PositiveThe Austin ChronicleKingsley\'s ghost wanders throughout this memoir, which circles its two subjects amid many digressions, footnotes, and ellipses ... In typical Amis style, this book can\'t help but lean toward the comic. Unabashed name-dropping produces first-rate anecdotes ... Amis is at his best on the subject of his gruesome dental saga, which occupies many painful pages ... Elsewhere in the memoir, Amis\' respectful tone can sometimes weary just a little. In certain passages he seems to write for someone, or to honor someone -- his cousin\'s bereaved family, a former Jerusalem mayor, or, repeatedly, Saul Bellow. Each of these graceful little tributes would be wonderfully suited to an awards banquet or a memorial service. In aggregate, they lie like a dentist\'s lead blanket on the narrative ... As Amis observes wonderingly of his mother, somehow innocence meets experience and yet becomes innocence again.
