Experience

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This is a good book to glimpse into the life of a literary giant who did not have to struggle to get published (his father’s agent and publisher published Martin’s first book and got him off to the races without the required mandatory years committed to wandering in the literary wilderness). His prose refashions the English language into a lean and brillant instrument, dazzling readers with its energy and wit. I am a fan of Amis, for sure, but even I wouldn’t necessarily recognize the man if I saw him out of context.

His teeth are too good… It’s not everyone, you know, who can jostle shoulders with Joyce, who can hobnob with Nabokov. Amis also examines the case of his cousin, Lucy Partington, who disappeared without a trace in 1973 (a month after the publication of his first novel), and was exhumed in 1994 from the back garden of Frederick West, Britain's most prolific serial killer. In 1978 the incumbent editor, Anthony Howard, bowed to historical forces and honorably stepped down. Amis, like me, like Nabokov, Joyce, David Foster Wallace, Conrad, and whoever else, is overly obsessive about his teeth. This is not My Life and Loves - rather a pity in a way, but perhaps that will be the subject of a further volume of autobiography?I said afterwards that this was sinister balls, and Christopher, whether or not he agreed (he was, of course, much more pro-union than I was), certainly seemed to be taken by the phrase.

Much of Christopher's discourse, at the dinner table in Vermont, can be found in this 8,000 word essay, which he wrote, so to speak, as a gentile. In part that is because there is so much else about which Martin says so little -- including the other women in his life, as well as his books (one hardly senses book-writing is his main occupation).

You cannot craft a narrative without artifice, and this one is as crafty and as artificial as it gets -- by which I mean it is a work of art. All the kids' voices in Experience -- those of the narrator as a child and those of his own children -- are done with a clairvoyant accuracy that wrings the heart even though it's funny. Kingsley's arrangement with Eric Jacob's is never adequately explained, and neither are many of the details of the controversy. The simple reason is that he is attractive to women, a quality which brings with it many pleasures, but which provokes aching hatred and jealousy in the rest of the human race. This is certainly an area where KA wins out, as his book is designed to concentrate on one individual – and sometimes one anecdote – at a time.

The narrative is notable for elaborate and complex time-shifts back and forth across the author's life, setting up echoes and parallels between incidents, playing variations on the themes of love and death, fathers and sons, innocence and experience. But what I've read of both their fiction, while it provides the occasional chuckle, and in the case of Nabokov admiration, has left me cold, even queasy (yes, I have suspicions it's me, not Nabokov, though I feel fortified in learning on p.It has been said that there are only two types of Irish male: the hard man, and the desperate chancer. Amis attributes this division to his feelings of embarrassment and guilt for the impulsive and naive decisions he made while younger. It is no discredit to him that his careful, heartfelt tribute - the text closes with a letter to her mother, complete with kisses at the end - somewhat unbalances the book.

His father however looms large in Martin’s book, and is far more of a real person than he is in his own volume.The other key strain to the novel is his tribute to his cousin, Lucy Partington, who was a victim of Fred and Rose West. completano il quadro accenni ai suoi figli, la scoperta di una figlia illegittima e qualche caso di "sassolino nella scarpa" nei confronti del biografo di suo padre. The second part is mainly about his father's dying and increasingly I realised this was more a biography of dad than of Martin, perhaps to show dad's biographer that he hadn't always got it right and that the son knew far more. As such I can’t help thinking that it would have been better to frame a lot of these incidents as fiction and let the author run wild with a narrator who is present for the reader.