The first time I read a Martin Amis book, I was in graduate school, and I hated it. The Information, to me, seemed too, well...British. I envisioned the writer of this book to be a snobby, overly-refined, overly-intelligent prick I would want to punch in the face after five minutes in his company. I finished the book, couldn't revise my opinion of the man, and forgot about him.
Since that time (more than a decade has passed), I have enjoyed the work of several different British authors whose tone and manner are somewhat similar to Amis (Ian McEwan and JG Ballard come to mind), so last summer I decided to give Amis another chance. After devouring London Fields over the course of a couple days, I was certainly glad I'd made amends. Age, patience...who knows what made me more tolerant of Amis's style, but I found London Fields to be funny, challenging, and basically brilliant.
Since that time I've gone on to read quite a few of his books, including, in my mind, the penultimate Amis novel Money, as well as Dead Babies, House of Meetings, The Second Plane (essays about 9/11 and the Islamic Fundamentalists), and the brilliant novel Time's Arrow. After reading that book (and being sincerely blown away), I decided to pick up his memoir, Experience.
Most people who are into these kinds of things already know that Martin Amis's father was Kingsley Amis (SIR Kingsley Amis, thank you very much), the great comic novelist and author of Lucky Jim. Much of Amis's memoir deals with his relationship with his father, how he grew up under the literary tutelage of a great and acclaimed novelist and poet, how it affected his tastes and morals, as well as his development as an artist. Martin's relationship with his father sounds to me to be typically, um...English (there we are again); fairly loving but repressed, sometimes contentious, often revolving around alcohol, subject to the successes of both father and son.
Speaking of alcohol, there's a lot of it in this story. Add to that a healthy dose of adultery, divorce, children born in and out of wedlock, literary references, lovers and friends both lost and found, descriptions of authors and their idiosyncratic behavior, Israel, nuclear weapons, critics, and oral surgery - and you pretty much have it. Most interestingly here, however, is a narrative that runs through the book about Lucy Partington, Amis's cousin who was the victim of notorious British serial killer Fred West. There is quite a bit of detail about Lucy and her family here - for almost 20 years Lucy was considered missing and no one could really say what happened to her. It was only after the discovery of West as a serial killer did all the information come out about his victims. Amis writes compellingly and emotionally about his feelings surrounding this event, as well as the following memorial service, the fallout of the revelations, the press coverage et al.
I am sure I am not doing the complexity of this memoir justice here. Suffice it to say that a very talented writer wrote a book about a very talented family - if you like that sort of thing, this book might be for you.
[Beware, casual reader, however - the text is riddled with footnotes and asides, as well as references to a fair amount of obscure English literature that certainly was beyond me. While there are profiles and more modest mentions of some pretty heavy hitters in Experience (Christopher Hitchens, Julian Barnes, Salman Rushdie, Cecil Day Lewis, Saul Bellow, Robert Graves, etc...), there are quite a few more writers, poets, actors, et al to whom the passing Amis fan will have no real connection.]
jD
