And I still think that’s an extraordinary liberty to take. I felt cramped and compromised-I was writing fiction about real people. In the book, you talk about autofiction, and it doesn’t feel like Knausgård or Amélie Nothomb, or those normally thought of as autofiction writers.ĪMIS: Perhaps it’s worth saying that I began this novel 18 years ago. RUSHDIE: It really is like nothing else I’ve read. I didn’t strive for originality, but I kept thinking, “I don’t think there’s another book that does this.” SALMAN RUSHDIE: Martin, this is a very unusual book.
Amis and Rushdie spoke this past July about cancel culture, the proper length of novels, and why authors might belong to a generation but never to a movement. You’ll get used to it”-when he introduces us to his pal Salman Rushdie, another literary superstar who has, in recent years, made his home in New York. Speaking of impressive friends, Amis acknowledges their presence early on-“Oh, and I apologize in advance for all the name-dropping. His interest in food, never great, had now declined into indifference, but he drank his one or two Johnnie Blacks and his half a bottle of red wine (‘sometimes more, never less’ was his rule), and he talked with undimmed fluency and humour for six or seven hours-to such effect that it would be a sin, he said, not to round it off with some cognac.” The Hitch, as he was known, was uniquely clever and cunning, and Amis writes beautifully on the subject of their close relationship, as when he describes a normal meal: “Lunch with the Hitch was still lunch with the Hitch, in the sense that you got there around one, and left there while the place was filling up for dinner. The main devastation of this book involves the death of Amis’s lifelong friend, the essayist and public intellectual Christopher Hitchens (Hitchens died in December 2011 after battling Stage 4 esophageal cancer). Inside Story shares with Amis’s greatest novels ( The Rachel Papers, London Fields, Money, Night Train-okay, really all 14 of them) his signature charming-rogue narrative style that manages to high- wire so brilliantly between the comedic and the emotionally calamitous. He has always been a provocateur the son of the celebrated novelist Kingsley Amis, he released his 2000 memoir Experience with a cover that showed him as a towheaded boy puffing on a cigarette. In truth, it’s a hybrid beast, a record of a real life written with all the freedom of fiction-its style, tactical ingenuity, and narrative leaps-while also moonlighting as an advice book to young writers and a literary critique of some of the key influences on Amis’s work (Saul Bellow and Philip Larkin are high up on the list of saints).Īt 70, Amis is still a writer who refuses to play it safe. But, as you might have guessed, Inside Story is no ordinary memoir. Amis cuts to the chase, then, telling us to take what we’d like. But with a memoir, the author welcomes the guest in and allows us to snoop around at our leisure. With an unauthorized biography, the reader becomes, whether we like it or not, a thief, breaking into a public figure’s home to root through their stuff and unearth their secrets. You are my reader.” (One imagines the good fortune of landing in New York City and crashing in the Cobble Hill brownstone that Amis and his wife, the writer Isabel Fonseca, shared before it was damaged in a fire in 2016.)
“Oh, don’t mention it- de nada,” Amis insists. In the prelude to Martin Amis’s latest book Inside Story, the author not only speaks directly to the reader, but warmly invites us into his home, offers us a drink, shares the latest tidbits about his wife and children who will be join- ing for dinner, and assures us that the upstairs bedroom is ours to enjoy.