Experience: A Memoir

Experience: A Memoir

Talk Miramax Books, 406pp., $23.95

It's a cliché to call Martin Amis the bad boy of contemporary English letters, and what's more, as it happens, that's no longer true. For one thing, at 50, the explosively brilliant author of London Fields, Time's Arrow, and The Information is no longer a boy. And from the looks of this memoir -- in part a memory of his father, the celebrated comic novelist Kingsley Amis, in part a defense of his own life -- he is perhaps no longer quite so bad. Which might be good news or not, depending on your perspective.

In 1994 and 1995, Amis underwent a technicolor, wide-screen epic of a midlife crisis. Divorce (he has two young sons), remarriage, the death of his father -- all anguishing enough by themselves. But in that period, Amis also met his adult daugher for the first time. A beloved cousin who had disappeared 20 years before was revealed to have been a victim of a notoriously brutal serial killer. He broke with his longtime literary agent for a new firm, in the process losing a close friend, the agent's husband, writer Julian Barnes. Last, and not remotely least, all his teeth were pulled and part of his jaw replaced.

To further particularize Amis' special hell, every one of those events was gleefully, sneeringly, jeeringly recounted in the British press. In England, literary writers are far more celebrated than in America (imagine Liz Smith obsessing over the details of Don DeLillo's divorce). As heir to a famous father, companion from childhood to the rich and gifted, a successful novelist by age 24, good-looking, well-off, and, before his marriage, a notorious womanizer -- in other words, as an extremely annoying fellow -- Amis had long been a malice-inspiring target.

"'Well it's all experience,'" as Amis' father Kingsley wrote to a friend about his second divorce, "'though it's a pity there had to be so much of it.'"

Kingsley's ghost wanders throughout this memoir, which circles its two subjects amid many digressions, footnotes, and ellipses. In Amis' youth and childhood, Kingsley (author of Lucky Jim, that paradigm of academic comedies) was a famous wit and drinker, an enthusiastic adulterer, and a loving if cranky and neurotic father. But after his second divorce, Kingsley quickly aged into a misogynist right-wing curmudgeon, obese, alcoholic, and nearly dysfunctional from phobias, who required "dadsitting" since he was unable to be alone, even for short periods of time, until his death.

Martin writes about Kingsley with admiration, exasperation, and love. They stayed close throughout Kingsley's life, meeting at least twice a week for dinner or Sunday lunch with Martin's young sons, and the passages about Kingsley's death are tender and moving.

But in typical Amis style, this book can't help but lean toward the comic. Unabashed name-dropping produces first-rate anecdotes, like the New Yorker dinner where he quarrelled with his friend Salman Rushdie over the question of Samuel Beckett's prose (Rushdie was pro; Amis, con). "'Okay,'" Amis says. "'Quote me some. Oh I see. You can't.' No answer: Only the extreme hooded-eye treatment." When Amis obnoxiously persists ("by this stage Salman looked like a falcon staring through a venetian blind"), Rushdie finally invites him to take it outside. The idea of two renowned English writers in a fistfight over Beckett's prose is almost irresistibly cheering, but sad to say, the two made up instead.

On another occasion, Amis brings an old friend, the leftist writer Christopher Hitchens, to meet conservative Nobel-prize winner Saul Bellow, Amis' idol and mentor. All Amis asks of Hitchens is "no sinister balls," their youthful trope for "no vehement expression of a left-wing tendency." Comically, disastrously, Hitchens spends the entire dinner in a pro-Palestinian assault on the state of Israel.

Amis is at his best on the subject of his gruesome dental saga, which occupies many painful pages. The press misrepresented these woes in a particularly galling way (Amis was mocked for spending tens of thousands for "cosmetic surgery"), which must provide some fuel for his writerly fire. But there's more going on here. Amis writes almost nothing about his collapsed marriage: no explanation, no defense, and virtually no mention of his first wife. Instead, all his most ferocious angst, his bitterest wit, are concentrated on the dental surgery, which begins to sound quite a lot like the anguish of divorce. Amis writes about how he neglected his already bad teeth until the problems became catastrophic, until the whole lot must be wrenched out. He elaborates the process in excruciating, self-lacerating detail: the agony of the removal, the transitional facelessness, the awkward new set that must be got used to. When the teeth come out, "Really I was saying goodbye to myself," he writes. He never makes the divorce-dentistry connection explicit, but he doesn't need to; he simply exercises his best black talent, the energy that boils furiously and relentlessly out of his finest prose.

Elsewhere in the memoir, Amis' respectful tone can sometimes weary just a little. In certain passages he seems to write for someone, or to honor someone -- his cousin's bereaved family, a former Jerusalem mayor, or, repeatedly, Saul Bellow. Each of these graceful little tributes would be wonderfully suited to an awards banquet or a memorial service. In aggregate, they lie like a dentist's lead blanket on the narrative.

But the book is only strengthened and deepened by certain more deeply felt moments. Occasionally, unexpectedly, the narrative switches to the second person -- without warning, Amis addresses himself to "you." The "you" is clearly his new wife, Isabel Fonseca. These odd, daring shifts startle like sudden small explosions -- but something softer than explosions: like a tenderness bursting into bud. And it is as if achieving these small clear moments of love is partly what the memoir is for. As Amis observes wonderingly of his mother, somehow innocence meets experience and yet becomes innocence again. His marriage dies, father dies; but a new marriage and a new child are born. A face is rebuilt and becomes his face.