Martin Amis' Memoir Confides and Conceals by Lisa Zeidner Philadelphia Inquirer Has Martin Amis ever submitted to psychotherapy? If so, the British novelist's chunky, enticing, uneven memoir, Experience, doesn't delve into it. Perhaps he thinks as disparagingly of Freud as did one of his idols, Vladimir Nabokov. But if ever a life seemed to call for intervention by Helping Professionals, it's Amis'. He was sexually assaulted at 9. His first cousin, Lucy Partington, was abducted, decapitated and dismembered in 1973, at age 21, by one of Britain's grisliest mass murderers, Frederick West. Martin Amis' father, the novelist Kingsley Amis (1922-1995), left Martin's mother and then was left by his stepmother, with whom Martin had also gotten close. Martin Amis may have a reputation as the scowling, rakish Bad Boy of British letters, but his father was so spectacularly bad drunken, philandering, nuttily right-wing, phobic, demanding that he makes Martin look like the Dalai Lama. And while it might seem that having a parent in the biz would be an advantage, Sir Kingsley Amis cannot be said to have encouraged Martin's ambitions. In fact, he was vocal about not respecting his son's novels not, after a certain point, even bothering to read them. Add to those problems Martin's own divorce, his discovery of his 19-year-old illegitimate daughter, grave dental woes, and a relentless, silly bashing in the British press, and you have quite enough crisis for a memoir. Nevertheless, Amis is clearly deeply uncomfortable with the confessional impulse. His discomfort makes Experience something of a hodgepodge: a queasy hybrid of straightforwardness and artifice, as interesting for what Amis fails to say as for what he reveals. Amis, 50, began writing this memoir at a time of heavy emotional weather, during which he was haunted by both literal and figurative divorces. He had split not only from his wife but also from his longtime literary agent, Pat Kavanaugh which cost him the friendship of Kavanaugh's husband, the novelist Julian Barnes. But most of all, Amis was bereft at the loss of his father in 1995, which left him as the death of any parent will, let alone one so complicated and dominant feeling brittle and vulnerable. "I claim that a writer is three things: literary being, innocent, everyman." Through much of this book, the Everyman triumphs with a gently meditative tone. Although much of this material is moving, it's not quite clear how Amis arrives at his middle-aged wisdom. The book's structure is adamantly unchronological a bit where Amis weeps through an entire transatlantic flight is juxtaposed with snide tidbits of literary gossip. Amis justifies the book's sprawl by reminding us: "My life is ridiculously shapeless." Indeed, he says, most lives are. That's why we crave literature, which has the virtue of imposing "pattern and balance, form, completion." True, except that, for all the book's heft, there's a surprising amount upon which Amis doesn't touch. There are two chapters titled "Women and Love," but both of his marriages happen cryptically off-page his second wife, the writer Isabel Fonseca, gets 20-odd clipped references in the book, as opposed to his buddy Saul Bellow's much more expansive 69. Amis implies that his relationships with women have been a source of his greatest hardships and pleasures - but that he plans to keep them private, thank you very much. OK but then, why are we reading a memoir? For all that he proposes to have matured by his experience, Amis seems more comfortable being the snide-to-wry, opinionated, show-offy prose stylist that we recognize from his fiction. He delivers a reasonably successful, if perhaps slightly overplayed, set piece on his dental disasters. He name-drops and gossips with sly abandon, as if to say, "Well, isn't this what you wanted?" Indeed. How amusing to hear Amis speculate that the start of his career was "tacitly nepotistic. Any London house would have published my first novel out of vulgar curiosity." His godfather was the British poet Philip Larkin. His stepmother, the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, got him into Oxford. He dated Tamasin Day Lewis, daughter of British poet laureate Cecil Day Lewis and sister of actor Daniel Day Lewis. His second big girlfriend's stepfather was the philosopher A.J. Ayer. Experience is studded with tart anecdotes about his literary friendships. Very occasionally these boys (despite the accomplished women, it is most decidedly a boys club) will spat about who picks up the check, but mostly they debate books and ideas. Over dinner, Amis harangues novelist Salman Rushdie about Samuel Beckett, whom Rushdie admires and Amis doesn't ("I really do hate Beckett's prose: every sentence is an assault on my ear"), until Rushdie suggests they step outside. Amis spends an entire evening kicking his friend Christopher Hitchens' shins under the table when Hitchens insists on arguing with Bellow about Israel. Most of the literary material gets handled in footnotes and asides. Perhaps Amis felt that since he had already written extensive journalistic pieces on Nabokov and Bellow, and granted many interviews on his influences and process, it would be redundant to do so here. But he spends more time dwelling on his father's literary development than on his own and "The King" (as young Amis sometimes called him) penned his own memoir as well, so even there, Amis Jr. is in the odd position of having to embellish, rather than invent, his own family narrative. It's difficult to say, from Experience, how much Amis understands about the complicated anxiety of influence that his literary lineage represents. When asked by a reporter if Saul Bellow is his literary father, he quips, "I already have a literary father." Yet we see Amis corresponding with Bellow's wife, as he once wrote to his stepmother (the worshiped elder dudes seem to be only sporadically satisfying correspondents). Here he is devotedly rereading drafts of Bellow's recent novel Ravelstein but there is hardly anything on how Bellow responds to Amis' work. Amis comes off as generous, conciliatory, surprisingly insecure - and mostly befuddled by his own heart. There is, no doubt, a bravery in admitting to this much bafflement. "Writers write more penetratingly than they live," Amis asserts, and Experience certainly proves his point. The more elegant formulations about rivalry and loss can still be found in his fiction. Home / Books / Short Stories / Articles / Personal Essays / Reviews / Biography / At Rutgers University / Contact Lisa Zeidner | |