Inside Story by Martin Amis - review: another erratic, self-indulgent memoir

Martin Amis’s new book is a love letter to his best friend, Christopher Hitchens, who died from cancer in 2011

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Katie Law @jkatielaw17 September 2020

Twenty years after Martin Amis delivered Experience — his sort-of autobiography that covered everything from his expensive dentistry and relationship with his father Kingsley, to the break-up of his first marriage and the death of his cousin Lucy Partington — comes this sort-of sequel.

Begun in 2016, but attempted more than a decade earlier, Inside Story, subtitled A Novel, is not a novel at all. Nor, as its second subtitle states, is it a useful guide on How to Write, unless you want to write like Martin Amis, which of course his many fans and acolytes once did.

No, it’s another erratic, rollercoasting and frankly self-regarding memoir, notwithstanding that the names of some real people have been tweaked, and there are pages of (presumably invented) dialogue, or “duologue” as he would say, going back decades with mentors, friends, lovers and family.

Narratively and chronologically it’s a mash-up, with Amis lurching between first and third person, and back and forth in time, from vividly recalled scenes with a former lover from the Seventies, “Phoebe Phelps”, to a lesson on the difference between story and plot, from a conversation with Saul Bellow about anti-Semitism to an appraisal of the effects on the novel of the decline of violence and back to Phoebe again.

Round and round it goes for 520 pages, except in one respect. At the heart of the book is a linear march towards the big topic: death, or rather three deaths. The clue is the cover, which depicts a young, bescarved Amis and his best friend Christopher Hitchens holding a cigarette. Both were long term, committed smokers, and Hitchens died from oesophageal cancer in 2011. If Experience was ultimately a love letter to his father, then Inside Story is a love letter to “Hitch”, and to do him justice, Amis paints a brilliant portrait of his friend as principled, entertaining, fiercely bright, and rather nicer than “Little Keith” himself.

“His death gave me my theme,” Amis announces in “Preludial” (nothing as ordinary as “Prelude” will do, obviously). That, and the demises of his two literary heroes, Philip Larkin, who died in 1985, and Bellow, in 2005. He describes Bellow’s descent into senility, setting it against the horror of 9/11. Bellow can’t take in the news of the destruction of the Twin Towers because he has Alzheimer’s, and Amis can’t take in the news of Bellow’s incomprehension. Almost 100 pages later, he visits Bellow at home where his mentor has been reduced to watching Pirates of the Caribbean on a loop.

One minute he’s discussing Islamism and Osama bin Laden with Hitchens, a little later he’s telling “Elena” (his wife, Isabel Fonseca) about the extraordinary-sounding Phoebe. Other ex-lovers pop up, including Germaine Greer, who, he tells Hitch, used to smile sweetly during sex. “Real feminists aren’t dirty,” he writes, but Phoebe, with her tailored business suits, “tits on a wand” figure, job in finance, escort service on the side and gift for being “shockingly inventive” with her hands, is very dirty indeed, and an absolute classic Amis — or as he might say “Amisian” — creation.

Years later, she writes to tell him that Kingsley once tried to seduce her by confiding that Larkin had had a fling with Martin’s mother Hilly, so he, Kingsley, wasn’t Martin’s biological father. Cobblers, obviously, but what a great story! Later still, Amis visits Phoebe in her London flat to find she has a carer and has become morbidly obese.

There are many memorable scenes — Amis, now 71 was never one to stint on melodrama — but Inside Story is too long, too repetitive, too lacking in cohesion and just too self-indulgent. Moreover, he has said a lot of it before, yet has almost nothing to say about Brexit, Trump (neither of which he saw coming), or Western democracy and its relationship with Islam now. Nor about the state of the novel today. Why not? The late 20th century glittering intellectual bubble to which he did — and still does — belong is beginning to feel like a long way away.

Inside Story: A Novel by Martin Amis (Cape, £20), buy it here.

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