Inside Story

by Martin Amis

This extraordinary novel gives the reader the heart-to-heart testimony of one of our finest writers – a wonder of literary invention and a boisterous modern classic

His most intimate and epic work to date, Inside Story is the unseen portrait of Martin Amis’ extraordinary life, as a man and a writer. This novel had its birth in a death – that of the author's closest friend, Christopher Hitchens. We also encounter the vibrant characters who have helped define Martin Amis, from his father Kingsley, to his hero Saul Bellow, from Philip Larkin to Iris Murdoch and Elizabeth Jane Howard, and to the person who captivated his twenties, the alluringly amoral Phoebe Phelps. What begins as a thrilling tale of romantic entanglements, family and friendship, evolves into a tender, witty exploration of the hardest questions: how to live, how to grieve, and how to die? In his search for answers, Amis surveys the great horrors of the twentieth century, and the still unfolding impact of the 9/11 attacks on the twenty-first – and what all this has taught him about how to be a writer. The result is one of Amis’ greatest achievements: a love letter to life that is at once exuberant, meditative, heartbreaking and ebullient, to be savoured and cherished for many years to come.

Genres: Fiction, Novels, Literature, Biography Memoir, British Literature, Literary Fiction, English Literature

560 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 24, 2020

About the author

Martin Amis was an English novelist, essayist, and short story writer. His works included 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 recognisable in any piece before he reaches his first full stop."

Amis's raw material is what he sees as the absurdity of the postmodern condition with its grotesque caricatures. He has thus sometimes been portrayed as the undisputed master of what the New York Times has called "the new unpleasantness."

Reviews

[William2 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Notes on first reading. Not a review.

1. Inside Story is a big voluble book. It’s story is a mashup of autobiography, tributes to absent friends, historical commentary, writing workshop, geopolitics, literary criticism, and commonplace book. It’s highly opinionated. I also think it’s very wise.

It’s an accelerated picaresque novel. Amis describes his idea here of today’s accelerated novel. He mentions, too, Don Quixote, perhaps the first modern novel, which is all travel and no destination. We don’t read much about actual travel today though because duration is so brief. Today it’s not the journey but the destination that matters.

The book is the fictional pendant, to use that curatorial word, to Amis’s memoir Experience, published in 2000. This book like that one uses the footnote to deliver bonus asides. So it has this two-tier structure. Sometimes they remind me of Shakespeare’s asides.

2. The reanimation of Christopher Hitchens makes me long for his smarts. He left a big hole. (Christ, think what he might have done with Trump.) When I read the speech the author has written for him, I have a synesthetic experience; I hear (imagine) Hitchens’ familiar voice vividly.

3. The novel is full of things I did not know. For example.

“On the night after Pearl Harbor, Churchill said that for the first time in years his insomnia withdrew, and he slept the sleep of 'the grateful and the saved'; he said he hoped that the sleep of eternity would be as soft and as pure.” ( p. 154n)

“Eight million horses were killed in the First World War; at Verdun 7,000 were killed in one day . . .” (p. 226)

The (fictional) Amis’s family had a donkey.

4. The book is amusing but it’s not one of the author’s madcap novels. It’s primary theme is mortality. Nor do I like reading about his faux sexual history, but then I never like sex in fiction. He addresses it here. It’s something that really can’t be done, he says, and then sets about doing it. I suppose it’s anodyne enough though when compared to Philip Roth‘s Sabbath’s Theater, which induces projectile vomiting.

5. The sections “How to Write” constitute a gift from a master. Though he denies dreams as legitimate fictional devices. Perhaps that’s meant to underline the death theme and underscore the realist mode in which he writes. I’m trying to think which of his other novels have dream sequences.

6. After the first tower collapsed on 11 September 2001, I took the elevator to the roof of my building on 86th and Riverside Drive in New York City. There, along with a few neighbors, on that spectacularly beautiful autumn day, I watched the second WTC tower collapse. Here’s what the fictional Martin Amis says about that day in London:

“Someone working in the yard at the rear of the house had his radio on, and the gaily babbling voice abruptly modulated into a tone of mature concern. I went to the window and listened. Reports were coming in that a light plane had collided with a building in Lower Manhattan . . . So I went to the kitchen and activated the kettle, and the TV. It had just gone two. Now before me, on the screen, was a thing I’ve never encountered before – an aircraft looking and behaving like an animal, like a cross between a carnivorous bull and an ink-black shark, seeming to rear up in greedy anticipation before putting its head down for the urgent rush of the charge . . . It was of course the second plane, and that jolt it gave (I later thought) was a reflex of the pilot, Marwan al-Shehhi, as he saw the achievement of his predecessor, Muhammad Atta. . . And soon both buildings would wear lantern-jawed grins with oily black smoke frothing out of them.” (p. 184)

7. The novel shines with love of family and friends, and dislike of the French, and dislike of the Germans; not hatred, mind you. No, it’s more acerbic critique.

8. I wish I could convey a sense of the pleasure I get while reading. And, my God, the comedy! And this in the midst of some seriously downbeat subject matter: the demise of Saul Bellow from Alzheimer’s, the disintegration of Christopher Hitchens from esophageal cancer; the death, less lingering textually, of Philip Larkin from an esophageal tumor. . .

9. Amis says this may be his final big novel. Thematically, I suppose, that makes sense.

10. I’ll admit not to liking the Phoebe Phelps character in the early going. She seemed a bore. (Though she reminded me of Gloria Beautyman in The Pregnant Widow, a wonderfully drawn character.) But when we come around to her again, after page 400, when she’s hilariously putting the moves on Philip Larkin, and we learn more about the hideous abuse to which she was subject, she grows enormously in depth and complexity.

11. Broadly the subtext of the story of Christopher Hitchens, it seems to me, is about how to live and how to die; by contrast the subtext of Philip Larkin’s story is how not to live and how not to die.

12. One gets the sense, too, that the novel is kind of a last dispatch, a sayonara, or summing up. I for one wish the author many more productive years. He’s 71; and there’s Edna O’Brien at 91 with a new play in Dublin.

13. It’s been great to be alive while the author has been writing. I’m grateful for the temporal alignment.

Later entry. So sad. He's gone. Like his friend Christopher Hitchens from esophageal cancer. Don't smoke, please.
RIP - 19 May 2023.

[Ken · Rating 4 out of 5]

Martin Amis. Along with his father Kingsley Amis (always credited as the author of Lucky Jim), a name I know. And have never read.

In the case of the son (if not the father and holy ghost), I corrected this shortcoming by reading Inside Story: A Novel. Well, Mart (as he's called) defines it as such, but I'd say it's closer to memoir territory. Mostly an autobiography with some stretchers (as Mark Twain called them). The truthiness is what led Amis to call it a novel, I suppose, but really, it's the inside story of Martin Amis's friendships with a novelist, a poet, and an essayist.

The novelist is Saul Bellow, with whom Amis had a long-standing friendship, despite their age difference. If you like Saul Bellow books, you'll be mining a rich vein of him in this book, so by all means.

The poet is Philip Larkin, who was good frenemies with Mart's dad, Kingsley. I have a complete Philip Larkin which I've read, but Lord knows I'll read it differently next time around. Amis is a fan, yes, but boy does he have the "inside story" on Larkin and Larkin's family and Larkin's female partners and especially Larkin's peculiar sexual propensities. This is where I say: If you like Philip Larkin poems, you'll be mining a rich vein of him in this book, so by all means.

The essayist is (surprise!) Christopher Hitchens. Last year I read Hitch-22, so I already knew Hitch and Mart were blood brothers, best buds, literary bromance partners. Much, then, was a rehash for me, only this time from the other friends' POV. Hitchens' was a unique voice and it's sad we lost him so young. I'm sure his pen would have had a field day with tRump, who earns some scorn even from the less political pen of Amis. All together now: If you like Christopher Hitchens' essays, you'll be mining a rich vein of him in this book, so by all means.

Along with all of these memoir-ish reminisces, we get the long story of one of Martin's early lovers, an unusual gal names Phoebe, who put him through his paces. Like the novelist, the poet, and the essayist, she appears, disappears, and then returns in the final bend of the book.

And while we're talking kitchen sink, let me just say that there's lots of literary talk and advice on how to write fiction, too, in this book. Amis is an amazing practitioner, a man who chooses not only words carefully but even avoids repetitions of syllables. Whew! That's a wordsmith for you. And here's a bit that I annotated that the readers of GR might find interesting:

"This is yet another example of the strange co-identity of writer and reader. Just as guest and host have the same root -- from Latin hospes, hospit- ('host, guest') -- readers and writers are in some sense interchangeable (because a tale, a teller, is nothing without a listener). And readers are artists, too. Each and every one of them paints a different mental picture of Madame Bovary.

"Asked to sum up the pleasures of reading, Nabokov said that they exactly correspond to the pleasures of writing. I for one have never read a novel that I 'wished I'd written' (that would be simultaneously craven and brash), but I certainly and invariably try to write the novels I would wish to read. When we write, we are also reading. When we read (as noted earlier), we are also writing. Reading and writing are somehow the same thing."

Debatable? Of course. But undeniably enjoyable. And so Martin Amis even directly addresses ME (and you, if you pick this book up), both in the beginning and the end, welcoming me in, asking me to have a seat, offering me a drink even though I am a teetotaler.

Now that's treating a reader like royalty, no? And you know what? I'll bet Martin Amis loved reading / writing this book, too. That's the way it goes when you're as nimble a practitioner as he is.

[Hal Johnson · Rating 4 out of 5]

(Note: I received an ARC by stealing it from a drunk, which was probably wrong, but he could not have appreciated it anyway. I received nothing, not even a legally acquired ARC, for this review.)

This book is so self-indulgent

(how self-indulgent is it?)

it is so self-indulgent that, partway through this long, autobiographical novel, Amis reprints a complete short story that had originally appeared in the New Yorker—and that short story is also autobiographical.

I once read an interview with the director Seijun Suzuki; they asked him why his latest film made no sense; he replied, essentially, “I’m 80 years old, I can do what I want.” Well, Martin Amis isn’t 80 years old, but he has written an old man book (discursive, repetitive, thanatotropic, full of complaints about the young), and he has done what he wanted to do. He threw it all in, his memories of childhood and his politics and his favorite poems and his hot wife and his nitpicky gripes about Alice Munro and his opinions on the words like “customers” and “inappropriate”—he threw it all in, and tried to bind it together loosely around the deaths of Bellow, Hitchens, and Larkin. It is not bound together. But what it is is cunning, and any complaint you might have upon reading it has been answered by the text.

Why is Amis spending all this time talking about the sexy ladies he’s boffed? Well, here’s a self-conscious parody of John Braine’s “smirk novel,” which begins “My ravishing young mistress, Lady Aramintha Worcestershire, pulled the top sheet over her bulging breasts…” It’s all a gag, see? When Amis says “hourglass” and “pneumatic” and all the rest, he’s just “pulling a Braine.”

Why is nothing happening? Don’t worry, here’s Amis’s summary of Bellow’s Augie March: “There’s development, but no real plot.” See, if it’s good for Bellow, it’s good for all of us!

Inside Story does have a plot, sort of—it’s the part that’s obviously not autobiographical, the part that Amis chose to insert into his real-life adventures: the revenge of Phoebe Phelps—but it dissipates inexplicably, and in a stupid way. Probably not a coincidence that Amis’s interjected advice on writing had nothing at all about how to form a plot.

But despite myself, I found myself really liking this book. Gary Groth once said that Brian dePalma has “craft coming out of the wazoo” but is incapable of creating a meaningful movie; well, Martin Amis also has craft coming out of the wazoo, and he keeps trying so hard to write a meaningful novel; obv. I think he often succeeds, but even when I wasn’t sure if he was succeeding with Inside Story, he still had craft coming out of the wazoo, and he was still trying so hard.

“As we drove the slowly melting igloo I’d been living in—the one with its name, Hope (or Denial), on a little plaque just above the entry tube—turned to slush.”

And beyond the mere prose, which of course is great—look, this is an autobiographical novel. Not the silly parts, I mean, but the parts about dying friends, and it kind of doesn’t matter if you can’t plot (Amis can sometimes plot, but not here; in this book he can’t plot) because dying friends have their own plot. There’s the decline and the death and the mourning. “It writes itself,” you might say, but of course it doesn’t write itself. It takes Martin Amis to write it, but the point is he can’t screw it up. It’s fiction The Way You Like It: beautiful and well-paced and heartfelt and heartbreaking. Even if you don’t care about (or are sick of; I mean, he has lived one of history’s most boring lives and has already written a memoir) Martin Amis’s life, you get the inside story so-called on Bellow, Hitchens, and Larkin, and surely that’s worth something. It’s worth a lot, and the book is brimming with cute anecdotes and quotes (Larkin: “Sex is too good to share with anyone else”) assembled just for you.

It’s also self-indulgent, of course. The footnotes are self-indulgent, and the ending piled upon ending are all self-indulgent. But Amis has earned it, I guess. He’s old, or oldish, and he says this is his last long novel (it’s certainly his longest to date). I can’t begrudge him his self-indulgence, and there’s enough good stuff here that you want to wish away the bad—as parody, or as self-conscious game, or as “what do you expect? It’s Amis being Amis.”

I made my approval sound more half-hearted than I meant, I think. This is a fun book! It has everything you want; it just also has everything you don’t want.

[Krista · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Glenn Russell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Biographies and autobiographies are generally not to my taste. For me, recounting episodes from real life, so called, is not nearly as provocative as shifting into the fantastic via imagination. However, since I count Martin Amis as among my favorite authors (I have read a collection of his essays and several of his novels; The Information is a true modern classic, a tale of two novelists that I've reread again and again), I didn't want to miss his 560-page autobiographical novel, Inside Story

Inside Story makes for an entertaining, enlightening read. There's also an audiobook expertly narrated by Alex Jennings. Martin Amis recounts his life with best friend Christopher Hitchens, lover Phoebe Phelps, wife Isabel Elena Fonseca, mentor Saul Bellow, and many, many others. However, for the purposes of my review, I will focus on the British author's insights on writing, authors, and the art of literature and link my comments to specific passages from the book.

On Graham Greene
“I incredulously revisited Brighton Rock and The End of the Affair, and it became quite clear to me that Greene could hardly hold a pen. His verbal surface is simply dull of ear (a brier patch of rhymes and chimes); and his plots, his narrative arrangements, tend to dissipate into the crassly tendentious (because they're determined by religion).”

Those are harsh words poured on one of the premier British authors. I’ve read and reread A Burnt-Out Case and Our Man in Havana. Perhaps I’m being overly generous, but I judge both novels to be superb, classic works of twentieth-century literature. And A Burnt-Out Case centers on several men and women of the Roman Catholic faith. There’s no doubt that Graham Greene presents a scathing indictment of religion.

On Religion
“This would include all ideologies, all institutionalized networks of committed belief . . . People who talk at any length about dreams, or about sex, will soon find themselves standing alone at the bar. And the same goes for religion. . . . No, fiction can't be doing with religion, because fiction is essentially a temporal and rational form – a social realist form.”

I agree completely with Martin here if a novel attempts to be a cheerleader for a particular religion. Unless in the hands of an outstanding author, it simply doesn’t work—or doesn’t work well. However, if a novel examines religion objectively as an institution and a set of beliefs exerting an influence, then a novel can work quite well—for example: At Play in the Fields of the Lord by Peter Matthiessen, The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver, The Origin of the Brunists and The Brunist Day of Wrath by Robert Coover—all extraordinary novels.

On Successful Contemporary Novels
Martin asks what doomed novels of the experimental sort – the stream of consciousness novels, language oriented novels, novels rebelling against plot and character? Answer: “A rational form, a secular form, and a moral form, the novel is in addition a social form. That's why social realism, always the dominant genre, is now the unquestioned hegemon. A social form—you might even say a sociable form. And the fatal character flaw of experimentalists? They're introverts, they keep to themselves to themselves, they prefer their own company. They're antisocial, in a word.”

I am a big fan of experimental fiction—novels such as The Age of Wire and String by Ben Marcus, The Invented Part by Rodrigo Fresán, Zone by Mathias Énard, Animal Money by Michael Cisco, and Invidicum by Michael Brodsky. I also recognize that, as a reader, I'm the exception. The overwhelming majority of contemporary readers gravitate toward novels that obediently reproduce the social-realist formula perfected by Jane Austen, Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens, and Agatha Christie. What experimental fiction threatens is not merely convention but comfort itself: the unspoken agreement that novels should reassure us with all the recognizable psychological and social cues. Experimental novels refuse this contract. They unsettle, estrange, and disrupt—treating confusion and complexity not as a failure of craft but as a demand of attention and commitment placed on the reader.

On Being a Literary Man or Literary Woman
Martin reflects back on his commitment to the literary life. He speaks of himself in the third person: “Martin was eighteen, and he was walking just after dark through a distant and neglected suburb of North London when he saw a lit window on the second-lowest floor of a council medium-rise. All it showed were the dark-blue shoulders of an unoccupied armchair. And he thought (this is word for word), That would be enough. Even if I never write, complete, publish anything at all, ever, that would be enough. A padded seat and a standard lamp (and of course an open book). That would be enough. Then I'd be a part of it.”

That’s so, so beautiful. I recall having a similar feeling in my early twenties—just give me a reading chair, a lamp, and a good book. I have kindred thoughts here in 2026: each time I pick up a work of literature, I am engaged in an act of intellectual defiance—the preservation of culture through reading and inquiry—in a world where millions of women and men in my country, the US, suffer from TV stupor, bad food, pills, and booze; a world where adults not only don’t read books but are incapable of reading a book. Pathetic.

On Using Words
Martin was scrupulous in his use of language. His advice to anyone wishing to engage in writing is clear: “Never use a form of words which is in any sense ready made. A form of words like stifling heat or biting cold or healthy scepticism or yawning gap; adjective and noun, long-married couples who ought to now be sick of the sight of each other.” And “To re-emphasise: never use any phrase that bears the taint of the second-hand. All credit to whoever coined no-brainer and (I suppose) to whoever coined go ballistic and Marxism lite and you rock and eye-popping and jaw dropping and double whammy and all the rest of them. Never do it –not even in conversation”

Once again, I agree with Martin here. However, we should be careful. In my review of his novel, The Information, I wrote: “Thus, I have figured out the major reason why I found The Information such an emotionally draining read. It is a real double whammy – both the narrator and the main character spit their vitriol out on every single page.” Martin says I shouldn't use the term double whammy. I disagree on three counts. First, I can't recall ever seeing double whammy in print. Thus, it hardly qualifies as an overused turn of phrase. Secondly, double whammy is colorful and contains power. Thirdly, I can't think of another term that could be used as a substitute that would carry equal force. Any suggestions?

I admit that my review hasn't touched on many of the book's main topics and themes, especially Martin's friendship with Christopher Hitchens, his relationship with Phoebe Phelps, and politics from Hitler's Germany to Trump's America. For the full 500+ page life of Martin and Martin's world, you'll have to read for yourself.

[W.D. Clarke · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a hard book to get through: I 'zipped' (relatively speaking, as Pynchon's character 'Slow' Lerner was named after yers truly) through the first half, more or less, but the mounting death toll proved to be spiritual body blows or something for me just as I coincidentally entered the seasonal, northern, diurnal-shortening blahs or whatevs, and

wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth, forgone all
custom of exercises, and, indeed, it goes so heavily
with my disposition that this goodly frame, the
Earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most
excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging
firmament, this majestical roof, fretted
with golden fire—why, it appeareth nothing to me
but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors.

So when Philip Larkin dies, I paused herein. Then, with Saul Bellow, same. I braced myself for The Hitch[ens] today, but got Elizabeth Jane Howard (Mart's novelist step-mom) as a 'bonus'.

And so, in sum, like with other books lately, I really wasn't in the mood to write a review, but then Paul asked me, after my previous quote-post about the Hitch, whether this is "good, bad or indifferent Amis", and it made me come to, sit upright for a change, and write at least this...

This is good, different Amis. He, too has lost his mirth, and the "baggy monster" cliche haunts whatever "structure" this book has (the hyperactive Table of Contents sez it all), and I am not sure I would call it a novel (lightly fictionalized autobiography, or 'Life Writing', as MA calls it?), but the author has lost none of his sense of sentence-level chutzpah. Literally chock full of apercus and insights I could have quoted at you all day. Half-way in, I never wanted it to end.

Essential for fans, hopefully (though he sez it is) not his final "major" work, but I wouldn't start here by any means—for fiction, go with the [unofficial] London Trilogy of Money, London Fields, and (my personal fave) the laugh-a-minute memento mori that is The Information. For non-fiction/literary essays, start with The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America, and work your way forward chronologically, but by all means read his sensitive, honest, and searing Experience: A Memoir.

I am definitely not ready to say good-bye to ol' Mart, and I do hope he didn't mean it when, in these pages, he said good-bye to us.
4.5*
********
[A month ago now]:
Not quite finished yet but wanted to put up the interview link with Mart from this past Sunday's episode of CBC's Writers & Company (an excellent program generally):
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/writersandco...

[Sam Quixote · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don’t know what makes Inside Story a “novel” because it reads like what I’m fairly sure it is: a memoir. Maybe because, at times, Martin Amis adopts novelistic devices like third person perspective or because he was covering himself in relating the numerous conversations from decades past and wasn’t sure if the words he was attributing were accurate - maybe even some of the details about the people were made up? But I’m gonna give Amis the benefit of the doubt and treat this as nonfiction with a nominally stylistic veneer of fiction, ie. belonging to the genre of Truman Capote’s Nonfiction Novel.

Another giveaway is that Inside Story is a lot more jumbled and unfocused than any of his other novels I’ve read. It’s mostly about Amis’ memories of his literary father, the Nobel Prize-winning author Saul Bellow; his actual authorial father Kingsley Amis’ friend, the poet Philip Larkin; his close friend, the essayist Christopher Hitchens; and his not-famous ex-girlfriend Phoebe Phelps. But there are a lot of tangents along the way: thoughts on suicidal ideation; the history of the novel; the state of Israel; a loving eulogy to his stepmother, the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard; 9/11; numerous tips on how to write; and myriad thoughts on writers in general.

Your enjoyment of the book will largely depend on how much you want to hear about Bellow, Larkin, Hitchens and Phelps. For me, I was there for Hitchens and Amis made me intrigued in Phelps, though Amis is a good enough storyteller to make Bellow and Larkin not uninteresting to read about at times. And his musings on the various other topics mentioned above weren’t boring either.

That said, there wasn’t much compelling about the Bellow sections until the end, when Bellow succumbed to Alzheimer’s, and even that was similar to anyone else dying of that terrible disease: tragically sad. Larkin too was another writer whose life wasn’t that exciting and felt slightly depressing to read about. I was surprised to find out that Larkin’s dad was a huge fan of the Third Reich though!

I’ve never been a fan of poetry but Amis clearly is and he quotes poems effusively throughout. Fine, but it didn’t make me appreciate the medium any more and I thought they didn’t illustrate his points any clearer (I find they rarely do). Amis also overdoses on footnotes - holy fucking christ, there are extensive footnotes in this book! I don’t mind the occasional footnote but there are too many here. Also, if you’ve read any guides on writing, Amis’ thoughts on writing aren’t going to blow your mind - besides gaining some insight into how he does it/his stylistic preferences, there’s not a lot of practical advice here that you won’t find in any how to write book (though I appreciate this isn’t the point of this book).

As a fan of Hitchens’ it was illuminating to read about Amis’ long-standing friendship with him, from their magazine days in the ‘70s to the very end in 2012 when Hitch died of oesophageal cancer (which Larkin also died of). Amis brings Hitch to life vividly and his words sounded exactly like his voice (if you’ve read his essays or seen any footage of him, you’ll know what I mean). The conversations were always witty, thoughtful and enjoyable to read. I didn’t realise Hitch had gay tendencies when he was younger but it’s not that unbelievable either.

Phoebe Phelps was an engaging character. Amis writes her very personably and she led an eventful life. She ties into some stuff involving his parents and Larkin but the supposed revelation was never convincing. Still, despite not being as famous as Bellow or Larkin, she was more fun to read about than either, and she obviously made a big impression on Little Keith (Hitch’s nickname for Amis) so it’s not hard to see why he’d include her in a book about this period of his life.

Inside Story is full of anecdotes on Bellow, Larkin and Hitchens, as well as Amis himself, and if those are writers you’re interested in, this one’s for you; if you’re not, you’re probably not going to get much out of this one. I thought the Hitchens/Phelps parts were more fascinating than not, the Bellow/Larkin stuff more boring than not, and the rest of it was a mix of both. I’m not sure this needed to be as long as 560 pages and the footnotes took the piss but, while not a must-read for most, this wasn’t a bad novel/memoir either.

[Laura Gotti · Rating 5 out of 5]

Quando e dove trovare i capolavori.

Questo è un libro sulla morte, così come sente la morte che si avvicina un grandissimo autore che arriva a settant'anni, dopo che sono morti i suoi genitori, sua sorella, il suo migliore amico, il suo mentore e molta altra parte della sua vita. È un libro sulla letteratura, sui suoi protagonisti del secolo scorso in Inghilterra e in America. È un libro sulla scrittura e su come si modella un paragrafo o su come si sceglie quella parola lì, quando, ancora, si pubblicavano libri degni di tal nome e quando uno faceva lo scrittore sapeva scrivere per davvero.

L'inglese di Amis è, come al solito, brillante, colto, ironico, complesso e facile allo stesso tempo, è quello di uno che scrive bene, per l'appunto. La sua vita è quella di uno che ha avuto come padre uno dei grandi della letteratura inglese e come amici Saul Bellow e Christopher Hitchens. Insomma, non ci si annoia.

È una lettura che è perfetta per chi ama determinate cose l'Inghilterra in primis e la letteratura anglo americana poi. È un libro per chi non è spaventato dalle parole che servono per esprimere i pensieri più nascosti. È un libro di uno che è capace di ammettere con se stesso di pensare spesso al suicidio, di essere accompagnato dal pensiero della morte. Uno che ha fatto 5 figli perché aveva bisogno di visi freschi e di allegria. È un libro che racconta l'amicizia profonda che lo legava a The Hitch, dai tempi in cui parlavano di fidanzate fino alle fine, mentre gli accarezzava una guancia, letteralmente, sul letto di morte. È un libro denso e per niente consolatorio, ma mai, minimamente, triste.

Nonostante il libro sua costellato di super alcolici che riempivano i bicchieri alle due del pomeriggio - in perfetta tradizione anglosassone - e qualche birra occasionale, io ho stappato quella bottiglia di Ruinart che tenevo da parte per le grandi occasioni, perché -mi sono detta - le grandi occasioni possono essere una lettura come questa all'inizio di un anno incerto dopo averne finito uno difficile. In fine dei conti, cosa c'è di meglio che festeggiare se stessi e brindare a quello che sarà?

[Grazia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Il segreto lavorio di certi giorni tutti uguali(*)

È un libro, questo, intriso di Letture, di parole, di citazioni, di frequentazione diretta con la Letteratura.

Martin Amis lo definisce un'autobiografia romanzata, io direi piuttosto un testo di Letteratura e di Scrittura con riferimenti autobiografici. Sì perché le frequentazioni di Amis sono libresche e letterarie. I suoi mentori e amici, mica da tutti, Saul Bellow, Philip Larkin, Christopher Hitchens.

Per tacer dei natali: pure la matrigna nonché seconda moglie dell'illustre Kingsley è niente di meno che Jane Howard, cui peraltro Martin riconosce merito relativamente al suo essere lettore in primis e conseguentemente scrittore.

E anche la moglie definitiva (Isabel Fonseca) poteva non essere altri che una scrittrice?

C'è la vita. L'amore.

"E c’è anche la questioncella della procreazione. Non posso continuare a fare finta di niente, Hitch. Ho bisogno di vedere una faccia nuova. Incontaminata dal mondo. Ho bisogno di vedere un innocente."


E poi c'è la morte.

La morte dei suoi riferimenti, padre, madre, matrigna, sorella, la perdita delle facoltà (Bellow - Helzheimer), la perdita del vigore e della vitalità (Hitchens - cancro all'esofago) e in conseguenza dell'amico più caro.

E da ultimo, non proprio così conclamata ma evidente tra le righe, la morte del romanzo (o la sua agonia) ed insieme ad esso quella del lettore. Di un certo tipo di romanzo e di un certo tipo di lettore.


"Cosí come si usa la parola ospite sia per chi ospita sia per chi è ospitato, anche lettori e scrittori sono in un certo senso intercambiabili (perché una storia, un narratore, non sono nulla senza un ascoltatore). E i lettori sono anche artisti. Ognuno si dipinge una diversa immagine mentale di Madame Bovary. Quando gli fu chiesto di riassumere i piaceri della lettura, Nabokov disse che corrispondono esattamente a quelli della scrittura. Io, da parte mia, non ho mai letto un romanzo che «avrei voluto scrivere io» (sarebbe un pensiero pusillanime e impudente allo stesso tempo), ma sicuramente e invariabilmente cerco di scrivere romanzi che vorrei leggere. Quando scriviamo, leggiamo anche. Quando leggiamo (come rimarcato poco fa), scriviamo anche. Leggere e scrivere sono per certi versi la stessa cosa."


Fluviale,dice la quarta e non si può che concordare, di lettura estremamente semplice, per amanti e curiosi della Letteratura.

Il primo effetto collaterale indottomi: la ripresa di Bellow con potenziata consapevolezza.


(*) Saul Bellow - L'iniziazione

[Marica · Rating 5 out of 5]

The super Hitch e Piccolo Keith
Quando Martin Amis parla di sé è irresistibilmente divertente, perchè strapazza il suo ego come se fosse il suo peggiore nemico: si dipinge completamente succube del genere femminile, di tutte le decine di fidanzatine e amanti e mogli ma soprattutto di Phoebe Phelps, che, se ho capito, non è una persona vera ma un archetipo dell'intero genere femminile, con tutte le qualità e i difetti possibili, anche antitetici. Quindi: aspetto da donna d'affari ma con notevole carica erotica, infatti viene imbroccata all'uscita da una cabina telefonica; appetiti straordinari ma curve perfette; donna del momento, super sexy ma molto poco disposta a concedersi, per non rimanere vittima dell'inflazione; ma se pagata adeguatamente, si può fare.
Il protagonista è Amis ma nel libro entrano ed escono amici e persone di famiglia. Di sé stesso dice che la volta in cui dietro richiesta della prima moglie ha deciso di farsi valere quale padre severo, ha detto: COSA SUCCEDE IN QUESTA STANZA? con voce tonante, quindi ha esaurito il totale delle riserve e non ha più riprovato. Un altro quadretto lo ritrae mentre sotto la chioma di un albero si muove ansiosamente per parare la potenziale caduta del fratellino piccolo (lui è già un adulto) nell'indifferenza generale della famiglia tutta.
La parte seria del libro segue il declino di varie persone che gli erano care: il poeta Larkin, amico di famiglia, l'eccellente scrittrice e filosofa Iris Murdoch (alzheimer), Saul Bellow, celebre scrittore (alzheimer), Christopher Hitchens, giornalista e scrittore e suo carissimo amico e compagno di una vita (cancro). Il suo affetto per the Hitch era tale che era l'unico ad esser pienamente convinto che sarebbe infallibilmente guarito. Purtroppo non è stato così. E' un libro piuttosto duro da leggere, ma è anche bello vedere quanta pienezza di sentimenti e disponibilità di se stessi possa abitare in un uomo e in genere nella sua famiglia per accompagnare un proprio caro fino al termine della vita. E' piuttosto raro ma comunque possibile.

[Craig · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are enormous pleasures on offer here. The book is characteristically forceful, erudite, magisterial, and biting. It's also, perhaps slightly less characteristically for Amis, tender, self-questioning and sentimental. There's much here to please an Amis fan, but hardly anything that would *make* an Amis fan. I can't imagine what someone who hadn't already read him would make of this self-referential anthology of anecdotes and memories, many of which have appeared elsewhere and thus are handled pretty elliptically at times. Amis admits to self-plagiarizing here, though he frames this as mere "authorial misconduct" rather than a felony, and fair enough. It's a deeply pleasurable read, but one that depends so much on its reader knowing not just the Amis corpus but the whole history of his circle--and devotees will tend to, given the status of the figures concerned (Larkin, Bellow, Hitchens, et al.)--that the book can't possibly stand alone. Which happens to be true of its form, too. It's billed as a novel, and its author insists it is on the page, but it isn’t much of one. It's all but plotless, and it's frequently interrupted by non-novelistic voices and perspectives and concerns, reading more like a scattered miscellany than a novel-shaped whole. This entails certain interesting problems, as you find yourself wishing for more clarity on the extent to which the events described actually happened, and as you wonder about the ethics of certain tactical moves (especially the shifting perspectives, settings and time signatures, and the inconsistent changing of names; perhaps someone cleverer than me can explain the basis for changing vs keeping names here). Amis is too deliberate a writer not to be consciously opening up questions of narrative truth, memory, accountability, self-disclosure, etc. How successfully he does so will probably depend on how much slack you're prepared to cut him--and there, too, it will probably depend on past encounters with his work, and whether all that reading brought you onside or not. The book is too pleasurable not to admire and enjoy, though nobody not already onside with Amis is apt to think so.

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

What an incredible novel/autobiography. The depth of Amis' voice. The stories he tells. The relentless storytelling. This is as good as Money or London Fields. It left me not only with the feeling I'd just read a great novel, but that I better understand the man who Martin Amis is, outside what the tabloids have reported.
The insights into Bellow, Hitchens, and Larkin add immensely to this. The relationships Amis had with these men, all varied, adds not only to the story but to a better understanding of the depth of Amis' ability to give of himself.
In the end, Amis says this is his final 'long' novel. I suspect this is true. The energy and focus needed to finish a long novel is overwhelming at any age. And the theme here is... death. The end. A movement to the end of time.
My hope is we get another few short stories. A couple of novellas. Amis' voice has always been unique, but at times it feels essential.

[Gabriela Pistol · Rating 4 out of 5]

O carte despre cărți, despre simbioza scriitor-cititor, despre literatura pe care o co-creează cele două entități, despre Larkin, Bellow, Hitchens, Murdoch, Roth, Woolf, despre feluri de a iubi și de a muri. Și de a scrie.
Ce să nu-ți placă? (De fapt, s-ar putea să fie câteva lucruri, Amis e ironic și obraznic și știe sa zgândăre).

In stilul lui extraordinar de expresiv și șlefuit (sunt la a cincea carte de el și e în top 20, dacă nu chiar mai restrâns, scriitori preferați).

[Andrew Alastair · Rating 5 out of 5]

Which writer alive writes better sentences?

[Ion · Rating 5 out of 5]

Un regal. O carte minunată despre scris, lumea literară, prietenie și despărțirea de cei apropiați. Aș fi vrut să nu se termine cititul. LE: am început să o citesc din nou.

[Mary Ann · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is supposed to be a novel, but, make no mistake, it's a memoir for all intents and purposes. I started it on July 7th after reading Bernadette's review (link below) because of my great admiration for Amis's best friend, Christopher Hitchens. Much of it is utterly heartbreaking, but it's also beautiful and so intense I had to take a break about halfway through. Don't skip the footnotes; they're much more than citations and add a great deal of insight and context.
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

[Laura Spira · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a difficult book to review because I found it a frustrating read, although the occasional flash of brilliance kept me going. It is pretentious and self-indulgent and far, far too long: yet another book that could have done with some well-considered editing.

I found the footnotes deeply irritating. Early in my academic career I was given some good advice about writing: think carefully about your objective in using footnotes, should their content really be included in the main text? If not, why not? Amis uses them as conversational digressions which I suppose suits the structure of the book but makes for an even more disjointed reading experience than the rambling main text already enforces on the reader.

But when Amis writes well he can be insightful, intellectually provocative and highly amusing, although he can also be unbearably condescending to his readers. I ended up with a list of books and authors I felt prompted to explore further, which, for me, is usually a sign of a good read. But I also felt somewhat battered and deeply glad that I wouldn't have to spend any more time in his company.

Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC.

[Bernadette Jansen op de Haar · Rating 5 out of 5]

I just finished this utterly remarkable book: Inside Story – a novel by Marin Amis. Is it a novel, is it a memoir? That’s beside the point, what matters is that it’s a great read and wonderful literature. A book to my heart, and that doesn’t mean I subscribe to all the author’s view, I’m a practising Roman Catholic, so say no more. It’s so refreshing to read an author who identities (this should be obvious but isn’t often enough) with readers and takes them seriously and challenges them to follow him on his journey through life and literature. His asides on the ins and outs of writing prose and poetry are insightful and memorable. The whole book deserves its length and is to be savoured. Wonderfully also to see acknowledgement and commemoration of death (none of us are immune to it) at the core of this book.

[Violet Baudelaire · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mi mancherà lo sguardo che Martin Amis mi restituiva dal mio tavolino da fumo.
Manca proprio in generale, Lui, a me.

L’ho letto come Lui ha chiesto: a intermittenza, divagando e tornando a rileggere passi che ho sottolineato con la mia matita viola della Tate Gallery ( comprata la mia prima volta a Londra ).

Entrare nella Sua Storia mi ha fatta sentire come il tè
( che beveva praticamente sempre, oltre al Martini Cocktail - si capisce! - )
quando lo guardi in infusione: l’acqua si colora gradatamente, in alcuni punti più che in altri.
Poi assume un tono omogeneo e l’attesa è finita.
Dal tempo e dal colore, riconosci che è pronto per essere bevuto e goduto.
Inside Story è stato la mia tazza da tè.

Ed è sorprendete, dato che racconta una vita mirabolante, piena di riferimenti altissimi e sommi maestri, uomini e donne imprescindibili della storia della letteratura contemporanea, con una lucidità irriverente e con un’ironia delle più sagaci e brillanti.
La Morte e la Malattia sono raccontate spogliandole d’ogni tabù, e affrontate a viso aperto, con un amore che va oltre il coraggio, con un’onestà commovente.

“ Questo romanzo non è liberamente ma rigorosamente autobiografico. E per avere il diritto di comparire in un’ opera simile hai bisogno solo della storicità .
Basta che tu sia realmente accaduto … e sei dentro . “

Non da tutti e per tutti, essere dentro, così .

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

My take on the book: https://bookandfilmglobe.com/fiction/...

[Glenn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Shattering. A book that celebrates life by attempting, at least, to look death square in the eye. Perhaps his best novel.

[R. · Rating 5 out of 5]

If it were not already over-recognized as the title of a hit comedy franchise, Amis could have easily called this novel The Hangover. Because this book is less about the banquet of life, with its goblets of wine and turkey drumsticks and barrels of beer, and more about the next day when you're heavy of gut, fraggle ragged of brain, slow with the movement and memory.
The comedy of the comedown, the slapstick of the exit: pursued not only offstage by bears, but also exes and regrets.
This novel has the formula for a mid-period Happy Madison production, you can hear the stentorian voice in the theatrical trailer: What do you get when an alcoholic essayist, a henpecked poet and a randy old novelist hit the road with Martin Amis (David Spade) for one last hurrah? Featuring Kevin James AS Christopher Hitchens ("I claim no courage for making such an elementary point..."), David Cross AS Philip Larkin ("I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.")I , and Alan Arkin AS Saul Bellow ("Search me. I'm a city boy myself, they might be crocuses.")

[Frederick Gault · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a wonderful time I had with this book. It was as if an old comrade came to dinner and regaled me with intimate stories about his famous friends; Philip Larkin the poet, Christopher Hitchens the essayist, Saul Bellow and Vladimir Nabokov the novelists, and his father, the infamous tippler and author, Kingley Amis. You are seated at a comfortably leisurely dinner, served cocktails, and the author talks to you, the reader, directly, even saying "Good bye" at the finish of a lovely time. And the beauty of his prose, is matched by his loving fascination with language and living and other people. The conversation didn't shirk the hard work of talking about the fear of death, and the bewildering emotional landscape when someone worthy is simply extinguished. He held forth on being in an America all at once amazing yet hosting the most appalling shits, some in positions of great responsibility. In short this is an author in thrall with the Universe; reveling in it with us through the magic of his hard work and towering gifts. He is at the height of his powers.

[Trin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Well, I'm relieved to be done with it, which is generally not the No. 1 thing one is hoping for in a novel...

If this is a novel. It's sometimes a novel. Certainly, it's a self-indulgent metatextual mess of a book. Amis writes a sprawling, time-skipping tribute to the lives and deaths of some of the most influential men and writers in his life: Saul Bellow, Christopher Hitchens, Philip Larkin, and his father, Kingsley Amis. He also meditates on several of his obsessions: 9/11, Israel (with side trips into the Holocaust and a goy's theories about the prevalence of antisemitism (eyeroll)), Trump, and death (via cancer and Alzheimer's). It is really hard to dwell in those topics for 550 pages, especially when it feels like Amis is just circling again and again over the same ground.

He also sprinkles in writing advice, some of which I found genuinely interesting, but much of which he ignores in this very book -- intentional irony? The whole thing feels extremely undisciplined and unrigorous, which makes it difficult to read him preaching rigor. He switches back and forth between the first and third persons ("Martin went upstairs," and then graphs later, "I went into the kitchen") and perhaps someone could do a study of when and why he employs the distancing voice (paging Daniel Molloy) but it's not made readily apparent by the text. (Or if it is, I missed it out of sheer fatigue.)

Then there is the contrast between how Amis writes about men and how he writes about women. There are gradations to misogyny -- I have read writers whose work has made me think, "Ahh, you clearly do not consider women to be people." Amis knows that women are people. But they are not people whose inner, intellectual, or creative lives he imbues with anything like the same weight he does his men. Amis puts to paper numerous sprawling reactionary centrist political discussions between him and Hitchens (which he seems to think are radical); he discusses, at one point, Saul Bellow's opinion on Pirates of the Caribbean. But aside from some ruminations on Iris Murdoch that clearly would not have been included if Amis could not point to the tragedy of her mental decline, and a belated tribute to his stepmother, the wonderful novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, which serves as the book's final epilogue (there are almost as many as in Return of the King), the women in this book all flit through the background, being mothers, arranging meals and healthcare and flights and parties.

All except for Amis' (entirely fictional) ex-girlfriend, Phoebe Phelps, who is essentially a) the villain of the piece, and b) a witch. Not literally. But he does take care to tell you that she is literally a whore, and by the end of her life, a grotesquely fat whore. This character being the most obviously fictional aspect of the novel offers Amis no excuses for it -- what the fuck is this? What was he trying to say?

I left this book exhausted. With its unclear purpose, with its treatment of women, with its burr-like clinging to tragedies Amis seems compelled to try to make his own (9/11, the Holocaust) while also writing obliviously about his own great privilege -- the world travel, the multiple homes, the constant languorous fine meals over which one might discuss philosophy with one's famous friends, a lifetime to create and think about being creative without ever worrying about how you're going to pay your rent. Believe it or not, but I have a lot of respect for Amis (I recently read and really liked The Moronic Inferno), but this makes me want to start in on a more intersectional A Room of One’s Own-style rant.

Toward the conclusion of this book, Amis mentions other things he hopes to write, and it feels deeply tragic that he never did, that he died less than three years later, that this was his final work. This shouldn't have been the end.

[Daniel Sevitt · Rating 5 out of 5]

The author can protest as much as he wants about this being a novel. It isn't, not that it matters in the slightest. Inside Story may be the simplest and best title ever given to a memoir. This is all inside stuff. Nothing here for beginners. Amis is growing old with more grace than his father for whom he has little time. Kingsley is a wholly periphery entity to this story. Instead we get a bunch of Bellow as Mart's beloved surrogate. We see bits of Bellow at his best but much more of him in decline. Because this inside story is about mortality, loss and grief. Amis watches Bellow fade away and it's heartbreaking.

Amis also talks endlessly about Philip Larkin and his legacy, what he achieved in life and what he failed to achieve. Larkin's misogyny (misanthropy?) remains unfathomable and Amis tries to reconcile it with the work which continues to transcend.

And at the heart of it all Amis writes about friendship. His friendship with his second wife may seem idealized, but it is loving. Only the names have been changed to protect the... innocent? His friendship with Bellow and Bellow's last wife feels true, and so the loss of it feels true. But it is his friendship with Christopher Hitchens which runs through the book, even as Hitch continues to call him "Little Keith". It is Hitchens' untimely death which breathes life into this extraordinary memoir and reflection on writers and writing.

Martin Amis is still here, orphaned, grieving, bereft. He is still writing although he notes he may not have much left to say. He is still standing with a wife, children, grandchildren. Some people find Martin Amis insufferably smug. He has plenty to be smug about, but he seems to have maintained his sense of wonder and appreciation and humility and I'm not sure there is anything more I could ever want from an author I have been reading for 30+ years.

[Jane Gregg · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved everything about this novel-memoir-thing. Profound and wise, with the most intriguing structure and form, I’m going to have to unpick how Martin Amis did this. It’s bloody brilliant. The lovely warm sections on Elizabeth Jane Howard were the cherry on this cherry pie of a book.

[Ryan]

Never reading this self-obsessed tosspot ever again.

[Bhaskar Thakuria · Rating 5 out of 5]

Probably the only thing that interposed as a significant detriment to the exhilaration that I experienced while reading this novel was the sad fact that Amis details in his characteristically lapidary but detailed prose in the closing chapters. The realisation that sunk upon me was enough in its moribund quiddity to impose a series of vacillations in my mind as to the state of the post-modern novel when Martin Amis would cease to write. And that he details very clearly that this was going to be his final full-length novel. The sensation never evaporated because this novel deals with love, death and sex in its most vivid and electrifying colours.

........But next August I enter my seventieth year. ........You see, another full-length fiction, let alone another long fiction, now seems unlikely. Time will tell. Maybe towards the end I'll just shut up an read...........With every work of fiction, with every voyage of discovery, you're at some point, utterly becalmed (like Conrad on the Otago), and you drop overboard and sink through the fathoms until you reach the following dual certainty: that not only is the book you're writing no good, no good at all, but also that every line you've ever written is no good either, no good at all. Then, when you're deep down there, among the rocks and the shipwrecks and the blind and the brainless bottomfeeders, you touch sand, and start to gird yourself to kick back up again...........

Goodbye, my reader, I said. Goodbye, my dear, my close, my gentle.

This book cannot be classified into a single genre of fiction or non-fiction. It is an amalgamation of autobiography, biography, a treatise on writing skills and how to develop fiction, political history, and a little fiction, especially when he deals with the turbulent lifes and loves of his dear friend Christopher Hitchens, his father Kingsley, the great Russian emigre novelist and poet Vladimir Nabokov, the American novelist Saul Bellow, and the poet Philip Larkin- one of Martin's early and greatest literary heroes. It even goes on to detail, in small and patchy accounts, on the death and the last poems of the British WWI poet, Wilfred Owen. Martin Amis chooses also to take a wild detour here- unlike in his previous novels- and gives us readers a hindsight into the workings of the mind of the other Martin Amis- the essayist- as in his works of non-fiction like The War Against Cliche, Koba The Dread, The Second Plane. On a more serious note unlike his usual novelistic fare he decides to give us a tour of the 9/11 WTC calamity and its haunting aftermath, and the Islamic ideology that worked as the driving force behind it. With prose of gimlet-like precision we see here Martin Amis the journalist and the contemporary chronicler detailing all the hypotheses related to the confines of the Islamist state theory and the turbulent wars that raged underneath all the blasphemous politics that has riddled the middle east and Israel for the past half a century. In this respect, one can call the work as non-fiction for most parts of it but in the hands of Amis it turns out to be something more than both fiction and non-fiction. Here we see the unconventional chronicler bearing down with his hatchet-like verbal outpourings and breaking new barriers in the development of the modern novel- a brilliant concoction of all the tenets of writing that Martin chooses to reveal to us readers in grand detail in several sections of this book.

Death seems to be the predominant aspect of this work; and sex as well. Indeed this novel had its genesis in the death of Christopher Hitchens and this is the flavour that permeates throughout this work- of quietus and utter oblivion.

Here is what Amis has to say while recounting the advent of Larkin's death:

Together with its almost sinister memorability, and its unique combination of the lapidary and the colloquial, the key distinction of Larkin's corpus is its humour: he is by many magnitudes the funniest poet in English (and I include all exponents of light verse). Nor, needless to say, is his comedy just a pleasant additive; it is foundational.....Was he helped in this- was he somehow 'swayed on'- by living a hollow life, 'a farce', 'absurd', and 'stuffed full of nothing'? Well, not nothing; his life was stuffed full of the kind of repetitive indignities that make us say, If you didn't laugh, you'd cry. Yes, and if you didn't cry, you'd laugh. This is the axis on which the poems rotate. His indignities were his daffodils.

As on the death of Saul Bellow, he writes:

Saul's last day on earth..............
That morning Saul woke up believing he was in transit- on a ship, perhaps? .....Saul wanted nothing to eat or drink (he was perhaps observing the traditional fast of the moribund- abstinence, with a garnish of penitence). Then he went back to sleep, or rejoined the light coma which, in his final weeks, patiently shadowed him. Time passed. His breathing became slow and effortful. Rosamund had an hour alone with him, and when the others came back into the room she was stroking his head, and she was talking to him, saying, 'It's okay, my baby, it's okay.' Saul opened his eyes and gazed at her in awe, a gaze from the heart, an ardent gaze; and then he died.
....When the last day began Saul thought he was at sea on a transatlantic voyage. That was a venture, that was a crossing, of about the right size- the mighty waters, the great deeps, the unknowable doldrums and tormentas.

As well as the death of Christopher Hitchens:

......There it lurks before me, under the angle lamp, Mortality- droll, steadfast, and desperately and startingly short. Usually I pick it up and put it down with the greatest care, to avoid seeing the photo that fills the back cover; but sometimes, as now, I make myself flip it over and I stare. We never talked about death, he and I, we never talked about the probably imminent death of the Hitch. But one glance at this portrait convinces me that he exhaustively discussed it- with himself. Those are the eyes of a man in hourly communion with the distinguished thing; they hold a great concentration of grief and waste, but they are clear, the pupils blue, the whites white. Christopher, long before the fact, mounted his own death watch. ..........

Once again the dark undercurrents of life are laid bare in all its ineludible pathos, and death plays a major part of it in this work of art- at once embellished and lucid. And it is in these episodes of death that we get to see Amis at his most striking and humane. Indeed this is one of his most sympathetic works to date and one of the best I have read this year.

It is right, it is fitting, it is as it should be, that we die. 'Death is the dark backing a mirror needs before we can see anything,' wrote Saul Bellow. And without death there is no art, because without death there is no interest, or to be more precise there is no fascination......

[Isobel Brown · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's a shock to think Martin Amis is in his seventies now. Though his writing always had the heft of an author who knows his own power, you cheer for the ruffian underneath, the upsetter, the hatchet-wielder and smasher of conventions. You felt, though, as a reader, that you would always be inadequate to the task of meeting his expectations, and this made it hard to like his work. You were stuck with admiring his clever tricks, and usually hating the way women were treated. I began softening my attitude to his work when I read his autobiography, 'Experience', which was quite a lot more than the genre straitjacket might allow.

Now, with Inside Story, which works into memoir the idea of novel and a sort of guide to reading and writing, there's a comforting welcome to the reader, a glass of whisky, an armchair for you to sink into. There's his family, his wife, his daughters for you to meet. Or a version of them. His sons from his first marriage. A composite of former girlfriends, a certain Phoebe, taunts and half-defeats the youthful Amis, and drives such of the narrative tension he allows. There's a lot of ruminating on his personal literary lions. The Pantheon. He flaunts his friendship with Saul Bellow, pays homage to his father Kingsley Amis, and, from a little further distance, genuflects, as ever, to Vladimir Nabokov. There's a twisty exploration of the power and inadequacies of Philip Larkin, that rides shotgun with the fictional adventures of Phoebe and calls into question the author's paternity. The heart of the book, though, and it's odd even for this to be a feature of an Amis work, (a heart, I mean), is all to do with his fondness and yearning for his old friend Christopher Hitchens. I would re-read the book just to savour the saltiness and the piquancy of that friendship. I've been a fan of The Hitch for years. (That voice!)

Inside Story - a nice play on words, as the book has lots of tips and wise words about the art of writing, story-telling, as well as being comfortable with the idea of creating story out of the author's own life, whether as memoir or as fiction forged from the building blocks of memory.

Amis is a horrific name dropper, and he knows it - but as he points out, his Dad was, well, his Dad, who just happened to be one of the leading writers of the day, and his stepmother, Elizabeth Jane Howard - a fine and, as he admits himself, dreadfully under-rated author. I confess, I got fairly tired with Amis's awe-struck reminiscences about Saul Bellow, an author I've never been able to read without having his amazing talent stick in my throat. I prefer my literary geniuses to give me more space to admire them than Bellow allows. And as he ruminated about Bellow and Nabokov and Larkin and Kingsley, I wondered why he was so very wrapped up with these elderly gents. It seemed he was almost crippled by his need to win approval, and to leap over them at the same time. It seemed a shame for him to care so much about these dusty, elderly old chaps. His urge to take his place in the Pantheon alongside these nicotine-stained, self-assured gents.

And then I realised, listening to the excellent edition of 'Open Book', with Amis being interviewed by Elizabeth Day, he's already become one of them himself.

But not the prose, it's full of pungency and accurate, jolting observations. Things like, "When a novel comes to you, there is a familiar but always surprising sense of calorific infusion; you feel blessed, strengthened, and gorgeously reassured." (My italics). A host of other things to savour.

Thanks to Netgalley and Jonathan Cape for giving me a copy to read pre-publication.

[Chloe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Matisse is oft-quoted „art should be like an armchair“ and Inside Story is a literary armchair - comfortable and welcoming, it leaves you with a cosy familiarity with Amis. Which is of course an illusion, but one which I believe Amis intends. It’s not really a novel, although it claims to be, it is of course a fiction, as all narratives are when we choose what to put in and what to leave out. But this is a rawer account, and Amis deliberately encourages this idea with conversational “how are you?” gambits. Once you get used to it, and it is he admits a device to maneouvre the reader into a new relationship with the author, a relationship born of the social media age but allowing for the hard-won, centuries-old trust and patience the novelist has been able up to now to command. Amis rejects restrictions of cultural appropriation and in fact any boundaries at all, believing he and all writers can write and should write from other perspectives.
It is most reminiscent of a college tutorial, with access to Amis’s experiences, opinions and acquaintances, albeit second-hand. Like the tutorial, the novel sparks avenues of thought - Steven Pinker’s account of violence in society The Better Angels of our Nature is exemplary here - and it is apparent that Amis would be a very entertaining and fascinating tutor. Probably though he would agree that he couldn’t be bothered.
Fun to read and thought-provoking, on death and dying, politics and conflict, fundamentally wide-ranging, I loved this book.