Martin Amis's late friend Christopher Hitchens advised a student to seek him out for his superlative comedy. Roberto Bolaño considered him one of the best writers in English and counted The Information (1995), a comic novel, among his favorites. I can't ignore their recommendations. And there's less-than-average risk involved: Should I find myself unable to share their enthusiasms (and I have), still got to know them better. But Hitchens on literature is my least favorite Hitchens, as far as his tastes and judgments go. And Bolaño also liked Night Train, Amis's crime novel, which I thought good but not so distinct or haunting that I had to see, in the immediate future, what else he could do. In the wider literary world, he doesn't seem to be an eminence of our time, exactly, and he's not obscure, either. What I remember most clearly as it pertains to him and his work are some of his rather annoying thoughts on reading and writing, not for what he thinks but how he thinks, in curiously disputable fashion. Amis on Franz Kafka's The Trial: "Unfinished by him and unfinished by us." "Us"? ("The discerning" would be my guess for an appropriately haughty retort.) Another of his: "I don't want to write a sentence that any guy could have written." No writer can ensure that every single sentence is like no other in a language more than one person writes in. Yet his untenable aesthetic standard, applied to his reading, once led him to dismiss an entire body of work because he'd come across a cliché. One bad sentence and you're supplying the grocery store with thrillers. In which case every writer, ever, can be tossed out now, including Martin Amis. This is according to a writer in the Irish Times, who once dismissed Amis's work because of a bad sentence. It was a bad (overwritten) sentence. The musician's guitar will go blurt, the baller will get to his spot and hit nothing but air, and the writer will let a shoddy sentence slip into an otherwise sound page. I can't remember Amis's bad sentence. And I find it absurd to reject him - or any writer, for that matter - entirely on that basis. So Amis takes the Nabokov stance, I take the Borges stance, and I started The Information guardedly.
It's satire about a form of literary hell. As a young writer, Richard Tull gets his start writing "eye-catchingly vicious" book reviews. He uses the momentum to publish a couple of novels, two books so difficult readers can't decide whether they're good or not. His followup novels, written in the same uncompromising mode, go unpublished. Now in middle age, with a wife and two children, he makes a meager living cobbling together whatever relevant work he can: reviewing thick biographies of figures he deems inconsequential, reading and marking submissions at a self-publisher that offends his literary principles, and editing a moribund arts magazine called The Little Magazine. His marriage has gone cold, his wife Gina (the primary earner) setting a deadline for when he must end his literary career. He's balding, impotent and in awful shape, mentally and physically. Meanwhile, his "oldest and stupidest" friend, Gwyn Barry, has become a global publishing sensation with books Tull thinks are trash. He can't stand it. Plunging into what he acknowledges is madness, he sets out to "mess Gwyn up," as the back cover gently puts it. Amis proceeds to mess Tull up further, battering him relentlessly with fresh miseries and humiliations. I'm one of those readers who approaches all satire warily: more rage? Hope there's just cause. The narrator, Martin Amis, refers to Tull as an asshole and that alone wouldn't qualify. But his entry in the genre isn't too harsh or bleak or even unforgiving for consumption, for several reasons.
The Hitch hasn't disappointed me. And my view of Amis has changed. From what little I'd picked up beforehand, I didn't suspect he was particularly amusing at all. But The Information is, and in more than the usual one or two ways. His taste for pure silliness partially disarms me:
Of the pressures facing the successful novelist in the mid-1990s Richard Tull could not easily speak. He was too busy with the pressures facing the unsuccessful novelist in the mid-1990s - or the resurgent novelist, let's say (for now): the unproved novelist. Richard sat in Coach. His seat was non-aisle, non-window, and above all non-smoking. It was also non-wide and non-comfortable.
He can be risqué (or impure) in his ridiculousness:
[Richard] kissed the boys as often as he could. His knowledge told him that boys should be hugged and kissed by their fathers - that what fucked men up was not being hugged and kissed by their fathers. Richard had not been hugged and kissed by his father. So he told himself to regard his relationship with his sons as purely sexual.
Tull steps out of the shower. "As Richard dried himself his chest was suddenly remoistened by the thought that he was - and had long been - nuts in the Johnson." Capital "J" [sic?].
Passing observations: Tull, in distress, walking around with all ten fingertips on his forehead. Someone's "intense sneer of puzzlement." (Try it at home!) Eyes of a loving husband that "bulge uxoriously." A meal of "sauce-glued nachos" (one of two nacho japes).
He gets laughs in dialogue, builds them cumulatively and at paragraph-length...
He gets them with affection for the everyday comedy of family life. And irrepressible affection for his kids, even when Tull appears to be impatient with or distant from them, is what, arguably above all, complicates Amis's depiction of him. The second reason his novel of degradation and madness works: Tull isn't so bonkers that he can't enjoy his kids. In one scene, his son sings a simple song he made up about how much he likes his father and his father likes him. Tull is pleased but also criticizes his rhyming skills, inwardly. And he notes that his wife doesn't sing songs like that. And he remembers the time when, shocked and infuriated by the latest example of Gwyn Barry's scandalously good fortune, he overreacted to something his son had done and slapped him. He'd apologized repeatedly afterward. His son only replied: "we all have our bad days." Forgiveness like a salve. The book is primarily satire but Amis's humor isn't wholly corrosive. And, without jarring the reader, he can suddenly pause it for a genuinely tender or lovingly observed moment. It's satire with the customary exaggerations (that aren't always so exaggerated) as well as some unexpected nuances and light.
A third reason: Since Tull's torment is literary, the novel has the appeal of an insider's account of that world. One of the best lines of the book:
Like most young reviewers, Richard had come in hard. But instead of getting softer, more catholic, more forgiving (heading toward elderly impartiality and, beyond that, journey's end: a gurgling stupor of satisfaction with everything written) Richard had just got harder.
Similar fun is had with novel writing, literary agents, radio interviews, readings, signings and other common features of the life. But more than that, Amis, in Tull and Barry, has worthy targets. Something absent from the book is love of literature. Not ready or willing to call it love? Scared of your love? Then the conviction or the nebulous nagging feeling the reader's life would be poorer without the book, without the search for books, without the music of considered language, without penetrating thought, without the guide. Literature gives Tull nothing to relieve or make sense of his sufferings and he won't try his hand at something more pleasurable or profitable. His ego won't let him admit that he may be wrong, that he isn't as great as he somehow came to believe, that he isn't owed an audience and the briefcase full of cash. To figure out what the obstacle to progress is, one requires a measure of self-curiosity. But Tull is incurious about himself. Instead of using a literary method, finding his answer in reading or writing, Tull's true, inexorable descent as a writer begins when he steps outside the bounds of literature to sabotage his enemy (his only friend) by any means, from chicanery to outright physical violence (though without the modicum of courage it would take to commit the act himself). Any writer who can't fight out in the open honestly is no real writer. The fake writer is deluded or delusive or, most poisonously, what Lichtenberg refers to as a deluded deluder. For presuming to consider himself a real writer (in addition to doing things like scheming to get Barry's wife hooked on coke and/or pregnant with his child) Tull is demolished. And I nod sagely. To this unsympathetic reader and reviewer of biography, Amis says: And what if I wrote your biography? On the other side is Barry, who spends much time contemplating how his own biography will read when he's not perusing his stack of newspapers and magazines, looking for any mention of Gwyn Barry. Amis is equally incisive about a squalid literary success.
The novel prompts me to differentiate between a writer of splendid sentences - aesthetically pleasing, impressive, quotable - and a writer who uses language distinctly but is more of an acquired taste. The first belongs to a small group generally recognized for prose style. The second belongs to no group and engenders every response: laudatory, indifferent, derisive. Given his past remarks, I thought Martin Amis would be in the first group. And he is capable of writing sentences that would gain him entry:
Once, in the street, on an agitated April afternoon, on his way back from lunch with some travel editor in some transient trattoria, he had seen a city cyclone of junkmail - leaflike leaflets, flying flyers, circling circulars - and had nodded, and thought: me, my life.
From above. Imagine clouds as you would be seeing them for the first time: on your way in. Clouds would be telling you about the earth. About its cliffs, its mountains and plateaus, its pastures and snowfields. Clouds would be telling you about its sandbars and sandflats, and insistently telling you (seven-tenths of the time) about its oceans and their postures of turbulence and calm. From above, even though the beauty of the clouds had lost some of their innocence, their pristine aura of eternal unregardedness, because nearly everyone from below had seen them now, the sky was telling outsiders about the earth.
Mostly, however, at least in The Information, Amis is more of the second kind of writer. Okay, he writes countless sentences that could be mistaken for those of most any other writer. ("Gwyn awoke," "it was ten o'clock," etc.) He also writes countless sentences that aren't pretty, aren't mini-events in themselves, and that the average writer could conceivably write but wouldn't necessarily think to write: "We are agreed - come on: we are agreed - about beauty in the flesh," "He had a reputation as a. He made no secret of his love of. To him, the fairer." Non-standard, informal sentences, the change-up however minor: a peculiar rhythm, a surprising colon or semicolon, the slight modification provided by an adjective or an adverb, italics, rhyming. And there's one other aspect to his language that struck me and merits special attention. About a third of the way into the book, I began to notice one of his verbal tics:
There she stood, in light lipstick and light pancake and light woollen suit, holding her teacup in joined palms.
Kafka's beetle didn't just pretend to like lying around on unswept floors beneath items of disused and disregarded furniture. To paraphrase a critic who also knew about beetles and what they liked, Kafka's beetle took a beetle pleasure, a beetle solace, in all the darkness and the dust and the discards.
To get them through this debate, Richard had to smile. And if it hurts when you smile, you realize how often you smile when you don't want to - how often your smiles are smiles of pain. He knew from mirrors how his smiles made him look.
While it would always be true and fair to say that Richard felt like a cigarette, it would now be doubly true and fair to say it. He felt like a cigarette. And he felt like a cigarette.
Once I picked up on how frequently he repeats words and phrases, diminishing somewhat the overall effect it has rhetorically, I began counting and got 107 formulations like the above in about 200 pages. I've never encountered another writer who does it and it engenders every response from me. Gwyn Barry's language is easy enough to handle but "barbarically plain." Richard Tull's language causes headaches and sudden illnesses. And somewhere in the middle, in effect, is Martin Amis: jolting, arresting, fatiguing, abrading.
Throughout, he integrates material about the universe but I can't think of a strong connection it has to the main narrative. No one reflects on their existence. No one is an astrophysicist or astronomer. It furnishes some metaphors about the characters, though without a stronger connection it can seem like an arbitrary interpolation, applicable to any fiction about people and their microscopic lives, in the context of universal time. ("It might help if we knew all this. It might help if we felt all this.") It's another form of information so doesn't come off as pretentious, more like a failed attempt at approaching the fiction from another angle. And while I'm admitting to what I haven't picked up, I'm drawing a blank about his conception of that word which is the title of the book. It's used at least a dozen times in the novel, is emphasized to generate a force I never feel the impact of. As a result, I'm not quite sure of what to make of his ending.
Back on firm ground, I have misgivings about what constitutes the wisdom of the book, namely about men and women. His satirical portraits are mostly persuasive, with the exception of a woman who specializes in obscure women writers, which is what partly makes her a joke. And everything about her, including signs of mental instability and her eventual suicide, is a joke. Then there are asides like these:
All men are eternally confronted by this: other men, in blocs and sets. Equipped with an act, all men are confronted by an audience which might cheer or jeer or stay silent or yawn rancorously or just walk out - their verdict on your life performance.
And men attended only one school of acting (the method), that of the cool. That's men. That's men for you: hams of cool.
The bell rang ending lunchtime long ago. I have no act. Certain men have an act. It shows. As do women - certain women. And I'm not putting on a show for an audience every day of my life because, as Harold Bloom observes in Genius, it really means living two lives simultaneously, as performer and spectator, watching closely, guts knotted, forever sweating your own performance. Which ends in madness. The cool head is fostered offstage and permits consideration of facts the overheated head doesn't. For example: The crowd is unlikely to be of one opinion. (If it is, think: horror movie, authoritarian regime, dystopia.) And not all those opinions, plural, will be informed or sophisticated or generous. To believe otherwise is to let anyone who comes along twist you as he or she sees fit. The very fear of that crowd will warp you before you even face it.
"Poets got women. They didn't get anything else, and women sensed this; so they got women": It is a halting read, as I get lost shaping replies to this stuff.
A split. Another instance in which I'm not in agreement with Bolaño. Although The Information is almost totally different than Night Train: proof of Amis's range, of his refusal to settle. It's mixed but memorable.
