The Martin Amis Experience
Experience: A Memoir; Martin Amis
In which Martin Amis lives in a whirlwind of literary glitterari and fixates on his father, his teeth and little else.
Martin Amis inhabits an entirely different, bizarro universe. Instead of being hemmed away into boring, poorly populated university lectures and back-issues of The Gawker, Martin's authors are celebrated icons. They even get pages in the tabloids! The public cares! No one's even heard of LiLo yet! And in this world, Amis is a notoriously undependable guide.
Experience stutters from event to event, reading like a senile stream of conscience: a life-changing, monumental event here (hello death of EXTRAORDINARILY IMPORTANT FATHER), a minute detail from twenty years past (I like buttons), and then another disorienting forward charge into the future (And then my son was born!). Without the usual milestones of background information and a sensible timeline, it is hard to put Amis' anecdotes into anything resembling a larger frame. He weighs almost every issue equally, which distorts the narrative, with trials of oral surgery ballooning up and looming as large (if not larger in sheer amount of paper) with the death of a father. It reads a bit like a Ralph Wiggum narrative, which is frustrating because it's written with such meticulous and dedicated craft (with of course the obligatory acres of meta-writing on, what else, the art of writing*).
Similarly, Amis waxes poetic (uncomfortably poetic, especially since I was expecting the memoirs of a snaggle-toothed, venom-penned shrew) about the usual - children, literature, family - yet inhumanly glides over the most blatantly emotional periods of his life. Maybe it's a difference in stiff upper lips, but Amis takes news of his family's dissolution and his father's constant infidelity with all the detachment of a biographer writing a retrospective 50 years in the future. So while Experience is an artfully articulate and at times viciously funny peek into the secret lives of literary boobs, the timeline is so jumbled and the emotional timbre is so warped and unfamiliar that it becomes difficult to relate to in any meaningful sense.
*Amis has cornered the market on metawriting on metawriting
In which Martin Amis lives in a whirlwind of literary glitterari and fixates on his father, his teeth and little else.
Martin Amis inhabits an entirely different, bizarro universe. Instead of being hemmed away into boring, poorly populated university lectures and back-issues of The Gawker, Martin's authors are celebrated icons. They even get pages in the tabloids! The public cares! No one's even heard of LiLo yet! And in this world, Amis is a notoriously undependable guide.
Experience stutters from event to event, reading like a senile stream of conscience: a life-changing, monumental event here (hello death of EXTRAORDINARILY IMPORTANT FATHER), a minute detail from twenty years past (I like buttons), and then another disorienting forward charge into the future (And then my son was born!). Without the usual milestones of background information and a sensible timeline, it is hard to put Amis' anecdotes into anything resembling a larger frame. He weighs almost every issue equally, which distorts the narrative, with trials of oral surgery ballooning up and looming as large (if not larger in sheer amount of paper) with the death of a father. It reads a bit like a Ralph Wiggum narrative, which is frustrating because it's written with such meticulous and dedicated craft (with of course the obligatory acres of meta-writing on, what else, the art of writing*).
Similarly, Amis waxes poetic (uncomfortably poetic, especially since I was expecting the memoirs of a snaggle-toothed, venom-penned shrew) about the usual - children, literature, family - yet inhumanly glides over the most blatantly emotional periods of his life. Maybe it's a difference in stiff upper lips, but Amis takes news of his family's dissolution and his father's constant infidelity with all the detachment of a biographer writing a retrospective 50 years in the future. So while Experience is an artfully articulate and at times viciously funny peek into the secret lives of literary boobs, the timeline is so jumbled and the emotional timbre is so warped and unfamiliar that it becomes difficult to relate to in any meaningful sense.
*Amis has cornered the market on metawriting on metawriting
