life of, say, a Solzhenitsyn, a Nabokov or even a Rushdie, Amis employs the framework of three other, personally relevant and occasionally connected literary lives (and deaths):

Saul Bellow (d 2005) as supplementary father figure; Philip Larkin (d 1985) as potential actual father; and Christopher Hitchens (d 2011) as brother in arms, in literature and all but in the sack.

Their stories (and all the rest of it) are threaded together by the amiable conceit that Amis is chatting to some young aspiring novelist.

Supporting roles are filled by his formative sexual relationship with ‘Phoebe Phelps’; his benevolent stepmother, Elizabeth Jane Howard; his wayward, needy father; and the now familiar coterie of boozy lunchmates (Conquest, Fenton and Clive James), influences (Nabokov appears on page 1, and then 42 more times), and all those Big Things Amis can’t prevent himself from writing about (the Holocaust, the Gulag and, latterly, 9/11).

Distractingly, the book opens with a lengthy, present-tense discussion of the looming 2016 US election and of Brexit, which Amis is comfortable Remain will win. Whatever effect this is supposed to have, the eye is trained on how much has aged quite badly. Lunches that involve ‘potted shrimps’ and ‘oatcake’. Someone being ‘a pill’. ‘Gaspers’. Talk of ‘rugby football’, and girlfriends called ‘Doris’. The man the critics once called ‘Amis fils’, the enfant terrible of modern English literature, is – one suddenly realises – old.

Accordingly, perhaps, this ‘novel’ is lighter on the more aggressive flourishes of Amis prose style. Committed Amisites may rest assured, though. For every diamond-tipped incision – ‘childsong [being] like a ventilation of happiness’, – there’s still ‘the lime, the gold, the rose’ of – can you guess? – traffic lights. There’s a train ‘now slaked of motion’ (ie stationary). There’s a finance bloke who uses words like ‘bonce’ and ‘gaff’.

Amis snorts that you wouldn’t put a janitor called ‘Art Hitman’ in a novel, but can’t resist naming an American author ‘Jed Slot’. He laments that no one writes well about sex, and then describes a woman’s ‘musky, smiley, gauzy, rumpy, nipply presence’.

Despite all this, Inside Story somehow emerges as a compelling and courageous slice of autobiography. Thankfully – if tragically, and via a lot of other deaths – it ultimately returns to him and Hitchens. The bereft Amis has extracted positives from that great personal and public loss, almost a decade ago. The reader sits through the whole thing again – that slow, appalling diminution – and hopes that Hitch won’t die.

The book is worth it for that alone.