Inside Story

For a time I couldn't decide whether Martin Amis's Inside Story was a chore to read, or a pleasure (it was both) -- but I persevered. Ultimately I would say it was a pleasure. Or perhaps, in keeping with the style of the novel, I should say something like this: “Geoff Gates, a reader who prided himself on some discernment, had decided that Inside Story was a novel worth bothering with.” 

The Wrap: You can read the way that the novel is equivocally praised in The Guardian by Tim Adams here:  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/sep/13/inside-story-by-martin-amis-review-too-clever-by-half. 

Or roasted indulgently in the New York Times by Parul Sehgal here: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/20/books/review-martin-amis-inside-story.html

Here's some of my own thoughts on the book. 

Observation One: ‘The Preludial’ (adjective for ‘Prelude?’) has the cute direct address of playful postmodernism (‘Welcome! Do step on in – this is a pleasure and a privilege’ [opening line]; ‘Now you’re a close reader, and you’re still very young. That in itself would mean that you too have thought about being a writer’ [p.xv]). However, this is just one of Amis’s tricks, like a funeral oration that begins with a joke. 

Observation Two: The reader is assumed to be a literary sort who would like to hear about the neuroses of a famous writer (his gift is dying!); the confessions of a hedonist (conversations about sex with Christopher Hitchens); the warts and love, combat and care that goes into being the son of Kingsley Amis, a literary godson to Philip Larkin, and a card-carrying accomplice to Hitchens. Then there’s Saul Bellow – a titan Amis clearly loves. The narrative recalls their early meetings, growing friendship, and finally profound sadness as Alzheimer claims its greatest scalp. If Amis’s assumption is correct, you will read the novel for its insider insights, even if you think some of the love-boasting is tawdry, or the death scenes, maudlin (and you’d be quick to feel a meanness of spirit so that neither judgement lasts). 

Observation Three: There isn’t a plot; it isn’t really a novel; but think ‘Four Weddings and a Funeral’ in reverse. Here it is ‘Three Funerals and a Love Affair’ (Larkin, Hitchens, Bellow for the funerals; Phoebe Phelps for the affair). Apart from that, lesser pals like Ian McEwan and Julian Barnes are mentioned only briefly (since living and not in the same league as the departed). Ex-wives are treated respectfully, while still giving the impression that Amis has loved and lost in a manner that makes the reader feel he (or she) lacks this lion’s Lebenskraft. 

Where I folded a Page: This is a good sign – where I have turned the page I would like to copy that whole sequence out. I’m either in furious agreement with an observation, or I am amused by the way it is expressed. Example sentences only:

‘There used to be a sub-genre of long, plotless, digressive, and essayistic novels (fairly) indulgently known as ‘baggy monsters’. Humbolt’s Gift … is a classic baggy monster, and when it was published in 1975 (before Bellow’s Nobel) it spent eight months on the bestseller list’ (p.63) Where have those readers gone? 

‘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’ (p.329). That’s just funny – ‘I maintain’ undermines the claim; 'verifiably non-fiction' is both a clever reversal, and charmingly impossible.  

‘We are living, you and I, through a Counter-Enlightenment. Popularly known as “populism”, it is a movement supposedly attentive and responsive to “the interests and opinions of ordinary people” … Every now and then there’s an urge to apply the same emphasis [Donald Trump is mentioned] to the arts; and the most vulnerable is literature – literature in prose’ (p.389). So, that’s where readers of baggy novels have gone – they’ve been actively discouraged by anti-elitists! 

‘So don’t do that: don’t be baffling and indigestible. The good, the thoughtful host doesn’t do that … Take the earliest opportunity to give the readers a bit of typographical air – a break a subhead, a new chapters’ (p.418). The book gives occasional, sensible literary advice to the would-be writer – another form of ‘inside story’, like a chatty novelist trying to teach something without being too patronising (who says writers have it over readers anymore that bridge-engineers have it over commuters). 

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After I finished this book, we visited Blackheath in the Blue Mountains. Shifting between first and third person again, in an Amis manner (he too, repeats jokes): 

Geoff felt that he owed it to both Amis and Bellow to buy-up big when he found three M. Amis novels (two in hardback) among bric-à-brac in a former picture theatre. He had already started again on Bellow, beginning with Seize the Day -- an aperitif for the baggy novels to follow.