As his latest novel Inside Story is published, Martin Amis talks about cultural appropriation, surviving lockdown, and how he’s still chatting to Christopher Hitchens
The new novel by Martin Amis, Inside Story, which combines elements of memoir with fiction and in which Amis himself is the protagonist, features a pseudonymous ex-girlfriend called Julia, who complains about the kind of male-authored book in which it’s just “him going on”. Among the many drive-by assassinations featured here – at mention of the antisemitism espoused by Ezra Pound, John Wyndham and TS Eliot, for example, he summarises the trio as “two nutters and a monarchist” – the most enjoyable is the one Amis turns on himself. The novel is a revisitation of the author’s now familiar obsessions – Christopher Hitchens, his father, Kingsley; Larkin, Nabokov, Bellow, the New Statesman books desk of the mid-1970s. In it a series of women, including a fictionalised version of Amis’s wife, the writer Isabel Fonseca, tell him repeatedly: “I can’t believe you’re still going on about that.”
At 71, Amis, banging on still, remains highly entertaining, partly because his hangups coincide with universal anxieties and partly because the memoir aspect of the novel – if some of the names are real, much of the dialogue is invented – grounds his wilder impulses as a writer of fiction. A few years ago, Anne Enright took him to task for being all voice, and while Inside Story has a few gimmicky elements, including a central and (to my mind) entirely fabricated character named Phoebe Phelps – an ex-girlfriend who turns out to be that load-bearer of female meaning in Amis, an escort – it is a different beast to his other novels. Less schematic, more loose-limbed and rangy. We find the author fretting around the edges of his lifelong preoccupations, while wondering what precisely his own game has been. “What is the good of the novel?” asks Amis, the character. “What does it do, what is it for?” For that matter, he wonders, what is any of it for? Through the lenses of love, death and poetry, the novel attempts to find answers.
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