Martin Amis has been my favourite novelist for most of my life. All the same, having been forewarned about its contents, I wasn't going to read this book at all. Then I found a copy at the Colombo Municipal Library and impulsively borrowed it.
Being, myself, an ageing writer somewhat troubled with premonitions of mortality, I knew I was risking my peace of mind by taking up a largely autobiographical work by an another, older writer similarly troubled: particularly a ‘novel’ that is largely about other famous and well-loved writers growing old and senile, losing their talent and dying of horrible diseases. Luckily, that’s far from all there is to Inside Story. It also contains, for instance, quite a lot about the author’s love life, which appears to have been rich, variegated and wildly successful, and later about his wives and children. There is also quite a bit about his parents’ love lives and those of their contemporaries (Philip Larkin being singled out for detailed treatment; there’s even a photo gallery of his girlfriends). There are various meditations on Jewishness – ethnic, literary and political – and about the ‘threat’ of radical Islamism, which was the green hill on which, early in the century, the author chose to crucify his political reputation; he appears to have learnt a few lessons from that experience, and rather more from the experience of his friend Christopher Hitchens, who (as we are reminded several times in this book) energetically supported the US invasion of Iraq.
Amis claimed that Inside Story is a novel. This is a bit of a joke, and though I don't doubt parts of the story have been fictionalized, it is definitely a personal memoir. I suppose one of its ancestors is Nabokov’s Speak, Memory, although the feeling-tone of that book is very different. The autobiography, fictionalized or not, is ‘interluded’ (as he puts it) with some writing about writing, included for the benefit of aspiring novelists. These are mostly observations about style, and although I did find many of my own concerns as a writer addressed among these interpolations, I got the impression that the insights being shared were really quite personal to the author and his very distinctive style – aesthetic choices, in fact, which some of us might resolve very differently.
Leaving aside these masterclass moments, the main burdens of the book are old age, death and dying. Standing or slumped in the queue for the exits we meet Saul Bellow, John Updike, Philip Larkin, the author’s father and of course his best friend, Hitchens, whose personality and long-drawn-out demise (and Amis’s palpable love for him) dominate the book. I happened to be dealing with a mild but nasty respiratory infection while reading Inside Story, and at one point I had to put the book down because of all the extra-literary anxiety the description of Hitchens’s ordeal was causing me. Long, long ago, while still a teenager, I read Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions and it triggered in me a very real bout of anxiety/depression. Such is the power of literary suggestion. Inside Story wasn’t nearly so devastating, but Amis’s detailed description of Hitchens's case and treatment rattled me so much that I had to stop reading for a few days. Still, I went back and finished the book in the end, and was rewarded for my pains when the narrative overcast lifted towards the end, the sun shone through and the novelist's art somehow made it all all right.
The other and greater reward was, as always, the privilege of sharing Amis’s thoughts and the wealth of worldly insight vouchsafed the reader over the course of the telling. As I said, he is my favourite writer, and one whose mental space has always seemed to me a larger, better stocked, more elegant and dignified extension of my own.
(Originally published on Goodreads)
