NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST
“[A] charismatic compound of fact and fiction.... Includes some of Amis’s best writing to date.” —The New York Times
“Warm, generous and deeply moving, whether on the subject of fatherhood, love or friendship.... The finest work he’s produced.” —The Observer
“His most beautiful book.” —New York Times Book Review
“A five-course meal of a book.... It’s a memoir tucked inside an endearingly discursive novel.” —Vanity Fair, “The Fifteen Best Books of 2020”
“Brilliant ... Abounds with entertaining anecdotes ... [Amis] explores the rich terrain of how matters of the heart (and loins) inform art ... Stylistically, Inside Story is most reminiscent of Dylan’s Chronicles, a master artist following his muse to create a genre-defying and career-defining work.” —Booklist (starred review)
“Amis' newest novel [is] unlike anything Amis has written. It's unlike anything anyone has written.... Inside Story is the 71-year old writer’s death-haunted ode to life.” —Esquire
“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 ... and there are good jokes, too.... [Amis] wants to lance the moment with language, and he wants his language to live forever.” —The Atlantic
“Inside Story is a book of gloriously unchecked preoccupations: sex, Saul Bellow, literature, sex, Philip Larkin, anti-Semitism, aging, smoking, sex, Christopher Hitchens, terrorism, suicide. Did I mention sex? ... Fans will revel in the excess and piling up of Amis’s sentences, which are both wired and ruthlessly controlled.” —Vogue
“This once-young buck of the British literary scene cannot help but look death, mortality, and the meaning of life squarely in the face. And he does so with a singular panache and much offhanded wit.... [Inside Story] caps Amis’s estimable literary career with cheeky candor and more than a touch of razzle-dazzle.” —BookPage
★ 08/03/2020
Amis (The Zone of Interest) frames his consistently intelligent and compulsively readable “novelized autobiography,” as he calls it, as a guide to writers. Along the way, the author crafts a dynamic series of paeans to three of his heroes—Saul Bellow, who became a kind of father figure; Christopher Hitchens, one of his best friends; and Philip Larkin, his father, Kingsley’s, lifelong friend—amid a wide-ranging survey of his own life. The book opens in 2016 with Amis living in Brooklyn with his wife, writer Isabel Fonseca, contemplating his own mortality, with a meta introduction to his reader (whom he imagines as an aspiring writer), but quickly turns to the lives of Bellow, Hitchens, and Larkin, and, eventually, their deaths: Bellow slips into dementia. Hitchens fights a losing battle with cancer. Larkin dies of cancer as well. Amis also relates the fascinating story of an early love of his, Phoebe Phelps, an enigmatic figure whom he admits was the inspiration for his first novel, The Rachel Papers, and whom he remained obsessed with for decades. There is much else on offer: critical aperçus and insightful digressions on Austen, Conrad, Nabokov, and other writers; an elegant gloss on the history of the modern novel; and opinions on Hitler, the Soviet Union, 9/11, the refugee crisis, and President Trump (“the high-end bingo caller who occupies pole position in the GOP”). Amis again proves himself to be as savvy a thinker as he is a writer as he applies his insight and curiosity as a novelist to this stylish and genuine account of his development as a writer. The result reaches the heights of his finest work. (Oct.)
10/30/2020
Across 26 books, including 17 works of fiction, Amis has blazed a trail of unremitting brilliance. But for all the virtues of his writing—wit and irony foremost among them—heart has not been one of his singular virtues. Until this book, billed as a novel but really autobiography, with Amis looking back at his life from age 71. Amis here covers a lot of things, including what it is to write fiction and what is good writing and what's not. The heart of it, though, is Amis's sorting out of his relations to the four men who shaped his life and whose deaths he mourns and commemorates in moving detail: his father, Kingsley, a great comic novelist but highly problematic human being (i.e., he was a drunk, anti-Semite, and womanizer); Kingsley's longtime friend, poet Philip Larkin (equally problematic); Saul Bellow, Martin's model as a writer and surrogate father; and Martin's same-age close friend, contrarian Christopher Hitchens. This book is finally about growing older, but from the evidence of it, Amis has in the process also grown more human. He's still witty, but there's bottom to him. VERDICT Amis is a proven winner in the literary circle, and this may be his best book to date. —David Keymer, Cleveland
★ 2020-07-14
Amis surveys a long, productive life in a deeply engaging “novelised autobiography” that focuses on love and death.
“The book,” he writes in a long preface, “is about a life, my own, so it won’t read like a novel.” So, prepare to wonder what is fact and what is “novelised.” The new volume, which runs from the 1970s to 2019, overlaps Amis' memoir, Experience (2000), which went up to late 1999. It resembles Sebald’s influential genre-straddlers with the inclusion of photos, like those of its “three principals,” Saul Bellow, Philip Larkin, and Christopher Hitchens, whose talents are celebrated and whose deaths are touchingly portrayed. Amis marks historical events and makes “essayistic detours.” He encapsulates “the erotic picaresque of [his] early adulthood” in the apparently fictional Phoebe Phelps, one of several strong women in a male-heavy work. Her saga runs from a first meeting in 1976 through a four-year relationship with less sex and more tedium than one might expect, several sly narrative twists, and a last visit more than 40 years later. Amis writes with admiration and affection of encounters with Bellow, including the onset and deepening of the older writer's dementia. The material on Larkin, an intimate of Kingsley Amis’, delights in the poetry without ignoring the man's complex and sometimes unpleasant personal life. The remaining principal, Hitchens, is a constant presence and comes to dominate the book after he's diagnosed with cancer. The eloquence Amis displays here, the understated play of the two men's attachment, makes it possible to forgive the boys-clubbiness that often colors scenes with his closest friend. The book is almost everywhere wonderfully readable, rich in the familiar Amis pleasures of wit, insight, and well-formed anecdotes. As for how much those pleasures derive from real life or fiction, let’s award the benefit of the doubt to the artist behind both.
An intriguing, often brilliant addition to a storied career.