Inside Story

Starred review from August 3, 2020
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 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 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.

Starred review from September 1, 2020
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. Drawing on a lifetime of literary and cultural influences, from his father, Kingsley, to family friend Philip Larkin, Amis muses on the process whereby life becomes art and, occasionally, vice versa. 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 about Vladimir Nabokov, Graham Greene, and Iris Murdoch as well as close friends Salmon Rushdie, Ian McEwan, and James Fenton. But the love of his life was his longtime wingman, Christopher Hitchens. Amis documents Hitch's brave and frequently humorous battle with esophageal cancer, shares memories of their younger days, and reflects on the loss of such a prodigious talent. Interspersed throughout are mini how-to-write essays, reminders of what a close and perceptive reader is Amis. 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.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Amis is a magnet for readers who love exceptional style and bold content, and this memoir disguised as a novel will be a particularly powerful draw.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)

October 30, 2020

Across 26 books, including 17 works of fiction, Amis has blazed a trail of unremitting brilliance. But for all the virtues of his writing--wit and irony foremost among them--heart has not been one of his singular virtues. Until this book, billed as a novel but really autobiography, with Amis looking back at his life from age 71. Amis here covers a lot of things, including what it is to write fiction and what is good writing and what's not. The heart of it, though, is Amis's sorting out of his relations to the four men who shaped his life and whose deaths he mourns and commemorates in moving detail: his father, Kingsley, a great comic novelist but highly problematic human being (i.e., he was a drunk, anti-Semite, and womanizer); Kingsley's longtime friend, poet Philip Larkin (equally problematic); Saul Bellow, Martin's model as a writer and surrogate father; and Martin's same-age close friend, contrarian Christopher Hitchens. This book is finally about growing older, but from the evidence of it, Amis has in the process also grown more human. He's still witty, but there's bottom to him. VERDICT Amis is a proven winner in the literary circle, and this may be his best book to date. --David Keymer, Cleveland

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from August 1, 2020
Amis surveys a long, productive life in a deeply engaging "novelised autobiography" that focuses on love and death. "The book," he writes in a long preface, "is about a life, my own, so it won't read like a novel." So, prepare to wonder what is fact and what is "novelised." The new volume, which runs from the 1970s to 2019, overlaps Amis' memoir, Experience (2000), which went up to late 1999. It resembles Sebald's influential genre-straddlers with the inclusion of photos, like those of its "three principals," Saul Bellow, Philip Larkin, and Christopher Hitchens, whose talents are celebrated and whose deaths are touchingly portrayed. Amis marks historical events and makes "essayistic detours." He encapsulates "the erotic picaresque of [his] early adulthood" in the apparently fictional Phoebe Phelps, one of several strong women in a male-heavy work. Her saga runs from a first meeting in 1976 through a four-year relationship with less sex and more tedium than one might expect, several sly narrative twists, and a last visit more than 40 years later. 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.

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