Name Droppers Extraordinaire

Inside Story: A Novel by Martin Amis.  Knopf.  545 pp. $28.82

Country Girl: A Memoir by Edna O’Brien.  Little, Brown.  368 pp. $27.94.

Inside Story is a novel because Martin Amis chooses to call it one.  It has novelistic sections, but the bulk of the book is a memoir of some writers who have been his good friends.   I have a vague memory from early in the book (I’ve been reading it for so long that it seems like weeks ago) that Amis at one point considered calling the book Life.  He could just as easily have called it Death, since that’s what he’s recounting most of the time.  He’s had a rich literary career, full of famous writers—his father was Kingsley Amis, his stepmother Elizabeth Jane Howard—but feels himself coming to the end of things.  He ain’t the only one.  The man is one year younger than I am.

The novelistic part of the book might be the most entrancing, however.  It primarily concerns a woman named Phoebe, whom he supposedly picked up at a phone booth one evening when he was young.  Amis has said somewhere or other that she’s a composite of several women he’s known; in any case, she’s a real zinger.  She almost immediately challenges him—“D’yo do a lot of this.  Trolling around street corners on the off-chance?”—but then, when she agrees to meet him, immediately takes control, making a reservation for dinner and having him to her place for drinks.  They’ve hardly taken a sip when she leads him off to the bedroom—at this point they’ve known each other for all of about ten minutes—and her performance in bed is marvelous, though he doesn’t describe it in detail (this book includes tips for writers, and one of them is to avoid describing sex explicitly[1].  He also advises the writer to avoid religion as a subject.  My whole career just went down the tubes).  After this unlikely beginning, she becomes a factor in his life for years to come.

In a way she is the most important person in the book, because it is she who tells him, well into their relationship, that Kingsley Amis told her he was not Martin’s biological father.  She delivers this news on September 12, 2001, a day when Martin—and the rest of the world—had something else on their minds.  Kingsley by that time is dead, and Martin’s only apparent recourse is to go to his mother and ask a rather awkward question.  He never reports that he does that.  But the issue of patrimony hangs over the entire novel.

Much of the memoir concerns Amis’ friendships with an older writer, Saul Bellow, and an exact contemporary, Christopher Hitchins.  He is also quite obsessed—as is Phoebe—with a friend of his father’s, the poet Philip Larkin, who emerges as perhaps the most vivid, and also the weirdest, of the people who inhabit the book.  Amis practically worships Bellow.  He considers him the greatest American novelist, a statement that threw me for a loop.  I haven’t read all of Bellow, in fact pretty much stopped with Humboldt’s Gift, my favorite of his books.  I had assumed, perhaps unfairly, that none of the later books could match that one.  I still don’t believe Bellow surpasses Faulkner, or Toni Morrison for that matter.  But it’s interesting that Amis thinks so.

I didn’t realize that Bellow suffered so seriously from Alzheimer’s at the end of his life, and was sad to discover that.  I suppose it’s sadder when the mind of a brilliant writer encounters that disease, but any Alzheimer’s patient is a sad one (and none will be sadder for me than my mother).  Amis is blindsided by the illness on one visit when Bellow keeps asking him the same question again and again.  I’ve been there.  It’s a difficult situation.

But the closer friendship was with Hitchins, a writer whom I don’t know at all.  Everyone who knew him raves about him as a person, and about his brilliance as a writer.  Amis goes on and on about the man, and what great company he was.  I do think that that friendship, and Amis’ long account of the man’s death, is the most moving thing in the book, and dominates the latter part of it.  Even the question of paternity—which does get resolved—doesn’t overshadow it.

I have a prejudice against Hitchins because he wrote a book entitled God Is Not Great.  It doesn’t bother me that someone is an atheist, and of course Hitchins is known as a contrarian and an antagonist.  I object to that title because it seems needlessly provocative and offensive; it’s fine to disagree with people, but you don’t need to spit in their face.  Also, the atheist arguments that so many of these writes espouse seem puerile to me (“How could a loving God allow blah blah blah.  Such arguments sound like sophomores in college).

Hitchins was apparently great company over lunch and dinners (meals which occupied a huge amount of his day), and could drink anyone under the table.  He had two whiskies before lunch, and a minimum half a bottle of wine with the meal.  He repeated the performance at dinner, which must have come fairly soon after lunch, because he would sit at both meals for hours, regaling people with conversation.  Previous to lunch, he had satisfied his daily requirement of producing a thousand printable words every day.  From then on it was all talk and booze.

Amis portrays him as a lover of life, and I’m not suggesting he wasn’t.  But he was a heavy smoker, and died a horrible death of esophageal cancer, which had spread to various parts of his body.  Nothing is more predictable than that a man who smoked and drank the way he did would die of cancer.  Yet he apparently didn’t stop, even in the face of that illness, and the people who surrounded him, including Amis and Hitchin’s wife, continued to attend these meals and to smoke themselves.  I’m reading a book about supposedly intelligent people who allegedly love life, and they’re systematically poisoning their bodies and are blotto half the time.  I drink beer, and like a little buzz at the end of the day.  But I don’t drink like this, and don’t think it’s intelligent—or life affirming—to live that way.

Amis’ account of Hitchins’ death is quite moving, and at least according to Amis he was kind to everyone around him and had a dignified passing.  I could have read an entire book about that friendship alone.

Amis sprinkled his book with chapters of writing tips—he was throwing everything into this book but the kitchen sink, a phrase he would disapprove of, since it’s a cliché—and that always seems a little strange to me.  Writing is a mystery that can’t be reduced to a set a rules, and there are great books that break every rule that Amis enumerates, and he knows it.  Besides, what are writing tips doing in a novel, which isn’t actually a novel but a memoir?  While he was at it, why didn’t he include some recipes and self-help tips?

I read Edna O’Brien’s memoir because she seemed so intelligent and lively in the Hemingway PBS special, and I’ve always admired her.  She is a stylist who seems completely unique, and doesn’t follow Martin Amis’ rules or anyone else’s.  I found her memoir often fascinating, but not terribly coherent; she seemed to take up her story wherever it was most interesting but left long stretches of her life out.  She does, however, have a hell of a cast of characters.  I found Amis to be a bit of a name dropper, but O’Brien, without blinking an eye, makes him look like a nobody.  She has a one-night stand with Robert Mitchum (who is much more talkative and literate than the strong silent types he always portrays), Paul McCartney drops by one night and sings lullabies to her children, and just when I thought she had topped Amis by far (I’ll call your Philip Roth and raise you one John Huston) she dropped the biggest name of all.  No memoir can match it.  She was good friends, and movie buddies, with Jackie O.

That settles it.  I’m not writing my memoirs.  I’ve got no names to drop.

[1] As I write this review, I’m reading Susanna Moore’s In the Cut, and she breaks that guideline in spectacular fashion.