September 12, 2001, was a hard day for many people around the world, but for Martin Amis, the celebrated English novelist and critic, it came bearing a surprise surplus of customized pain. Staring down what seemed like the sudden obsolescence of his life’s work (“the pointlessness of everything you’ve ever written and everything you’ll ever write”), Amis arrived at his London office that morning to find an unwelcome message on his answering machine. “I have something to tell you,” a long-estranged ex-girlfriend, Phoebe Phelps, announced. “It’s been bothering me for twenty-four years and I don’t see why it shouldn’t start bothering you.” When the doorbell rang a short while later, and someone handed him the promised communication, Amis, who had once betrayed Phelps with another woman, thought he had some idea of what lay in store.
He was mistaken. The handwritten letter didn’t call him a bastard or a scumbag, didn’t denounce him for his past transgressions or warn of a coming defamation campaign: it went much further than that. What it said, in effect, was that Martin Amis didn’t exist. The story went like this: Phoebe and Martin had planned to spend the evening of November 1, 1977, with Martin’s father, Kingsley, the famous comic novelist, whose suite of debilitating hangups and phobias included a fear of being alone in a house after dark. (His second wife was travelling in Greece at the time.) That afternoon, however, Martin, then twenty-eight years old and already the author of two acclaimed novels, received a frantic call from an old flame who was organizing a literary festival in the North of England. A headliner had dropped out at the last minute: could he fill the empty slot? Martin gallantly jumped on the next plane to Newcastle, leaving Phoebe on her own to take care of Kingsley, a reckless and compulsive womanizer two decades her senior. She cooked him dinner and accepted his offer of a stiff drink, and then, as her 2001 letter tells it, he “made a verbal pass” at her “that went on for half an hour.” Meanwhile, up north, Martin was putting the make on his ex.
But the night was just getting started. When Phoebe rebuffed Kingsley (“You’re Martin’s father!”), he came out with an extraordinary revelation: he wasn’t Martin’s father. In December, 1948, Kingsley and Hilly, his first wife, were spending the holiday season in a cottage near Oxford. On the twenty-third, the couple had a blowout argument, and Kingsley, at the time a university lecturer, promptly stormed off to go see a student he’d been sleeping with. Left alone for the holiday with a four-month-old baby (Martin’s brother) and desperate to exact revenge, Hilly summoned Philip Larkin, Kingsley’s best friend, who she knew had long had a crush on her. Larkin arrived in time for Christmas Day, and was still there when Kingsley sheepishly returned, on New Year’s Eve.
Although he sensed that something had happened between his wife and his friend, Kingsley was “frankly relieved because it sort of equalized the guilt,” Phelps said in her letter. Larkin left two days later, and after a tense interlude the Amis household returned more or less to normal. Then they discovered that Hilly was pregnant. The marriage had been chaste since November. Larkin, a solitary misanthrope who despised children (“with their shallow, violent eyes”), went to his death without knowing the truth. Kingsley had sworn Phelps to secrecy. She was telling Martin now only because his father—his pseudo-father—had died a few years earlier. “So bad luck, mate,” she signed off, with sardonic glee. “Rather confusing, no? Still—not the milkman!”
If all of this sounds suspiciously like the plot of one of Amis’s own black farces, that’s because, in some sense, it is. His new book, “Inside Story” (Knopf), in which we learn of Phelps’s epistolary I.E.D., is a novel that tells us it is “not loosely but fairly strictly autobiographical.” The narrator is called Martin Amis, and much of what he relates—about his life, his career, and his illustrious inner circle—is verifiably unmade-up. A triumvirate of real-life figures roams this elegiac volume. Christopher Hitchens, the journalist who was Amis’s oldest and closest friend, really did die, of esophageal cancer, in December, 2011; Saul Bellow, the novelist who became a kind of second father to Amis after they met, in the early nineteen-eighties, really did die, after a series of minor strokes, in April, 2005; and Philip Larkin really did die, also of esophageal cancer, in December, 1985. The three were given plenty of page time in Amis’s memoir, “Experience” (2000), to which “Inside Story” often feels like something of a sequel—or, at certain moments, a remake or a director’s cut—but a lot has happened in the twenty years since the first book appeared, and Amis clearly felt a duty, once again, to commemorate his departed comrades.
The difference between autofiction and a “loosely” autobiographical novel, broadly speaking, is the difference between Amis’s new book and one he published ten years ago, “The Pregnant Widow.” Both tell the story of a middle-aged baby boomer looking back on a formative erotic encounter that took place in the nineteen-seventies, during the heyday of the sexual revolution. In “The Pregnant Widow,” Keith Nearing, a literary critic and poet manqué whose biography bears more than a passing resemblance to that of Amis, believes that the largely disappointing trajectory of his later romantic life was determined by a long day in bed with a sexually ruthless partner, who, inverting the way these things had typically gone between men and women, used Keith as an object of gratification before brusquely casting him aside. In “Inside Story,” Martin Amis, or the character so named, suffers a similar fate at the hands of Phoebe Phelps. What distinguishes the two books is a matter not so much of candor as of the effect of candor. Neither makes any bones about being drawn closely from the author’s life, but, whereas “The Pregnant Widow” is tightly plotted and unfailingly on-theme, “Inside Story” is more digressive and centrifugal, its freewheeling structure, which flits among memories nonchronologically, suggestive of what remembering the past is actually like.
The newly permissive society of the nineteen-seventies has been an abiding obsession for Amis, who was born in 1949. When he first tackled the subject, in the string of acidulous sex comedies with which he opened his literary account—“The Rachel Papers” (1973), “Dead Babies” (1975), and “Success” (1978)—he was trying to make sense of the era’s rapidly shifting norms in real time. “There was a feeling that there were places to go that the English novel didn’t go, and was being too fastidious about,” he later remarked. These places weren’t just the bedroom and the lounge bar. Amis, it was widely thought, had a major style, poised and supple and bracingly responsive to the chaotic energies of modern urban life; it stood to reason that he should also have a major theme. As he grew older, he seemed to feel what Larkin’s poem “Church Going” calls “a hunger in himself to be more serious,” and, although his ampler novels of the next two decades contained plenty in the way of ribald humor, they also found him grappling with increasingly weighty subjects. In “Money” (1984), it was the ravages of capitalism; in “London Fields” (1989), ecological collapse; in “Time’s Arrow” (1991), the Holocaust.
These books established Amis as a literary giant of the late twentieth century, but he has struggled to find a foothold in the twenty-first. Of the five previous novels he has published since the turn of the millennium, three are set in the past—“House of Meetings” (2006) in Soviet Russia, “The Zone of Interest” (2014) in Nazi-occupied Poland, and “The Pregnant Widow” (2010) in nineteen-seventies Italy, where Keith and his friends are spending a summer vacation. These books are hardly lacking in ambition or accomplishment—“House of Meetings” has been especially underrated—but the retreat into history seemed a concerning sign from a writer who for much of his career thrived on an up-close relationship with what John Self, the hard-living adman narrator of “Money,” calls “the panting present.” The post-2000 novels that do take place in the here and now—“Yellow Dog” (2003) and “Lionel Asbo” (2012)—are satires on contemporary England in which Amis, a master of comic hyperbole, often found himself outdone by the culture he was seeking to burlesque. Both books created what Amis once said his books had typically failed to create: a consensus. And the consensus was distinctly unfavorable.
The embrace of autofiction in “Inside Story,” which Amis says will likely be his last full-length novel, could suggest a late-in-the-game bid for a piece of what Bellow once called “the real modern action,” a phrase that Amis likes to quote. A new generation of readers may think of him primarily as an aging controversialist, the maker of certain inflammatory comments about Islam or euthanasia, rather than as the author of some of the most daring comic novels of the past several decades. But he and his second wife, the writer Isabel Fonseca, moved to New York in 2011, and early on in the book he promises that it will have “a fair amount to say about what it’s like living in . . . America.” The book is addressed to an imagined young admirer (“You’ll be reading me every now and then at least until about 2080, weather permitting,” Amis predicts), who, on the first page, is welcomed to the author’s elegant Brooklyn town house and promptly plied with whisky. It’s a metaphor that Amis has long cherished. He once praised Nabokov—his joint favorite novelist, with Bellow—as “the dream host, always giving us on our visits his best chair and his best wine.” Dinner and drinks with Amis, world-renowned wit and raconteur, is certainly a tempting prospect; and it soon turns out that we’re not just there for the evening. After showing us around and introducing us to his cat, he presents us with our own set of keys, as if to prepare us for a roman à clef.
Amis’s turn to autofiction may have been spurred by the latest millennial trend, but it’s a narrative M.O. he’s been contemplating for some time. In a 1983 profile of Bellow for the London Observer, he argued that the “present phase of western literature is inescapably one of ‘higher autobiography.’ ” Authors like Bellow, he said, had grown weary of concocting stories, and were instead “increasingly committed to the private being.” Quoting this passage in “Experience,” he proposed that what lay behind higher autobiography was the assumption that in a world becoming “more and more mediated, the direct line to your own experience was the only thing you could trust.” That sounds a lot like today’s autofiction (the novelty of which some critics have tended to inflate), but one difference worth noting is that in the best works of recent autofiction the “private being” is itself profoundly and inescapably mediated (and recognized to be so), whether by Twitter or Xanax or the distorting lens of ideology. What makes, say, Ben Lerner such a powerful writer is the feeling you get from his books that the direct line to your own experience can’t be trusted. His protagonists tend to present themselves as bewildered frauds and loners whose contempt for society is matched only by their contempt for themselves.
The Amis of “Inside Story,” by contrast, is enviably well adjusted. No sooner have we taken a seat in front of the roaring fire than our host is telling us how much he loves his children, and vice versa. “You’re a very good father, Daddy,” his elder daughter apparently once said, when she was eight or nine, and who is he to deny it? “I’m incapable of embodying strictness,” he concedes. “You need genuine anger for that, and anger is something I almost never feel.” Instead, his “destined mood”—the mood that at a certain point in late middle age “congeals and solidifies and encysts itself” inside you—is one of slow-burning happiness, a buoyant wonder at the daily recurring miracle of existence. Some readers will find this all deplorably smug (a charge levelled at Amis on more than one occasion), but the self-pleased protagonist may be no more of a confection than the customary self-loathing one. “Modern consciousness has this great need to explode its own postures,” Bellow’s protagonist Moses Herzog says. “It throws shit on all pretensions.” To insist always on exposing your own pretensions, or those of others, is itself a form of pretense, Bellow suggests, and it is hard to go from “Herzog,” or “Inside Story,” to the current crop of millennial autofiction without suspecting that the latter’s self-flagellating tendencies betray more than a hint of sublimated self-regard.
The Martin Amis who greets us at the start of “Inside Story” is not the only version of the author circulating in the text. The sections on Amis’s relationship with Phoebe Phelps—the woman, we are told, who best encapsulates the “moronic inferno” of his love life in the nineteen-seventies—are narrated largely in a scolding third person, establishing a distance between the younger man and the older one telling his story. (In an interview, Amis has said that Phoebe is not a real person but, rather, “an anthology of various women.”) Young Amis is brash, ambitious, and effortlessly seductive—a portrait of the artist as a little shit—but after falling for Phoebe, a plain-speaking businesswoman seven years his senior, he finds himself out of his depth. This is part of her appeal. Spiky, vindictive, and unstable, Phoebe mocks him for his effete accent, flirts with other men, and imposes months-long “sexual terror-famines”; and Amis can’t seem to get enough. His sheer “carnal awe” soon blossoms into full-blown love, but love is something that Phoebe has come to the end of. When Amis pops the question, her answer is a hard pass. “I don’t want a husband,” she tells him. “This subject is now closed.”
“Experience” was movingly forthright about the thousand natural shocks that befell Amis in the mid-nineties—the collapse of his first marriage, the death of his father, the discovery that his cousin Lucy Partington, who’d been missing for more than twenty years, was a victim of the serial killer Frederick West—but it was also a work of considerable decorum and tact. Few people are likely to view “Inside Story” that way. A couple of hours after Martin first picks Phoebe up (on a London street corner), the two are already going at it. “What a very unexpected figure you have,” he drawls at the sight of her naked body. She replies, “That’s what all the men are forever saying. Tits on a stick.” Never one to settle for a hand-me-down locution, Amis says, “No . . . Tits on a wand.” Just wait until he gets a proper look at her vulva.
Young Amis is all yearning and reaching; the senior Amis, all getting and having. “In the mid-1990s Vogue magazine ran a feature called ‘The World’s Hundred Most Alluring Women’; and she came thirty-sixth,” he tells us of his wife, Elena. (Although the leading men in “Inside Story” appear as themselves, under their actual marquee names, the supporting cast of wives, children, and siblings are mostly rechristened, one of the ways in which the book gently insists on its margin of freedom from the real.) In France, where Elena is due to receive a literary prize for a nonfiction book about the Roma, Amis is struck with an idea for what he calls a smirk novel. “What’s a smirk novel?” Elena asks. A novel of “unalleviated self-congratulation,” he informs her, in which the author glories in his “literary fame and stupendous success with women.” For the title, he fancies a “Rousseauesque intonation”—“Confessions of a Sexually Irresistible Genius,” perhaps, or maybe “Seer and Stud: His Confessions.” As “Inside Story” wears on, and this sort of thing continues, it’s hard to shake the suspicion that the author is playing a taunting game of preëmption, puffing up his narrator so as to later tear him down.
When Phoebe’s letter arrives, about a third of the way through the book, it looks as though it’s going to pass like a wrecking ball through the gleaming palace of the Amis ego, inaugurating a story of existential free fall. In “Money,” John Self unravels as he discovers that his father is not Barry Self, the pub landlord who raised him, but Fat Vince, the pub’s bouncer. What comes of being told that your father is not the charismatic lady-killer Kingsley Amis but the girl-shy Eeyore Philip Larkin, who once described himself as looking like “an egg sculpted in lard, with goggles on”? In purely literary terms, Larkin is hardly a step down. Amis is one of the poet’s most sensitive and eloquent admirers, and the pages on him here represent a valuable supplement to an already ample body of criticism. The question of just how closely the young Larkin hewed to his father’s admiration of Nazi Germany, on the other hand, acquires an unsettling personal dimension in light of Phoebe’s letter. Soon after receiving it, Amis confesses to Elena that he’s getting “cold sweats just imagining the horror of being a Larkin male.”
