Martin Amis

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Energy and Entropy

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SOURCE: "Energy and Entropy," in New Statesman & Society, March 24, 1995, p. 24.

[In the following review, Kaveney asserts that The Information is a "generic" Amis novel, and claims the book to be "the overpriced sale of second-hand shoddy."]

Nervous energy is not enough. Martin Amis has built a successful career on, and out of, fear of failure. His interest in that fear, like ours, is wearing thin. Sexual rebuffs in The Rachel Papers, having your credit cards cut up in smart New York restaurants in Money—these were intense moments because they are anti-sacraments, outward signs of an entire gracelessness thus far concealed.

The vehemence of this self-distrust underlay the obsession with bodily functions, which critics called Swiftian. Admit, pre-emptively, acne and dandruff, and people might stop at criticising your skin and your hair. Self-distrust also helped Amis produce interesting, if self-serving, responses to feminist critiques of male attitudes. Admit to this sin or that and you might get to plea-bargain the rest. He could be attacked for getting it wrong, but not for dodging the issues.

This was made easier by his interest in formal game-playing, derived from Nabokov, and his use of unreliable narration as the literary equivalent of dodgy alibis—I wasn't there, it wasn't me who did it, and I was drunk at the time. The crooked sexist slob of his best novel (Money) may be called Self, but there is a character called Martin Amis in it who wanders around virtuously observing; so that's all right, then.

The Information is the first clear example of the generic Martin Amis novel. It is an auto-pastiche in which old themes are endlessly enumerated to exorcise once and for all the demon of failure. Like Success and London Fields, its protagonist is split. Failed novelist Richard Tull has demonic Others in the shape of the glib, successful Gwyn Barry and demented criminal Steve Cousins. As in London Fields, the narrative is periodically broken off so that Amis can tell us about the astrophysics books he has been reading—an updating and inversion of the pathetic fallacy. If there is chaos and entropy in the life of Tull, it's because the universe is going to fall apart like a used tissue.

Richard, given an ultimatum by his wife about the sacrifices she has made so that he can write his increasingly unpublishable and over-technical novels, decides to punish his oldest and best friend Gwyn for success. Each attempt goes as wrong as Wile E Coyote's efforts to catch the Road Runner. Indeed, Richard inadvertently ensures Gwyn's greatest triumph, a major literary prize. Meanwhile, we realise that Gwyn has come to hate Richard and enjoys humiliating him. Gwyn too over-reaches and accidentally saves Richard from the worst consequences of his own actions.

This is an extremely formal plot, which must at some point have been laid out in Amis' head like a diagram. However, if you are writing a formal plot, whether tragedy or farce or this odd mixture of both, the form must impose disciplines. A sonnet, if you want to write one, had better have about 14 lines that (more or less) rhyme. The faults of The Information lie in just this area of high technique.

Specifically, Richard tries to ensure that Gwyn does not get the Profundity Requital award (Amis' ear for awful American pomposity, and villain's demotic, has deserted him) by privately telling each of the impeccably liberal judges lies about Gwyn's political attitudes. Unfortunately, the sexual harassment expert he tells about Gwyn's seduction of college servants is turned on by the darkly passionate heroes of Harlequin romances … One of the difficulties of comedy is knowing which jokes will run and run. When Amis repeats this gag with racism and public hanging, we learn—as he should have done—that this is not one of them. It would not have worked even from his father, who at least believes that all liberals are hypocrites.

Part of the plot turns on the fact that Gwyn's upper-class wife Demi has a trick of speech. Rather than do the old-fashioned thing of showing this in action over many scenes, Amis tells us about it. When Chekhov said you should not fire a gun in the third act unless you had hung it on the wall in the first, he did not mean that you should surround the gun with flashing neon lights and a sign that says Ceci n'est pas un fusil. But Chekhov, unlike Amis, did not have postmodern technique available as an excuse for laziness.

Amis has chosen to lack such old-fashioned virtues, and it's this lack that lands him in so much new-fangled political hot water. Demi is a sexist stereotype not because she sleeps with black coke dealers, but because she does so without any hint of inner life. Martin Amis will be accused of treating her as a sex object because he chose to treat her merely as a plot function. None of the women ever gets to be more than a funny voice, or a sexy one. It's not a matter of asking Amis to place Demi and the rest centre stage; just that, without some depth, their role in motivating the men—in whom he is more interested—is arbitrary.

Of course, there are splendid things here as well. Richard's relationship with his twin sons is admirably touching. Typically, one of them has a mild handicap in respect of understanding narrative. Richard writes short notices of vast biographies, and the running jokes about the horrors of literary life are funny. The descriptions of Richard's and Gwyn's books make one amusedly glad to be reading any other novel—even this one.

This is the novel Amis always feared he would eventually write: one in which the tricks and gambits that had always served him become threadbare, while those traditional virtues to which he had paid lip-service as reviewer become apparent by their absence. The Information is a very busy book, skipping between joke American publishers and joke pub quiz machines and joke HIV-positive punkettes. The nervous energy has to go somewhere and it is no longer going into technical control. No reviewer should blame Amis for making a lot of money. We are entitled to express concern that a brilliant career has come to this: the overpriced sale of second-hand shoddy.

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Martin Amis: Between the Influences of Bellow and Nabokov

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