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Martin Amis is one of the most gifted and innovative writers of our time. With Experience, he discloses a private life every bit as unique and fascinating as his bestselling novels. The son of the great comic novelist Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis explores his relationship with this father and writes about the various crises of Kingsley's life. He also examines the life and legacy of his cousin, Lucy Partington, who was abducted and murdered by one of Britain’s most notorious serial killers. Experience also deconstructs the changing literary scene, including Amis' portraits of Saul Bellow, Salman Rushdie, Allan Bloom, Philip Larkin, and Robert Graves, among others. Not since Nabokov's Speak, Memory has such an implausible life been recorded by such an inimitable talent. Profound, witty, and ruthlessly honest, Experience is a literary event.… (more)
User reviews
It is all kinds of strange and inconsistent to have read this so early in the game: I'd only read Money, a few somewhat-forgotten chapters of London Fields and his dad's big, obvious book. Pretty entertaining for a book that uses most of its space to settle completely obscure scores: the idea of
I also think that Amis made a good choice when he decided that his memoir wasn't gonna be a chronological history but a freewheeling collection of loosely structured anecdotes. Considering the enormous amount of alcohol that's been consumed in Amis's vicinity, it's sort of hard to avoid comparing "Experience" to a particularly talky and entertaining drinking session, and I'm not sure Amis would argue with this comparison. He's both expansive and digressive throughout, and his use of footnotes to insert additional commentary only adds to this book's conversational tone. Amis is, after a fashion, rather suited to this literary form: his eye for detail is as sharp as ever, and the wry cynicism that has made it difficult for me to really love him as a novelist serves this material well. Among all the anecdotes, Amis does manage to touch on the big issues: there's the death of his father and of Ricardo Fonseca, an artist friend, the birth of his children, and the disappearance of Lucy Partington, a cousin who was later discovered to be one of Fred West's victims. And, as others have mentioned, there's an awful lot about his teeth, which are, apparently, almost as awful as Shane McGowan's. There are also a few things missing here. There are few details in "Experience" about Amis's own love affairs or about the business of writing. Indeed, it almost seems that Amis considers novel writing to be a day job that he'd rather not talk about when he's not at the office. Perhaps he's saving those subjects for his next memoir, to be written when he reaches appropriately advanced age, perhaps a decade or two from now.
I deducted a star for the jumpy narrative and excessive footnotes. (If it's good enough to make a footnote, it's good enough to be seamlessly incorporated into the story) (and brackets so I'm somewhat hoist on my own petard!)