"Writers write far more penetratingly than they live," the novelist Martin Amis noted in his 2000 memoir Experience. He continued: "Their novels show them at their very best, making a huge effort: stretched until they twang." Amis's autobiographical novel Inside Story, his most engaged and engaging book since Experience, finds this superb stylist at his best in one crucial sense: Amis has never written more invitingly. Early pages find the one-time enfant terrible offering readers tea as he tries to explain just what this curious book even is.
Somewhat haphazardly, Inside Story mashes together straight autobiography, advice on how to write, seemingly invented material about a youthful affair and potential family scandals, and essayistic passages about Amis's relationship with the writers Christopher Hitchens, his friend and contemporary; Saul Bellow, his prose hero; and Philip Larkin, who emerges as a contested father figure. The result is a ragged miscellany--Amis himself recommends reading it fitfully rather than in a binge--that nevertheless achieves a unity and power thanks to the qualities that have always delivered Amis's best work from his tendency toward formal incoherence.
Here, again, the pleasure rises from the shapely sharpness of the sentences; the devilishness of the play; the brilliance of the namedropping ("my pal Salman"). Amis revisits themes and anecdotes from across his career, not always with fresh insight, but the surprise here is he's become warmer and wiser, not quite the crank that he seemed to be aging into when, in the late aughts, he kept getting into what the Brits call "rows" over Islam. --Alan Scherstuhl, freelance writer and editor