Inside Story
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4.0 • 4 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Martin Amis's dazzling autobiographical novel of a unique literary life seen through the lens of friendships, family, sex and love, is wise, warm, heartbreaking and funny: the heart-to-heart testimony of an incomparable writer.
This is the portrait of an extraordinary life lived by a great writer. Martin Amis leads us through boisterous romantic entanglements and literary friendships, the encompassing ties of family to generously revealing details about how to write (from the master of prose style), and finally to the intimate sorrow of a death closely felt.
Inside Story had its birth in a death--that of the author's closest friend, the beloved thinker and writer Christopher Hitchens. From their early days as young magazine staffers in London, reviewing romantic conquests and the latest literary gossip (not to mention ideas, books and where to lunch), Hitchens was Martin's wingman and adviser, especially in the matter of the alluringly amoral, unforgettable Phoebe Phelps--an obsession Martin must somehow put behind him if he is ever to find love, marriage, a plausible run at happiness. We meet the literary giants who influenced him--his father Kingsley Amis, his hero Saul Bellow, the weirdly self-finessing poet Philip Larkin, and significant literary women, from Iris Murdoch to Elizabeth Jane Howard.
Moving among these greats to set his own path, Martin's quest is a tender, witty exploration of the hardest questions: how to live, how to be a husband and father, how to grieve, and how to die? In his search for answers, he surveys the horrors of the twentieth century, and the still-unfolding impact of 9/11 on the twenty-first, and considers what all this has taught him about how to be a writer.
The result is a love letter to life and to the people in his life, which is simultaneously a wonder of literary invention--wise, meditative, heartbreaking, funny, and as engaging as a novel--that achieves a new level of confidentiality with readers.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Amis (The Zone of Interest) frames his consistently intelligent and compulsively readable "novelized autobiography," as he calls it, as a guide to writers. Along the way, the author crafts a dynamic series of paeans to three of his heroes Saul Bellow, who became a kind of father figure; Christopher Hitchens, one of his best friends; and Philip Larkin, his father, Kingsley's, lifelong friend amid a wide-ranging survey of his own life. The book opens in 2016 with Amis living in Brooklyn with his wife, writer Isabel Fonseca, contemplating his own mortality, with a meta introduction to his reader (whom he imagines as an aspiring writer), but quickly turns to the lives of Bellow, Hitchens, and Larkin, and, eventually, their deaths: Bellow slips into dementia. Hitchens fights a losing battle with cancer. Larkin dies of cancer as well. Amis also relates the fascinating story of an early love of his, Phoebe Phelps, an enigmatic figure whom he admits was the inspiration for his first novel, The Rachel Papers, and whom he remained obsessed with for decades. There is much else on offer: critical aper us and insightful digressions on Austen, Conrad, Nabokov, and other writers; an elegant gloss on the history of the modern novel; and opinions on Hitler, the Soviet Union, 9/11, the refugee crisis, and President Trump ("the high-end bingo caller who occupies pole position in the GOP"). Amis again proves himself to be as savvy a thinker as he is a writer as he applies his insight and curiosity as a novelist to this stylish and genuine account of his development as a writer. The result reaches the heights of his finest work.
