PositiveFinancial Times (UK)Through language, Amis has changed our relationship with a quotidian object. He has been doing it for almost half a century … At 71, the man who, with Ian McEwan and other peers, saved English fiction from the ‘Hampstead adultery novel’, from endless inventories of furniture, is almost as old as Bellow was then. And so Inside Story, ‘A Novel’, but really a fragmentary memoir, has an air of valediction. It is an account of his relationships with three deceased writers: Bellow, Philip Larkin and, most affectingly, Christopher Hitchens. Intersecting these literary tales are reminiscences of a youthful fling with an older and highly quotable woman. Yet a third thread is this prose master’s scattered advice for would-be writers. If this sounds like an amorphous structure for a book, the reality is even baggier … Male friendship can verge on the romantic, if not the sexual, and Amis renders this one without mawkishness … It is when he returns to the personal that humour and illumination flow … If Amis in his pomp was ferocious, his late style is wry and companionable. Infusing his book is the spirit of domestic tranquillity … In all sorts of ways, this is a man saying his dignified goodbyes: to departed friends, to long-ago loves and ultimately to a once-fearsome talent.
