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The Information

3.62 of 5 stars 3.62 · rating details · 2,641 ratings · 158 reviews

Fame, envy, lust, violence, intrigues literary and criminal - they're all here in The Information. How does one writer hurt another writer? This is the question novelist Richard Tull mills over, for his friend Gwyn Barry has become a darling of book buyers, award committees, and TV interviewers, even as Tull himself sinks deeper into the sub-basement of literary failure. T...more

Paperback, 374 pages

Published March 19th 1996 by Vintage (first published 1995)

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Apr 05, 2013 Anthony Vacca rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2013, my-own-personal-jukebox, writers-behaving-badly

Failed novelist Richard Tull is fairly certain that the cosmos are at odds with him; and while Martin Amis assures us--as in, Martin Amis takes the time to address us directly himself--that Richard's place in regards to the universal order of things is tantamount to jack-shit, he doesn't bother to mention this simple fact to his protagonist; but I guess Amiss knows that telling Richard Tull any of this wouldn't make much of a difference. You see, Richard Tull is kind of going insane.

And because...more

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Anthony Vacca @ Hugo: In most trailers for films, they often show snippets of key scenes out of context, to entice. In a book that, for me at least, is nearly 400 p...more
updated May 14, 2013 01:02pm

Hugo Emanuel @Anthony Vacca It's true that there is alot more to the novel than what you have mentioned; this novel is rather rich in both characterization and eve...more
May 15, 2013 04:09am

Jun 16, 2010 Jessica rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: crime-and-punishment, groups-of-people, leetle-boys, substance-related-disorders, dicklits

I need to force myself to take a break from Martin Amis. I'm pretty sure I've never felt so thoroughly repelled by yet drawn to a man I haven't slept with. This creepily eroticized, one-way relationship with a writer (especially one with such an uncomplicatedly obnoxious public persona) is embarrassing, and I shouldn't feed into it. I also probably shouldn't broadcast it on the Internet, but what can I do? Is this a common response to this particular author? Based on talks with a few people, I t...more

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Apr 12, 2010 Manny rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: too-sexy-for-maiden-aunts, well-i-think-its-funny, the-goodreads-experience

The great thing about Goodreads is that it lets all us bibliophiles share our common love of books. It's so wonderful to meet someone else who's appreciated the book the same way as you have. You thought you were the only person in the world who'd seen it that way, and now there are two of you. And they even gave you a new angle on that character, and recommended a similar book that you didn't know existed...

Who am I kidding? It's about getting votes, of course. Isn't it infuriating when you've...more

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Aug 14, 2008 R. rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2006

October 18, 2006

Martin Amis
c/oJonathan Cape Ltd
Random House UK Ltd
20 Vauxhall Bridge Road
London SW1V 2SA
England

Dear Mr. Amis,

I had the pleasure of reading The Information this past August while living in a motel room in Bridgeville, Pennsylvania, just outside of Pittsburgh. Reading, and wandering the parking lot of Star City, an abandoned movie theater, were my sole diversions while waiting for a replacement windshield wiper to arrive at the local auto parts store. Your book was a sanity-saver a...more

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Jun 07, 2012 MJ Nicholls rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: novels, sassysassenachs, tortured-artists, worshipped

Original Review:

This scathing and outrageously eloquent satire on literary envy is clearly Mr. Amis’s magnum opus. Amis probes with excruciating minutiae every nook and cranny of the writer’s psyche, leaving no area of the literary life unflamed with his blowtorch of masterful prose, hilarious wit, and Nabokovian wordplay. Even when Amis “does the proles” his writing is still at its mesmerising peak. This is a book writers everywhere will adore: hopefully blasting a few scribes from their ego-cl...more

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Mar 03, 2009 Allycks rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

A great and greatly flawed book. Every sentence is written to perfection and beyond, Amis constantly challenges, delights, and exasperates the reader with his downbeat wit and intermittent bolts of insight and astrophysical philosophy. Five stars, six stars, a starry galaxy to Amis's intellectual and creative commitment, to his gutty persistence, to his never letting a sentence or a thought fade away without coming to a satisfying or at least unchallengable conclusion. Kudos. Martin Amis rules....more A great and greatly flawed book. Every sentence is written to perfection and beyond, Amis constantly challenges, delights, and exasperates the reader with his downbeat wit and intermittent bolts of insight and astrophysical philosophy. Five stars, six stars, a starry galaxy to Amis's intellectual and creative commitment, to his gutty persistence, to his never letting a sentence or a thought fade away without coming to a satisfying or at least unchallengable conclusion. Kudos. Martin Amis rules. No joke. I'll definitely be diving back into The Information, it's a book that practically demands at least one re-read. At least.

But...

But 'The Information' is basically a spectacular failure. Excuse the boiled-down Headline News of a review, but 'The Information' is exactly a very very good novel that fails to lift off into the ether of greatness. Sounds like a failure that anybody could live with but the problem is that 'The Information' should have been great, it's basically sitting there on the launch pad at Cape Canaveral with all signs go, but...

'The Information', for all the dark creativity of its writing, for as much as I gained from it and enjoyed it a a reader, is, as a plot-driven novel, totally monotone. The gallows humor, the theme of envy-- envy thrills but kills, envy is the succubus or whatever-- the protagonist's horrible bad luck, the recurring migraine jokes, and the way everything, everything, everything backfires--it's all good and executed to perfection, but the story itself just never kicks in. Should a 'story arc' really be expected from a novel of this quality? Maybe not. Problem is, 'The Information' actually promises a kick ass story. Just doesn't deliver.

To finish on the positive note that this novel so thoroughly deserves, I kept thinking of Frantzen's 'The Corrections' as I read 'The Information.' Frantzen failed in a stupid, overblown way that made me want to throw the damn book across the room. Instead Amis fails with so much wild humanity that I was constantly chuckling or holding back some other real emotion as I was clutching the book to my chest.

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Mar 24, 2008 Stacey rated it 4 of 5 stars

Recommended to Stacey by: Mark

This is one of Mark's favourite books, so i thought i would give it a try. Almost three months of trying to get into it (it has a very stylized prose and be prepared to have dictionary.com at the ready; Amis's use of an extensive vocabulary is fantastic) i finally got through it in about 3 days.

It's mean, the characters aren't just flawed- they're downright unlikeable-, and it's pretty damn funny. But be careful, because if you don't have a VERY dark sense of humor (or you can't appreciate a da...more

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Aug 02, 2007 Mel rated it 2 of 5 stars Recommends it for: no one

After reading "Time's Arrow", I thought I would surely enjoy other Martin Amis books. Man, was I wrong!

This story has a less than successful writer out to sabatoge the carreer of his very successful fellow writer/friend. I didn't make it even half way through, but felt I was reading a work of some one either insane or a genius. The story is jumping between two story lines - the day to day life of the main character, Richard, and his plans to destroy Gwyn, and the day to day life of some crimina...more

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Mar 13, 2011 Peter added it · review of another edition

Not a masterpiece, but a lot better than most bestsellers.: Be warned: this book is not everybody's cup of tea. An appreciation of black, irreverent humour is absolutely essential if you want to enjoy this novel and it is no wonder that a lot of people find it infuriating and outrageous. Everybody does seem to agree, however, that it is very well-written.

First of all let me tell you what the book is about. Protagonist Richard Tull is a pretentious, but sensationally unsuccesful novelist - plus a

...more Not a masterpiece, but a lot better than most bestsellers.: Be warned: this book is not everybody's cup of tea. An appreciation of black, irreverent humour is absolutely essential if you want to enjoy this novel and it is no wonder that a lot of people find it infuriating and outrageous. Everybody does seem to agree, however, that it is very well-written.

First of all let me tell you what the book is about. Protagonist Richard Tull is a pretentious, but sensationally unsuccesful novelist - plus a chainsmoker and an alcholic with a harrowing midlife crisis. His novels are so unreadable that nobody makes it past page 10 without developing at least one mysterious ailment. So when the bland, improbably inoffensive novels of his dim friend Gwyn hit the bestseller lists and Gwyn gets the celebrity, wealth and trophy wife that go with beststellerdom something snaps in Richard. He now has only one goal left in life: f*****g up Gwyn. Contemplating the several ways he can go about doing this, Richard runs into Steve, a screwed-up, sadistic drugdealer and as it happens not only his only fan but also the only reader able to make it past the first dozen or so pages. Of course this is a set-up for disaster, but of the comic not the tragic kind.

So, all this sounds like fun. And it is, several passages are downright laugh-out-loud funny, especially if you read them in context...

But the book is also dark and pessimistic. The London that provides most of its background is a crowded city full of filth and violence. Neither Richard nor Gwyn is likeable. The publishing world is a scream. And human is life is nothing, absolutely nothing from a cosmic point of view, as the author keeps pointing out. The low-life characters such as Steve, 13 and Darko are unconvincing and superfluous. But is the book depressing? Not to me; the exuberant wit, the great writing and the incisive original thinking save it from itself. Not a masterpiece, not even the best Amis ("Money" is better), but definitely a great deal more worthwhile than most bestsellers.

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Apr 11, 2013 Tenielle Thompson rated it 2 of 5 stars

Despite Amis' brilliantly developed characters and witty metaphors, both of which I found relevant to an ever-changing modern world,I thought the themes of literary culture were a bit overpowering and at times pretentious. The protagonist, Richard Tull, is vulgar and unlike-able and his long-drawn plot for revenge against his rival and friend, Gwyn Barry, became too much of a bore for me to actually become emotionally invested in. Not to mention that Richard's eventual realisation of the way in...more
Despite Amis' brilliantly developed characters and witty metaphors, both of which I found relevant to an ever-changing modern world,I thought the themes of literary culture were a bit overpowering and at times pretentious. The protagonist, Richard Tull, is vulgar and unlike-able and his long-drawn plot for revenge against his rival and friend, Gwyn Barry, became too much of a bore for me to actually become emotionally invested in. Not to mention that Richard's eventual realisation of the way in which he will conduct his revenge (which is more than half way through the book)is incredibly simple and anti-climactic.

Richard is also, and this is putting it mildly, a massive sook who is worthy of his misfortune due to his apathetic mood towards his family, his chain-smoking and alcoholism. What's worse is that he plays the victim, blaming the universe for his troubles instead of taking responsibility.In contrast, Gwyn Barry is totally unworthy of his success and plays a gloating idiot for majority of the book. Again, I found this difficult to engage with.

Yet perhaps the fact that the characters in this novel have no redeeming qualities is yet another one of Amis' comments on the selfish nature of the human condition. If so, then I find the whole book aggravatingly cynical and nihilistic. Unlike 'London Fields' where the characters were once again a little narcissistic yet funny, I found the humour in this book to be a little more dark and a little more insulting. The over all attitude towards women in this book is appalling. It's as if Amis sees them as unfit to be profound artists. They are only an artist's muse, or, even more simply, their "sexual obsession".

Upon finishing the book, I am underwhelmed. I thought that Amis would offer some kind of redemption for the characters. I was looking for hope. Instead, he concludes with a warning to his audience against tortured artists, a vengeful universe and ultimately "the information, which is nothing, and comes at night". I guess the book as a whole is a cathartic expression of Amis' own pathos. Ironically, I seek what he so often makes fun of, and that is: an "Amelior"; a more optimistic view of the world which, in spite of his belief, contains goodness and innocence.

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Jan 07, 2013 Lorileinart rated it 5 of 5 stars

Have you ever read a book that you WISH one single person you knew could appreciate the same way you do? Loved a book so much that you wanted to climb into bed with said book and other people, simultaneously reading it, knowing that the act of doing so might be better than other things you could be doing in bed? Well, THAT is how much I love this book.
Before I go any further, let me explain that this book is brilliant and bad. It is perhaps shite, even. Brilliant, delicious, experimental shite....more Have you ever read a book that you WISH one single person you knew could appreciate the same way you do? Loved a book so much that you wanted to climb into bed with said book and other people, simultaneously reading it, knowing that the act of doing so might be better than other things you could be doing in bed? Well, THAT is how much I love this book.
Before I go any further, let me explain that this book is brilliant and bad. It is perhaps shite, even. Brilliant, delicious, experimental shite. The kind I want to roll in. It's hardcore British, so be prepared to constantly reference your UK dictionary. I will also add, just shy of misogyny, that this is a dude's book. If you are female and loved it, we should become friends immediately. Message me.
Richard Tull and Gwyn Barry, both writers, have a history as mates from school. For a time, their paths aligned--inferior prose, inferior girlfriends. But suddenly, Gwyn deviates from the course and finds himself in the limelight; the land of glowing literary reviews and a buxom wife descended from royal bloodlines. Whereas Richard's life--and work--takes a nosedive.
As the realities of middle age (impotence, male-pattern baldness) set it, Richard comes to a startling conclusion: He must destroy Gwyn Barry. That is the crux of this twisted tale. The humor here is so dark. It is so genius.
I will confess that Amis muddles up the story with several subplots that really only serve to confuse the reader. Some of them pan out at the end, and you can see that they were devices used to make a point. Some of them were unnecessary...or perhaps, they ARE necessary, and I am just too ignorant to understand them.
I have a profound admiration for Martin Amis. He wields a vicious power with the English language. The kind of power that suspends a reader through several dozen pages where he has ABSOLUTELY no idea what is happening, but has faith that Amis will write a bridge that will carry him to the other side: A place of understanding. And he delivers on that faith, in spades. This is the kind of book that causes you to read the final page, and immediately return to Page 1, to read it again. Vicious Power.
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Mar 18, 2012 Bob rated it 5 of 5 stars

Thematically similar enough to its predecessors that it garnered some unkind reviews accusing Amis of repeating himself too much, but I didn't have any trouble reading this and London Fields in the same week.
The literary rivalry is at the forefront here, a wildly successful but vapid writer juxtaposed with a literary serious but blocked and financially failing one. Amis has said the two represent different aspects of himself, but one could easily think up some celebrated fights between two diffe...more

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Sep 30, 2010 Kaung Myat Han rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: abandoned

What a let down! Painful, it's just painful to read. I hugely liked his other book, "The Rachel Papers" but this one "The Information" seems to have no plot, none at all and Martin Amis seemed to be trying to amuse himself by writing such extraordinarily arranged and crafted passages of English vocabulary and words. I must admit he writes beautifully. But there needs to be a plot! Otherwise, it's just plain boring. Books, unlike movies, take up a lot of your time and time is a commodity that peo...more

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Mar 19, 2010 Trane rated it 3 of 5 stars Recommends it for: dark clever hipsters with well-trimmed facial hair

Shelves: fiction

This is one of the darkest, most consistently funny novels that I've read for a long time, but there's something about it that just doesn't ultimately all add up for me. On the plus side, you've got Amis's exuberantly baroque writing style, bloated full of alarming and disarming wit that's always as entertaining as it is clever. There's also Amis's absolutely cutting satire of the cult of the celebrity writer, and an equally damning take on the self-important seriousness of co-protagonist Richar...more This is one of the darkest, most consistently funny novels that I've read for a long time, but there's something about it that just doesn't ultimately all add up for me. On the plus side, you've got Amis's exuberantly baroque writing style, bloated full of alarming and disarming wit that's always as entertaining as it is clever. There's also Amis's absolutely cutting satire of the cult of the celebrity writer, and an equally damning take on the self-important seriousness of co-protagonist Richard Tull's purist modern experimentalism.

The problem with the "new unpleasantness," however, is that ultimately the ends of the 'unpleasantness' on offer — narcissistic self-delusion, blind misogyny, tacit racism, the pleasures of random violence and dissociative sex — remain unclear. I had a boss once who, when asked whether or not he had seen a particular movie recently, replied, "No. I don't usually go to see movies about people with fucked up lives. I know enough of them already." I feel much the same about a lot of the "new unpleasantness" — I already see too much of this type of thing for the thing itself to be either informative or titillating. Unlike a book like The Jungle which functions as an anatomy of the social violence inherent in industrial food production as well as a novel about the working class, The Information seems to add nothing to the general pool of unpleasant knowledge except the idea that middle-age writers can be really fucked up people who function within a larger social formation that's equally as fucked up. Even a film as difficult to watch as Lars von Trier's Dancer in the Dark at least contains an implicit critique within its formal construction so that the scenes of violence and tragedy in the film are always more than merely scenes of violence and tragedy.

Of course, it can be argued that Amis deploys unpleasantness in the service of black comedy rather than in the service of social critique, and this would be a perfectly valid claim — there is, after all, nothing wrong with wit for the sake of wit. However, the novel becomes so dark at points that it undermines even the pleasures of its own satire; perhaps a bit like what watching a Sacha Cohen movie would be like if Cohen, every now and then, were to cut someone's face with a knife and force us to watch it bleed. In other words, there's a sense in this novel that what's going on, at least at one level, is the kind of hip one-upmanship that can happen when a group of friends is sitting around telling unpleasant stories. As the game progresses and the stories get more and more unpleasant, there's a kind of pleasurable frisson that grows in intensity. The winner of the game is always the person who can tell the story that breaks the frisson of pleasure because the winning story has simply overstepped the bounds of nastiness. The game is over because no one feels like playing any more. There are points in this novel where the urge to outdo itself in unpleasantness destroys the very pleasure of unpleasantness that makes the novel worth reading in the first place.

However, that much said, it's almost impossible not to enjoy the quick intelligence of Amis's writing, the self-referential mise en abîme of his meta-commentaries on fiction, the deeply funny narration of his deeply unreliable narrators, and the occasional stab at profundity that stands out all the more because it feels so displaced within the high-cultural squalor of the literary world that he presents to us like a head on a platter.

In the end, a bit like cotton candy. You eat and eat and eat, feel a bit sick afterward, wonder why you bothered, and then next time you go to the fair you'll probably do it all over again.(less)

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Sep 26, 2009 El rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommended to El by: Clovis brought it home.

Shelves: late20th-centurylit

Writers, apparently, are a curmudgeonly and vindictive lot. Richard Tull is the protagonist of Amis's 1995 novel, a once-promising hot new writer. But the real success story lies in his former roommate, Gwyn Barry, who has written a phenomenal novel. Tull, reduced to writing book reviews, is obsessed with his previous friend's success and can hardly understand it. This obsession leads Tull to try and bring Gwyn down, going about it in quite some impressive ways.

Amis is one of those writers I lov...more

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Nov 26, 2011 Brittany Kubes rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: favorites

Dark, dry, subtle humor – who knew it could be so good? Martin Amis made me feel energized from his ability to capture inanities and connect with the reader through dialogue, and made me laugh aloud at every other page. The characters of Richard and Gwyn (both based in part on Amis himself) are epically clear, such that when either says something ordinary, it can be funny or endearing because ‘it’s Richard.’ Mmmmmm I love fiction (as opposed to non-) again.

In the first 3 parts of the novel, we g...more Dark, dry, subtle humor – who knew it could be so good? Martin Amis made me feel energized from his ability to capture inanities and connect with the reader through dialogue, and made me laugh aloud at every other page. The characters of Richard and Gwyn (both based in part on Amis himself) are epically clear, such that when either says something ordinary, it can be funny or endearing because ‘it’s Richard.’ Mmmmmm I love fiction (as opposed to non-) again.

In the first 3 parts of the novel, we get the POV of Richard Tull: a failed author, disintegrating depressive, messy, balding, chubby, impotent (but adulterous), reckless man. Richard hides behind literature by writing book reviews and unpopular novels. [Example of Richard’s love for lit that makes me laugh: “’What I don’t understand,’ said Richard, ‘is what these people have against dictionaries. Maybe they don’t even know they can’t spell.’ As he said this he found he was sweating, and even crying.” ] Despite how pathetically he was painted, I fell a little bit in love with the guy.*^ Richard is ‘friends’ with Gwyn Barry, a blooming author who is essentially everything Richard is not. Richard’s (reckless) goal is to ‘fuck Gwyn up’ – and so the plot ensues.

Notably, it wasn’t a particularly mind-blowing plot; what garnered so much interest were the wonderfully vivid characters, the correspondingly funny dialogue, and the jarringly insightful anecdotes. There were many repetitive anecdotes that made me feel comfy seeing again and again – such as a man speeding down Richard’s street 2x a day at 60 mph [“…Jesus: that fucking guy. Twice every weekday, at irregular hours, a big man in a big car drove down Calchalk Street at sixty miles an hour. What was his hurry? Who could want him anywhere sooner than he was going to get there already.” ] and people incurring spontaneous illnesses every time they reached pages 7 or 8 of one of Richard’s novels.

We, the reader and the public, do not trust Richard’s depleted opinion of Gwyn in Parts 1-3 due to his obvious jealousy bias: Gwyn, on the surface, is essentially the positive opposite of Richard. HOWEVER, in the final part (Part 4) of the novel, we skip into Gwyn’s POV…and it turns out, Richard was right – Gwyn is a disgusting character. Gwyn is not the ‘uxorious,’ profound, giving author that we, the reader and the public, believed he was. He is in fact a careless and frequent adulterer; he gets angry losing games to Richard; he “can’t write for toffee”; and he nevertheless has an utterly gluttonous view of himself [“That rarest of literary phenomena- a cult writer with a mass audience-is walking home up Holland Park Avenue…” ]. We also want to cut him for the way he treats his lovely wife. Thus, we find that Richard and Gwyn are really rather similar, and it is unclear who is worse off (well OK, probably Richard still, in light of the final scene). When Richard expresses this thought of alignment to Gwyn, Gwyn says: “You know something? I understand exactly what you’re saying. And I couldn’t disagree more...I think we’ve got to the end of one another. This’ll do me. It’s a wrap” (which is humorous nonetheless).

I felt a little empty when this book ended – partially because I didn’t want it to, and partially because I enjoyed each page rather than what all the pages represented together.

* I must say…the adultery running casually rampant is unreal. In this vein, I was talking to a 45-year-old friend and she was surprised at my disgust for an older lawyer who is openly unfaithful to his spouse, and suggested it was something about my generation (26 years old) that is too romantic about relationships. Wha..?!

^ I did NOT fall in love with Richard’s/Amis’ depiction of the women folk, which is captured by the following (albeit funny) quotes:
-“Women can do it [passionate speech], or they get further, but when the chance of tears presents itself they usually take it.”
-“Proposing the errand to him, inviting him to take the vacuum cleaner in, Gina had used the words nip and pop: ‘Could you nip round to the electrician and pop the Hoover in,’ she had said.”
-“By midmorning on Tuesday Richard knew why women never did anything and were no good at anything and never amounted to anything and never contributed anything to anything….It was hanging out with children that did it.”
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Nov 27, 2012 Chris Gager rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I just read a profile of this author in the Smithsonian magazine. He's already on my to read list but I was inspired to pick this one up - the highest Goodreads-rated one at the library. Start tomorrow maybe...

Day one... my first MA or KA read though I may have read some stuff in a magazine or two before. Very funny and pithy. What a contrast to James Patterson's generic cop thriller prose! No skimming here as attention must be paid or else why bother? One question about the obvious skill/clever...more

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Sep 06, 2011 La Stamberga dei Lettori added it · review of another edition

Shelves: desian

Un libro strano.

Nel senso che i suggerimenti di lettura per questo autore, e per il libro in particolare, lo mettono sempre tra gli imperdibili. In effetti Amis è senza dubbio scrittore di grande talento, non ho letto altro ma già in questo libro si vede alla grande. L'interrogativo, allora, è proprio questo: basta un grande talento per fare un buon o un grande libro? Sempre e comunque?

"L'informazione" mi ha annoiato a morte: la storia, molto gossipata (le citazioni nascoste ed i mascheramenti...more

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Dec 06, 2007 Adam rated it 3 of 5 stars

This book is almost as bitter and cranky as the guy I was dating at the time. Bile-black, I can still dig it. One thing I can say is that Amis knows his literature. His riffs on different topics within the story-construct are just as interesting as the story itself.

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Jun 03, 2007 Michael Shilling rated it 5 of 5 stars

The Amis book with an ending. Really funny and well-plotted and exuberantly languaged like Nabokov. So many American writers (the ones I know) over-value a simple style, are afraid of fat, passionate, in-your-face baroque. This is a good entray into that style.

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Jan 20, 2013 caitlin rated it 4 of 5 stars

Amis has convinced me how very Difficult it is to be an Artist, much less a Writer.
Even after realizing Gwyn was a man (50 pages or so in), I'm not sure this book entirely made sense. However, doesn't mean that it wasn't entertaining:

"Daddy? Are you bold?"
"I sometimes like to think so, yes, Marco."
"Will you always be bold?"
"Despite the ills that await life's balms, Marco, though made weak by time and fate, but strong in will, to strive, to seek - "
"Have you always been bold? How did you get bold...more

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Sep 27, 2012 Jeremy rated it 4 of 5 stars

Maybe 3.5?

I dunno.

Do British writers (or maybe does just Amis) have a different relationship with adverbs than the rest of us?

Everything happens in the final 20-30 pages.

'Round about the final 100 pages, the villain suddenly becomes villainous for reasons other than that the protagonist (who, by the way is an awful person too) loathes him (and that, again until these final chapters, primarily out of professional envy).

Mr. Amis, I'll give you one more book to impress me. You're mean-spirited enou...more

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Apr 10, 2011 David Prybil rated it 4 of 5 stars

This is a tough book for which to assign a proper star rating, because Martin Amis is such a tremendous writer, with a biting wit, and a dazzling vocabulary. Some of his passages here are as good as anything you are likely to find. And his two main characters, the inexplicably celebrated novelist Gwyn Barry and his "best friend," the bitter, pompous non-talent Richard Tull, certainly present an interesting central dynamic for a novel.

However, one is never quite sure what to make of these two - n...more This is a tough book for which to assign a proper star rating, because Martin Amis is such a tremendous writer, with a biting wit, and a dazzling vocabulary. Some of his passages here are as good as anything you are likely to find. And his two main characters, the inexplicably celebrated novelist Gwyn Barry and his "best friend," the bitter, pompous non-talent Richard Tull, certainly present an interesting central dynamic for a novel.

However, one is never quite sure what to make of these two - neither are likable in the least - or of the story, which shows them joined at the hip for reasons, other than an obvious mutual loathing, that are never clear to them or anyone else. Why doesn't Gwyn leave Richard behind to rot in obscurity? And since he doesn't, why doesn't Richard milk this valuable contact for all it's worth, rather than try to ruin him?

The supporting characters are even harder to grasp. Both men's beleaguered spouses seem to have no reason to stay with these boors, and yet we are given no insight as to why they do. Indeed, our only insights to the lives of these two only reinforce how utterly despicable the two leads are. They are both surely destined for ruin of some sort or another.

The driving action here seems to be Richard's plan to ruin Gwyn. The two major thrusts of this plan are his hiring of a team of thugs/hit men to harass Gwyn in the days leading up to the publication of his next novel, and perhaps even cause him serious bodily harm (never entirely clear). Amis uses this to explore a subplot involving these hit men, including Steve Cousins, 13, and others, that never really gell with anything else going on around it. The second part of Richard's plan is to use a magazine profile piece of Gwyn, which he was hired for at Gwyn's urging, to expose Gwyn as a non-talent, a fraud, and a louse. Gwyn seems to know this all along, only adding confusion.

What is the point of all of this plotting? I cannot begin to tell you. No nearly enough of it makes sense to actually hold up. Maybe this is Amis' point, a satiric desecration of his own chosen field and the people that inhabit it. But a little attempt at logic here and there might have been nice.

However, putting that rather significant grievance aside, the read itself is filled with wonderful bits, and not a page passes without writing that - taken in and of itself - sparkles. Perhaps this is good enough - I have never been able to ascribe a strong internal logic to any of Pynchon or Wallace's works, either, and yet I would not hesitate to recommend them to people who appreciate great writing.

Perhaps it is best to just enjoy the caustic, colorful road to ruin, and leave the A-B-C storytelling to others.(less)

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Mar 29, 2013 k e rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: literature-as-art-wannabe

The book contains some truly inspired writing however to find it one must navigate some rather pretentious writing. Why do authors feel that if they make heady use of their thesaurus they are then writing "literature?" In my opinion all it does is interrupt the flow of the story and can be perplexing as sometimes the word usage makes no sense at all. While the story of a personal and professional rivalry between two friend/authors was well fleshed out the ending seemed a bit hurried and abrupt....more

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Nov 04, 2012 Michelle rated it 4 of 5 stars

I think if you're a writer, editor or publisher, you would really love this book. Even for someone outside of the publishing business, watching Richard's downward spiral through Amis's wonderful, sarcastic prose is painfully delicious, kind of like pulling off a scab. He's a wholly unlikable asshole, but so is Gwyn. Gwyn, however, is super successful without seeming to deserve it all, so after awhile I found myself wishing Richard would succeed a little bit in trying to bring him down. Without w...more

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Oct 16, 2009 Cheri added it

The Information took me a little bit to get into because, like the other Amis book I have read, Yellow Dog, there are quite a few characters and initially disparate story lines. Because I have a personal rule of sticking it out through the first 100 pages of the novel, I am now well past page 100 and loving every page. Amis' writing style is complex and different than what I am typically used to reading, and in that it is a fresh type of fiction to read.

I also tend not to like main characters w...more

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May 31, 2009 Tommy added it

Shelves: mainstream, crap

Have to say I'm struggling with this one.

Will finish the latest Neal Stephenson and have another crack at it.

Nah, given up!

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Nov 21, 2012 James Metcalf rated it 4 of 5 stars

Despite Richard Tull's simply awful conduct towards his friend Gwyn Barry, I found myself appreciating his stance much more than that of his friend, and this is what Amis does best. He is very persuasive in his arguments on the extreme unfairness of the universe. And though his style could be argued to come before all other concerns, that is his gift. It is funny and poignant, as well as engaging as always, but his portrayal of the underclass is too much, and deviates a little excessively from t...more

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Mar 01, 2012 Rory rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: recent-favourites

Words layered and arranged and augmented and spliced, that spew into a thick, lumpy stew of a story, a bitter tale of revenge. At least I think there is a story hidden among the muck and mangle of words, words structured into glorious, unyielding and sometimes highly irritating sentences. Personally, I love this book. Days of sitting on the toilet (the perfect sanctuary for a solitary read) scratching my scalp over each perplexing and nourishing word clump were days thoroughly well spent. Obviou...more

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Sep 16, 2011 Kat rated it 3 of 5 stars

Richard Tull is a very literary (impenetrable, in fact) novelist whose career has hit the skids; his friend Gwyn Barry is lionized for his uplifting novels of somewhat lighter weight. Richard finds this unforgivable, and resolves to destroy Gwyn's life no matter what it takes. Amis brings tremendous hilarity and even some compassion (though not a lot) to the story of these unpleasant people who are so unlike and yet so like we are ourselves.

It occurred to me while reading The Information that i...more

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About Martin Amis

Martin Amis is an English novelist, essayist and short story writer. His works include the novels Money, London Fields and The Information.

The Guardian writes that "all his critics have noted what Kingsley Amis [his father] complained of as a 'terrible compulsive vividness in his style... that constant demonstrating of his command of English'; and it's true that the Amis-ness of Amis will be recog...more

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“He awoke at six, as usual. He needed no alarm clock. He was already comprehensively alarmed.” — 35 people liked it

“Cities at night, I feel, contain men who cry in their sleep and then say Nothing. It's nothing. Just sad dreams. Or something like that...Swing low in your weep ship, with your tear scans and sob probes, and you would mark them. Women--and they can be wives, lovers, gaunt muses, fat nurses, obsessions, devourers, exes, nemeses--will wake and turn to these men and ask, with female need-to-know, "What is it?" And the men will say, "Nothing. No it isn't anything really. Just sad dreams.” — 21 people liked it

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