 | |
| Author | Martin Amis |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Genre | Fiction |
| Publisher | Jonathan Cape |
Publication date | 24 September 2020 |
| ISBN | 978-0-593-31829-4 |
| 823/.914 21 | |
Inside Story is an autobiographical novel by the English author Martin Amis, published in 2020. It was Amis' final novel to be published before his death in 2023. [1]
The book revolves around a fictionalized account of Amis' relationship with three central figures who have died: Philip Larkin, Saul Bellow and Christopher Hitchens. Another central figure, Phoebe Phelps, is entirely fictional, and characterized by a mixture of hyper-sexuality and vulnerability reminiscent of previous female characters written by Amis (e.g. Nicola Six in London Fields , Gloria Prettyman in The Pregnant Widow ). [2] The novel begins with Amis welcoming the reader into his home. It is interspersed with sections in which Amis addresses the reader directly and discusses the art of writing. The final part of the novel describes the death of each of the three principal figures (Larkin, Bellow, Hitchens), followed by Amis himself bidding farewell to the reader.
Amis first attempted to write a second memoir (his first being Experience ) during his stay in Uruguay, between 2003 and 2006. [3] It was provisionally called Life. In 2005, having written about 100,000 words, he read the manuscript and decided it was "dead". [4] He eventually developed a 30-page section of it which he did like into The Pregnant Widow , and abandoned the project for several years. He was moved to try it again following the death of Christopher Hitchens: "when Christopher died I thought, 'Christ, they're all dead now'. I mean, Saul, Christopher and Philip Larkin, who is the other dominant figure. And I thought 'Well, that gives me a bit more freedom'". [3] The addition of Pheobe Phelps, a completely made-up character, afforded more space for the imagination. [5]
The book is divided into an introduction ('Preludial'), five parts (the last three called 'antepenultimate, 'penultimate', and 'ultimate'), and two postscripts ('Afterthought' and 'Addendum'). A short story, 'Oktober', is included between parts 2 and 3. Parts 1 and 4 include interludes in which Amis discusses writing.
Death is the main theme of the book. Amis reflects lengthily upon the death of Larkin, Bellow and Hitchens. He also visits the fictional character Phoebe Phelps in her crippled old age, and comments in a postscript on the death of his stepmother, Elizabeth Jane Howard. Amis also laments the approaching end of his writing life. He confesses that at seventy, writing another long fiction seems unlikely, and that he will probably write shorter works until he will eventually "shut up and read". [4]
Inside Story was for the most part favourably reviewed, though particular aspects of it were regularly critiqued. Several reviewers were baffled by the claim that it was a novel: "Martin Amis’s “Inside Story” contains so much autofiction, metafiction and just plain nonfiction (there’s an index) that one doesn’t know how to classify the book" [6] Others felt the novel was somewhat recycled, with several ideas and character types appearing in previous novels and essays. [2] [7] As in other Amis novels, critics praised his singular style: "The great lines come flying at you, as always, volleyed out of the cleft of the book and into the magic space beneath your raised eyebrows." [8] Kevin Power wrote that, as in Amis' best novels, Inside Story creates a feeling of intimacy with the reader. Recalling a line from Saul Bellow's Herzog - "Each man has his own batch of poems", Power summarizes the conundrum of the book's genre thus: "What is Inside Story? A novel? A memoir? Perhaps it’s simply an anthology – autumnal, summative – of Martin Amis’s poems". [7]
Sir Kingsley William Amis was an English novelist, poet, critic and teacher. He wrote more than 20 novels, six volumes of poetry, a memoir, short stories, radio and television scripts, and works of social and literary criticism. He is best known for satirical comedies such as Lucky Jim (1954), One Fat Englishman (1963), Ending Up (1974), Jake's Thing (1978) and The Old Devils (1986).
Saul Bellow was a Canadian–American writer. For his literary work, Bellow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the 1976 Nobel Prize for Literature, and the National Medal of Arts. He is the only writer to win the National Book Award for Fiction three times, and he received the National Book Foundation's lifetime Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 1990.
Sir Martin Louis Amis was an English novelist, essayist, memoirist, and screenwriter. He is best known for his novels Money (1984) and London Fields (1989). He received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his memoir Experience and was twice listed for the Booker Prize. Amis served as Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Manchester's Centre for New Writing from 2007 until 2011. In 2008, The Times named him one of the fifty greatest British writers since 1945.
Christopher Eric Hitchens was a British author and journalist who is widely regarded as one of the most influential atheists of the 20th and 21st centuries. Author of 18 books on faith, culture, politics, and literature, he was born and educated in Britain, graduating in the 1970s from Oxford. In the early 1980s, he emigrated to the United States and wrote for The Nation and Vanity Fair. Known as one of the four horsemen of New Atheism, he gained prominence as a columnist and speaker. His epistemological razor, which states that "what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence", is still of mark in philosophy and law.
Lucky Jim is a novel by Kingsley Amis, first published in 1954 by Victor Gollancz. It was Amis's first novel and won the 1955 Somerset Maugham Award for fiction. The novel follows the academic and romantic tribulations of the eponymous James (Jim) Dixon, a reluctant history lecturer at an unnamed provincial English university.
Henderson the Rain King is a 1959 novel by Saul Bellow. The book's blend of philosophical discourse and comic adventure has helped make it one of his more popular works.
Herzog is a 1964 novel by Saul Bellow, composed in part of letters from the protagonist Moses E. Herzog. It won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction and the Prix International. In 2005, Time magazine named it one of the 100 best novels in the English language since Time's founding in 1923.
James Douglas Graham Wood is an English literary critic, essayist and novelist.
James Martin Fenton is an English poet, journalist and literary critic. He is a former Oxford Professor of Poetry.
Ravelstein is Saul Bellow's final novel. Published in 2000, when Bellow was eighty-five years old, it received widespread critical acclaim. It tells the tale of a friendship between a university professor and a writer, and the complications that animate their erotic and intellectual attachments in the face of impending death. The novel is a roman à clef written in the form of a memoir. The narrator is in Paris with Abe Ravelstein, a renowned professor, and Nikki, his lover. Ravelstein, who is dying, asks the narrator to write a memoir about him after he dies. After his death, the narrator and his wife go on holiday to the Caribbean. The narrator catches a tropical disease and flies back to the United States to convalesce. Eventually, on recuperation, he decides to write the memoir.
The War Against Cliché (2001) is an anthology of essays, book reviews and literary criticism from the British author Martin Amis. The collection received the National Book Critics Circle award in 2001.
The Pregnant Widow is a novel by the English writer Martin Amis, published by Jonathan Cape on 4 February 2010. Its theme is the feminist revolution, which Amis sees as incomplete and bewildering for women, echoing the view of the 19th-century Russian writer, Alexander Herzen, that revolution is "a long night of chaos and desolation". The "pregnant widow", a phrase taken from Herzen's From the other shore (1848–1850), is the point at which the old order has given way, the new one not yet born. Amis said in 2007 that "consciousness is not revolutionised by the snap of a finger. And feminism, I reckon, is about halfway through its second trimester."
The Moronic Inferno: And Other Visits to America (1986) is a collection of non-fiction essays on the subject of America, by the British novelist Martin Amis.
Benjamin Taylor is an American writer whose work has appeared in a number of publications including The Atlantic, Harper's, Esquire, Bookforum, BOMB, the Los Angeles Times, Le Monde, The Georgia Review, Raritan Quarterly Review, Threepenny Review, Salmagundi, Provincetown Arts and The Reading Room. He is a founding member of the Graduate Writing Program faculty of The New School in New York City, and has also taught at Washington University in St. Louis, the Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y, Bennington College and Columbia University. He has served as Secretary of the Board of Trustees of PEN American Center, has been a fellow of the MacDowell Colony and was awarded the Iphigene Ochs Sulzberger Residency at Yaddo. A Trustee of the Edward F. Albee Foundation, Inc., he is also a Fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University and a Guggenheim Fellow for 2012 - 2013. Taylor's biography of Marcel Proust, Proust: The Search, was published in October 2015 by Yale University Press as part of its newly launched Yale Jewish Lives series.
Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million is a 2002 non-fiction book by British writer Martin Amis.
Arguably: Essays is a 2011 book by Christopher Hitchens, comprising 107 essays on a variety of political and cultural topics. These essays were previously published in The Atlantic, City Journal, Foreign Affairs, The Guardian, Newsweek, New Statesman, The New York Times Book Review, Slate, Times Literary Supplement, The Wall Street Journal, The Weekly Standard, The Wilson Quarterly, and Vanity Fair. Arguably also includes introductions that Hitchens wrote for new editions of several classic texts, such as Animal Farm and Our Man in Havana. Critics' reviews of the collection were largely positive.
Hitch-22: A Memoir is a memoir written by author and journalist Christopher Hitchens.
Sweet Tooth is a novel by the English writer Ian McEwan, published on 21 August 2012. It deals with the experiences of its protagonist, Serena Frome, during the early 1970s. After graduating from Cambridge she is recruited by MI5, and becomes involved in a covert programme to combat communism by infiltrating the intellectual world. When she becomes romantically involved with her mark, complications ensue.
The Anti-Death League is a 1966 novel by English author Kingsley Amis (1922–1995). Set in England, it follows the lives of characters working in and around a fictional British Army camp where a secret weapon is being tested.
The Rub of Time: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump: Essays and Reportage, 1994–2017 is a 2017 collection of non-fiction essays and criticism by the British author Martin Amis. It was his eighth nonfiction book and the final collection published during his lifetime.