I was just in a rush to finish the book, and not just because of time pressure: it was because I was enjoying it so much. Amis’s prose, as you should know by now, has a rush and a power that sweeps you along like surf: you’re never going to get a sentence that isn’t pulling its weight. On a rereading, though, I found myself asking: why’s he doing this? Isn’t this undermining the veracity of his account? And why here, and not there? Is this true? Did this happen ... if you liked Experience, then you’ll love Inside Story. It has similar rhythms, equally good jokes, equal if not greater poignancies (the scene at Hitchens’s deathbed affected me more than anything else I can remember reading); and, of course, great footnotes ... But the heart of this book is in his relationship with Christopher Hitchens, and you can tell how much love there was between them ... Their dialogue, to use a reviewer’s miserable cliché, sparkles; it has the feel of truth, too, and one of the reasons Amis calls this a novel is that it frees him from recalling their chats—or indeed his chats with anyone else—verbatim. It gives him room ... Novel, shmovel. It works.
Inside Story is the most confusing of the 14 novels, two short-story collections, one memoir, and seven works of journalism and history that Amis, 71, has written ... It comprises, briefly: magnificent and affecting accounts of the decline of Saul Bellow and the death of Christopher Hitchen ... a pointless subnovel featuring another (Jesus Christ) of Amis’s Eros-Thanatos women ... a slightly half-assed but nonetheless very interesting how-to-write manual; lashings of his bamboozlingly brilliant critical commentary; digressions and footnotes galore. Really it’s a 500-page miscellany of Amis-ness ... The great lines come flying at you ... And there are good jokes, too ... It’s full of ellipses: Dangling, tantalizing, confiding, pregnant beyond utterance … polyvalent .. .There are sweating pockets of male shame and grease spots on the conscience ... How do I measure up to all this? Not the writing, but the level of perception, the level of interrogation, the level of work, the level of living. And then the mood passed, and as a reader I felt—like an absolution—the gaze of the author, and his understanding. That’s greatness. That lasts.
The book is a 'novelized autobiography'—an unstable and charismatic compound of fact and fiction. Amis revisits stories he told in his memoir Experience. Some other passages have been grafted from his essays and speeches. He reproduces a New Yorker article in its entirety ... Amis feels a bit like a beloved vice these days. You read him through your fingers. As a critic, he remains strong and original. His memoir is a model of the form ... Inside Story is rife with dreams, sex fantasies and maundering meditations on Jewishness, a longstanding obsession. The book feels built to baffle. It is an orgy of inconsistencies and inexplicable technical choices ... Most maddening of all, Inside Story also includes some of Amis’s best writing to date.
Martin Amis begins this baggy, curious book with an account of how it nearly wasn’t written. He had a go at it more than a decade ago, he confesses … We start…with the author, like Jagger on the opening leg of the latest farewell tour, cranking himself up to deliver the hits … There have always been two extremes in Amis’s writing, that brilliant observational gift for ironies and a sort of elevated melodrama that stands in for a fuller range of emotion. Both still compete for attention here. There are perfectly crafted scenes that capture the creeping shocks of mortality …but they are rarely left to speak for themselves. Instead, they are bookended with mannered, self-absorbed reflections on the Holocaust, or the state of Israel, or the fall of the twin towers, or hangovers, or full stops.
... the book’s unsettled relationship with fictiveness doesn’t come across as a game or a get-out clause ... Amis doesn’t try too hard to persuade the reader that this is all of a seamless piece. Instead he adds more seams ... It’s hard to arrive at a measured view of all this. The barrage balloons of fame or notoriety following these people around keep getting in the way, and there’s always so much going on. Even after the book’s last four or five resolutions, Amis finds room for another argument with himself about Israel, two passages (one reprinted) on Elizabeth Jane Howard, and a post-postscript describing a dream about her dog. Another difficulty is the range of Martin Amises on offer. Here he’s a distinguished, thoroughly normcore man of letters, there he’s a feral, muscle-flexing cult writer, and there, there and there he’s in various in-between states ... He takes an unpretentious, anxious interest in holding the reader’s attention, and from time to time he can still get out from behind the rhetorical afflatus and come at you with sheer voice.
Inside Story is...digressive and centrifugal, its freewheeling structure, which flits among memories nonchronologically, suggestive of what remembering the past is actually like ... his 'destined mood'...is one of slow-burning happiness, a buoyant wonder at the daily recurring miracle of existence. Some readers will find this all deplorably smug (a charge levelled at Amis on more than one occasion), but the self-pleased protagonist may be no more of a confection than the customary self-loathing one ... it’s hard to shake the suspicion that the author is playing a taunting game of preëmption, puffing up his narrator so as to later tear him down ... the pages on [Philip Larkin] here represent a valuable supplement to an already ample body of criticism ... the book’s hybrid genre, the way it teasingly straddles the fact-fiction borderline, begins to pay off ... Amis has written about love and lust so many times before that in the Phelps sections of Inside Story, vivid though they sometimes are, he seems to be relying on imaginative muscle memory. The same cannot be said about the book’s treatment of male friendship, a relatively novel theme for Amis ... some of the book’s most powerful moments come when we glimpse a simmering competitiveness beneath the tranquil surface of [Amis and Hitchens's] friendship ... Such vignettes are a main attraction of Inside Story, whose narrative elements—including the Phelps affair, the gossipy observations and asides, and the lit-crit musings and creative-writing tips—retain, across the book’s five hundred pages, a miscellaneous quality, as if Amis’s grab-bag structure had been masking some measure of creative lassitude, even appetitive excess ... it’s hard to fight the feeling that the novel’s air of achieved ambition has come at the cost of a more substantial achievement. Whatever else it may be, Inside Story is unmistakably the work of a man with nothing left to prove.
... a late-style slackening. Gone are the comic and inventive adjectival pairings of the past ... Instead Amis settles for something close to tautology ... you are reminded of his thirty-seven-year-old claim that 'a cliché or an approximation, wedged between inverted commas, is still a cliché or an approximation' ... he’s voluble, there’s no getting around that—content to unfold his anecdotes and apothegms at virtually Victorian length. He’s somewhat insistent on age ... He’s capable of moving sincerity, as when writing about Saul Bellow’s dementia and Christopher Hitchens’s cancer ... And he’s funny, now and again, in a blunt, broad way (he’s still Martin Amis) ... But he’s also complacent, inaccurate, and behind the times, especially when it comes to literary topics ... Inside Story is at once his bulkiest book and his weirdest ... Again and again, you find yourself wondering (often aloud): What on earth is going on? ... his riffs are tortuous, pedantic, and irony-free ... Of course, Amis delivers great access, taking us into train carriages and holiday homes and sick bays and bedrooms—but no further, not inside himself, at least not in the way he intended.
Though this book is categorized as a novel, there is little that, on the surface, appears fictional in British writer Martin Amis’ capacious 'novelized memoir,' Inside Story ... Amis’ account sprawls back and forth across decades and continents, shifting not only in time but also in tense and voice, interrupted by a sometimes overwhelming quantity of explicating footnotes. This intentional disregard for conventional storytelling further blurs the line between truth and imagination. The reader presumes that much of the content is true at heart, with specifics morphed by the passage of time and the untrustworthiness of memory ... Most readers will likely deem Inside Story more memoir than novel. It is certainly a sui generis work either way. Early on I christened it a 'kitchen sink' book (as in, 'everything but the') and had to laugh, about halfway in, when the fictional Amis actually 'poured the [drink] down the kitchen sink.' Yet whatever its hybrid status suggests, it regally caps Amis’ estimable literary career with cheeky candor and more than a touch of razzle-dazzle.
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.
It purports to be an autobiographical novel — 'life-writing,' Amis calls it — featuring a number of real people, many of them famous, along with others who’ve been lightly pseudonymed, yet it’s also, somehow, a vocational primer on how to write fiction, and an excellent one at that ... Near the end of Inside Story, Amis writes that nothing can prepare you for the deaths of your friends, parents, sisters, brothers and loved ones. 'Certainly not literature,' he writes, 'which is curiously incapable of helping you through the critical events of an average span.' He said something similar in Experience. I agreed with him, then. Then I read Inside Story. I cannot agree with him now. Now I cannot agree.
It’s like a soap opera. The black-and-white photos included in the book are fun to look at, in a magazine-y way; there’s Anna Wintour bebobbed beside Christopher Hitchens’s hat, and Hitchens looking surprisingly attractive while getting arrested in the ‘70s ... It’s quite the vortex, with reality and fiction and misapprehension crashing into each other at every turn ... It is conversation that shines in Amis’s prose ... I don’t know quite what it is. Amis has a way of putting things into conversation, or remembering an immortal phrase from some ordinary afternoon, that is quite difficult to pin down. It’s something too complicated for Martin Amis to understand about his own craft, so maybe it’s just unnameable. But it’s very human, and it’s worth something. Comic remembrance is Amis’s most successful mode, and Inside Story is best read as an addition to an established and expanding autofictional universe—the Martin Amis Story—rather than the late-career remembrances of a great novelist. It could be gender, his father, sexual insecurity, or something else, but whatever block has prevented Amis from realizing what he’s best at must be big, and belatedly breaking down. The novels aren’t great and the man is beyond the pale, but I’d like to say a word on his behalf—Martin makes me laugh.
... a giant octopus of a book spritzing out regular inky puffs of lit-world gossip, historical digressions, romantic confessions, and vintage score-settling, with footnotes. It is also, nominally, a guide on how to write ... His great Martin-y mind is still a thing to marvel at, all the clever wordplay and synaptic leaps, but it’s the tender, ordinary moments—watching old movies with a gently addled Bellow, eating Tex-Mex near the Houston hospital where 'Hitch' spent his last days—that stay.
If Henry James could characterize some 19th-century novels as 'loose, baggy monsters,' Inside Story is a grab-baggy one, an intermittently bracing but mostly exasperating (and familiar) miscellany from the most gifted English writer of his time. The book is full of sudden U-turns, long asides and copious footnotes ... Without ever coalescing, the book adds up (sort of) to a meditation on decay and dying and death, phenomena that Mr. Amis has witnessed, up close, in several of his life’s most important people ... The freshest, most harrowing material of Inside Story involves the illness and death of Christopher Hitchens, Mr. Amis’s friend since their shared tyro days on the New Statesman in the 1970s. On the pages that he occupies (too few of the total), 'the Hitch' will seem fully alive to anyone who ever knew or read or just YouTubed him ... The author tells us that 'plots demand constant attention,' but if Inside Story has one, it would seem derived from constant distraction ... Mr. Amis remains a peerless composer of phrases and paragraphs ... But these perfect little pictures seem to be off their hooks and scattered on the floor of what remains a construction site. Mr. Amis plays with the conceit of inviting readers into his book as if welcoming them to his actual house in Brooklyn...but it’s doubtful that many of them will feel at home here.
Generous is not a word that is often associated with Martin Amis. He’s usually depicted with a snarl. Yet from the start of this oblique, infuriating, ultimately rather moving book, he falls over himself to be hospitable … By the time he points you to your room and starts mumbling to his cat, even the most gracious guest might wonder where their host is going with this. Has he gone gaga? What does he want from me? There are several hints that this may be his last novel, that he hopes for a little indulgence in return … Much of Inside Story has a looping, repetitive, now-where-was-I? quality, Amis the father of the bride who has misplaced his spectacles and decided to ad-lib his speech … It would be easy to pan this novel. For much of it Amis sounds entitled and out of touch, a man plumping up empty pillows of thoughts. Lean on them and they deflate. But in the final reckoning it would be perverse to deny how much pleasure he has given over the past half century. In Inside Story he has gone through all his cupboards, giving us all that he has. Gratitude is the appropriate response. And a polite note, left for the morning — sorry, I found somewhere else to stay.
I have to report that the finished product is a considerably weirder proposition than I’d been anticipating. For one thing, Inside Story doesn’t seem entirely sure of what sort of book it is … The result doesn’t feel like a plucky raid on the no man’s land between fiction and non-fiction so much as like several books (a novel, a memoir, a primer on style) glued haphazardly together, with a few additional bits and bobs thrown in … It is like watching a self-indulgent director’s cut of a favourite movie: twice the length of the theatrical version, and half the fun … As for the new material, it is of startingly uneven quality … But that’s enough complaining. Even the best Amis (which this obviously isn’t) can sail close to the rambling and bombastic, and even the worst (which this also isn’t) is stuffed full of classy sentences, catchy riffs and excellent jokes. Among the false fronts and dead-ends of this frequently maddening book bask plenty of lusty pleasures.
From the outset, Inside Story provokes renewed wonder at Amis’s bottomless capacity for filial piety. Not content with one father to revere, Amis made a point of acquiring others … The trouble that Amis encounters in his attempt to fictionalise his friendship with Hitchens is that we know too much about him … There is the feeling of a friendship being performed rather than excavated … But the chief problem with Amis’s revivification of Hitchens is the lurking sense that something is missing from the effort … Amis himself once told the Independent that, ‘My friendship with the Hitch has always been perfectly cloudless. It is a love whose month is ever May.’ But the statement is so uncharacteristically and ostentatiously studded with clichés that it rises to a wry smirk. Did they experience no vicissitudes? … The unexpected gift of Inside Story comes under the heading of ‘How to Write’. Amis reliably provides synaptic pleasure whenever he pauses to give one of his didactic asides about the English language. It would be worth compiling these in a volume to stand alongside Kingsley’s The King’s English. In these moments, Amis’s fastidiousness becomes purely enjoyable.
... the book’s unsettled relationship with fictiveness doesn’t come across as a game or a get-out clause ... Amis doesn’t try too hard to persuade the reader that this is all of a seamless piece. Instead he adds more seams ... It’s hard to arrive at a measured view of all this. The barrage balloons of fame or notoriety following these people around keep getting in the way, and there’s always so much going on. Even after the book’s last four or five resolutions, Amis finds room for another argument with himself about Israel, two passages (one reprinted) on Elizabeth Jane Howard, and a post-postscript describing a dream about her dog. Another difficulty is the range of Martin Amises on offer. Here he’s a distinguished, thoroughly normcore man of letters, there he’s a feral, muscle-flexing cult writer, and there, there and there he’s in various in-between states ... He takes an unpretentious, anxious interest in holding the reader’s attention, and from time to time he can still get out from behind the rhetorical afflatus and come at you with sheer voice.
Inside Story is an arrogant and long-winded mess with a bad dose of the male gaze that even its supposed self-awareness can’t fix ... Amis apologises in advance for all the name dropping – everyone from Anthony Burgess to Anna Wintour makes an appearance – but the literary gossip is actually the fun part. (An aside about Larkin possibly being Amis’s father is particularly juicy.) ... What he ought to apologise for is subjecting us to long passages of dialogue, the point of which is always to make Martin Amis look clever ... the only times Inside Story make any impact is when it is straightforward and sentimental. Bellow’s descent into dementia in his 80s is movingly depicted ... Martin Amis is certainly a stylish writer. I just wish he’d stop trying to be so clever about it. But then, I suppose, he wouldn’t be Martin Amis.
Most storytellers, when confronted with an imperative to be fact-based, earn their keep from selection. They make us applaud the art of choosing which people, events, and scraps of dialogue to retain or pass over. Not Amis ... From the opening pages, Amis dons the mask of a voluble host [...] a ploy that might have curdled quickly if he did not flatter us with the sense of being feted at an all-night literary cocktail party, one at which an outrageous secret or two will turn up before dawn. The trick is more likely to succeed if the reader is an Amis fan in the first place.
Amis has packed more than comfortably fits between covers in this often moving, mostly entertaining and stimulating, but sometimes exhausting manifesto on love, sex, literature, politics, parenting, writing, aging, and mortality ... Even when this book doesn’t entirely cohere, Amis’ prose is always coherent, and often dazzling. High points include those portraits of his literary touchstones, even through sobering descriptions of their waning days ... Inside Story is at times overwhelming. Much of the material is not new, and much could have been cut. The irritatingly distracting footnotes are decidedly not reader-friendly. Redundancies from his earlier publications heighten the sense that we’re reading an anthology or a valedictory summing up. Or, perhaps, a greatest hits.
Amis has written a novel so interested in Amis that its cover—a black-and-white portrait of, you guessed it, Amis—feels less like a postmodern joke and more like a warning sign ... admittedly, Amis’s life has been rather eventful. He flits about from topic to topic ... much of Inside Story is regurgitated from Amis’s other work, especially his memoir Experience ... But if you thought that Amis, now 73, might look over his wild life with fresh eyes, you’d be laughably wrong. He especially hasn’t evolved when it comes to recognizing that women, too, might have brains and creative talent ... Amis is still able to charm (when he isn’t calling an old girlfriend 'tits on a stick'), but that charm is his only weapon, and the shine’s gone off over the past 40 years ... [one of those] lazy books, born of...novelists trotting out diluted versions of their greatest hits.
There are five parts to this 'nove'l (not counting the Preludial, an Interludial, and a Postludial, plus Afterthoughts and an addendum), and each part contains roughly four or five chapters. Within all of this are bouts of fiction and nonfiction and memoir. There are also photographs and long footnotes, which at times make reading a chore ... It’s hard to know what a young writer might glean from all this. Inside Story is one complicated compilation of writing. The word 'hodgepodge' comes to mind ... One of the many positive things one can say about Amis as a writer, besides his being smart and possessing a well-stocked mind, is that he loves deeply ... Fiction and nonfiction cover such similar territory that I found myself losing track of what it was that his student reader, or anyone, was supposed to learn from the shifting stance, happening sometimes in mid-scene, mid-flight ... the How to Write advice disappears for long stretches of pages, only to disjointedly rear its head here and there with grammatical lessons in tow—some more intriguing than others ... In a chapter titled Things Fiction Can’t Do, Amis lists 'Sex' at No. 2, after 'Dreams.' At that point I wanted to send him paper airplanes embossed with great sex scenes written by, I don’t know, Toni Morrison, James Salter, Jeanette Winterson, and James Baldwin. Marguerite Duras. Elena Ferrante, whom he dismisses here in an aside ... If you tire of 'Mart' and 'I,' Amis includes the short story Oktober, previously published in The New Yorker and plopped down here, nearly whole hog, in the middle of the book ... Amis is also uxorious, and so I first delighted in his heartfelt appreciation and deep regard for his beautiful and brilliant wife—I was happy for them! But many pages in I tired of their witty repartee, and wondered if they ever turned it off ... Still, the pages devoted to 'the principals' were fascinating and gutting. Amis’s devotion to Hitchens is very affecting, their friendship an everlasting love affair between two people who were meant to go through life together, their habits and language carefully cultivated by the shared time they’ve clocked. The patience Amis shows his hero, Bellow, as the Nobel laureate slips away into a demented fog, brought me to tears.
if the reward after reading Inside Story straight through, right up against the clock, is the knowledge that going back to read this uniquely remarkable . . . umm . . . book is the knowledge that it is there to be revisited in fitful bursts with the luxury of skipping, postponing, and doubling back, well, then, the sacrifice in the name of literature is worth the first slogging read. Because gems await ... can, on occasion, read like a more literate edition of People magazine. This is not a criticism. And Inside Story is certainly much more than that, fun though anything People-magazine-like can be. In addition to advice to writers, there is charming commentary on classic literature ... If it is tempting to quote and quote again from Inside Story, it is perhaps because of the riches within. Read this—what the hell—novel in fits and starts. Flip through the pages and find and remember the parts that will most challenge, inspire, delight. Find your own gems within Inside Story and treasure them.
I have three arguments with this book. Firstly, its length; it is a tome. The second and the third are perhaps broader arguments against a type of literature that has recently emerged. The new books are what seem to be journal entries that have not been shaped into a significant memoir, novel, or history. In this book, we learn a great deal about the main character’s sexuality and his famous friends. It purports to be a novel, but if it is a novel, it also has the author’s name as the main character and his friends. The third argument is a portrayal of women who are nothing more than sexual props for the male characters. As Martin unchivalrously recounts his sexual exploits to Christopher Hitchens, this reader cringes with embarrassment for the women so involved ... this reader hoped for something that held together a bit more.
The ‘palpable occlusion’ of Bellow’s dementia, his death at the age of eighty-nine, informs some of the novel’s most affecting passages ... Recollections of women are realised less gracefully. Those who populate Amis’s work—carers, redeemers, conduits, temptresses—wearily resign themselves to their fate, as must the reader. They are there, mainly, to connect the men with the men ... Nonetheless, Amis’s house style...has a way of drawing the reader in, making you an initiate. It carries the proceedings along even when you feel as if you might wish to get off. The hard bop, the brag and jive, the crotchety pugilism (always ducking and weaving): this is the joy and energy of Martin Amis, his loyal solicitude towards the reader.
The novel is too long, largely dull and should have been better edited. There is too much irritating name dropping...and verbiage ... The references to Trump are predictable and uninteresting. Confusingly, some names are changed, some are not ... The memoir, though, is fascinating ... There is much talk about sex, drink and cigarettes, but the best talk is about politics and death. When Bellow and Hitchens are centre-stage the 'novel' really comes to life. The mood darkens, the book grows up. The descriptions of Bellow’s decline into dementia and Hitchens’s battle with cancer are excellent. They are Martin Amis at his best, and that is very good indeed.
'Senescence' isn't quite the word for the stage the writers of the Baby Boom have reached. Sure, they may be collecting social security, the eldest of them in their mid-seventies, but the wonders of modern science may allow some another couple of decades of productivity. When the Reaper starts to come for the writer’s instrument, the first thing to go is flow, but that may not matter: fragments are in ... Inside Story, [Amis's] new novel, resets the equation. Amis will again retell his life story. He will mix fact and fiction, with the balance in favor of the former. Real names will be used for many of the characters, most of them famous writers. He will digress on politics, history, and literature at will. There will be writing instructions, the book itself framed as an encounter with a young writer who’s come to his door ... The opening passages of Inside Story are unpromising ... Yet there is, especially for the longtime reader of Amis, an irresistible charm at work ... The reader who submits to this charm will be rewarded ... Inside Story is unified by the force of Amis’s personality, which lives in his prose style. That was always where his redemption would be found.
He frets briefly over the 'morally treacherous ground' of auto-fiction, but leaps right in with a buoyant disdain for the genre’s quagmires and quicksands ... Over 520 pages, Inside Story gathers just about every weapon in the writer’s armoury into a Bumper Book of Mart—the grotesque, hyperbolic fiction; the tender tributes to friends and family; the corrosively witty takedowns; the shame-faced but swaggeringly funny avowals of youthful excess; the grandiose edicts on literature and politics; most of all, the restless circling around the idea, and the process, of death ... If you enjoy keeping company with Amis—his eye, his mind, his lexicon—Inside Story serves a lavish buffet. The book sprawls; it irritates; it may even outrage. But it exhilarates much more.
The style of Inside Story is, by and large, part of the message itself. There's a lot to it ... Ordinarily, all this would compete for pole position on the page but the sheer size of Amis' world and worldview makes space for everything. Wife and children are touchingly and tenderly shown off, Christopher Hitchens, in all his gregarious glory, is celebrated and mourned, and there's Amis' famous father, Kingsley Amis, to be accounted for ... The book is characterized by a lot-to-get-through and by the story moving around in multiple dimensions ... There's no spine-diving allowed for readers looking for a quick fix of Amis at his coltish best; photographs are scattered throughout ... The sense of time of Inside Story feels appealing slow and voluptuous, each section a pocket of spacetime with its own rules ... striking in its experimental cajoling of fact into fiction and its related questions – will it fit, does it matter, will this do? ... Where things don't quite add up, Amis fashions the untidy sum into a sort of punchline; where there aren't any punchlines, Amis makes the mess into his own cosmic joke. Inside Story is the grimoire of Martin Amis, giving heady clues to inner workings – of him, of life, and of love – while keeping plenty of the mystery.
Do I want to do this? The opening words—'Welcome! Do step in…'—unnerve. He introduces his cat, Spats. Do I want the one-time enfant terrible of the BritLit scene to be this chummy and chatty? Soon, in the margins, I’m scribbling 'His worst-ever book?' But later this changes to 'best-ever?' ... The absolute best of this book concerns not sex but death ... Amis has battled through Inside Story to declare it will probably be his 'last long novel' but I hope not.
... it’s another erratic, rollercoasting and frankly self-regarding memoir, notwithstanding that the names of some real people have been tweaked ... Narratively and chronologically it’s a mash-up, with Amis lurching between first and third person, and back and forth in time ... Round and round it goes for 520 pages, except in one respect. At the heart of the book is a linear march towards the big topic: death ... Amis paints a brilliant portrait of his friend as principled, entertaining, fiercely bright, and rather nicer than 'Little Keith' himself ... There are many memorable scenes—Amis, now 71 was never one to stint on melodrama—but Inside Story is too long, too repetitive, too lacking in cohesion and just too self-indulgent ... The late 20th century glittering intellectual bubble to which he did—and still does—belong is beginning to feel like a long way away.
Amis’ autobiographical novel finds him lamenting the inevitable decline of the intellect, the loss of those powers that nourish a rich interiority and fuel the creative life. This brilliant hybrid work is proof positive that his fears are ill-founded and premature ... He writes poignantly about Saul Bellow and the Nobel laureate’s slide into dementia. He explores the rich terrain of how matters of the heart (and loins) inform art, and shares an account of his dysfunctional yet riveting relationship with the truly memorable Phoebe Phelps. The nonlinear structure abounds with entertaining anecdotes ... Stylistically, Inside Story is most reminiscent of Dylan’s Chronicles, a master artist following his muse to create a genre-defying and career-defining work.
… consistently intelligent and compulsively readable … There is much…on offer: critical aperçus 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 … 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.
Amis writes with admiration and affection of encounters with Bellow, including the onset and deepening of the older writer's dementia. The material on Larkin, an intimate of Kingsley Amis’, delights in the poetry without ignoring the man's complex and sometimes unpleasant personal life. The remaining principal, Hitchens, is a constant presence and comes to dominate the book after he's diagnosed with cancer. The eloquence Amis displays here, the understated play of the two men's attachment, makes it possible to forgive the boys-clubbiness that often colors scenes with his closest friend. The book is almost everywhere wonderfully readable, rich in the familiar Amis pleasures of wit, insight, and well-formed anecdotes. As for how much those pleasures derive from real life or fiction, let’s award the benefit of the doubt to the artist behind both … An intriguing, often brilliant addition to a storied career.
