Experience

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Come un esperto equilibrista Amis si muove sul filo di un racconto esemplare: commovente e ironico, sobrio e vibrante insieme. The format of the book might make it a volume to dip into rather than read all at once, but all his hallmarks are here – pomposity, booze, a fear of the modern and – cringingly at times – sexism.

I was left with a strong feeling of the unreliable narrator, but I really enjoyed the book: for making me think about these reasons; for introducing me to some fascinating literary ideas - and for making me laugh. If only he'd stuck to writing about smoking, shagging and snooker, on the other hand, he might even have been the next Nick Hornby.Martin’s misfortunes with his bad teeth, that embarrass him no end, and Kingsley’s lingering death get more than required air time in this book. Amis wrote Experience mainly to qualify and refine stories about his life that had captured the public imagination despite being, in his view, inaccurate. Whether you love or hate Amis, the sentences he crafts are as sparkling and witty and imaginative as anything, and his pronouncements are somehow uttered with this devastatingly quiet authority of hipness that you sort of can't help but take him seriously. 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. And his dental preoccupation is understandable: they were terrible teeth, and the solution to his problems was a highly unpleasant procedure.

Reading it I imagine that to have a drink with the older Amis would be to enter a world where the cantankerous had been made flesh. If the trick is to work, the unreliable narrator must in fact be very reliable indeed: reliably partial, reliably unaware of his own egotism. Four hundred pages of this 'autobiography' somehow go by without us ever learning very much about who Martin Amis is, or what he has done with the past 51 years of his life. As the Chevrolet Celebrity moved boldly down Route 6, I was pretty confident that the evening would go well.

This memoir really isn’t for the women (the many women, it seems) in Martin’s life, but for his father Kingsley, his ‘twin peaks’ (Nabokov and Bellow), Christopher Hitchens, his mother Hilly, brother Philip, and his cousin Lucy Partington. He clearly wanted to show that he wasn't the spoilt brat the press had described and he didn't have all that dental work done for vanity. 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?