Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.914
EAN: 9780375726835
Edition: 1st Vintage International ed
ISBN: 0375726837
Label: Vintage
Languages: Array
Manufacturer: Vintage
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 432
Publication Date: 2001-06-12
Publisher: Vintage
Release Date: 2001-06-12
Studio: Vintage

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.
"We live in the age of mass loquacity," Martin Amis writes by way of introduction to Experience, thereby placing the reader in a curious bind. How to feel about a memoir by a writer who deplores our current enthusiasm for memoirs? Can such a public appeal for private life be convincing? The son of misanthropic comic novelist Kingsley Amis, Amis the Younger's life story is "a literary curiosity," he tells us, "which is also just another instance of a father and a son." He's spent his whole life bathed in the dubious yellow glow of celebrity, from the cries of nepotism surrounding his first novel's publication to the bizarre tempest in a teapot involving the size of the advance for The Information, his choice of literary agent, and of course that famously expensive set of new teeth.

Here, finally, is Amis's chance to set matters straight--and if you're looking for his take on these controversies, you won't be disappointed. In fact, you should turn right away to the end of the book. After all, how many memoirs have indices--and how many indices are this entertaining? In addition to movers and shakers like "Travolta, John," "Brown, Tina," and "Bellow, Saul," one finds an extended entry for "dental problems," which includes "of animals," "sexual potency and," "Bellow on," and--more ominously--"tumour."

Yet it's as "a clear view of the geography of a writer's mind," not as a celebrity tell-all, that Experience succeeds. Organized not by chronology but by a strange thematic schema all Amis's own, this messy, tangential book moves backward and forward in time and comes studded with footnotes and interspersed with schoolboy epistles. As a result, it's much truer to the actual texture of experience than anything more "novelistic" could possibly be. Amis's charming, quarrelsome, almost entirely helpless father; the tragic disappearance of his cousin, Lucy Partington; the daughter discovered only as an adult; those teeth--the narrative circles around these events and personages in prose as virtuoso but often less chilly than that found in his novels. This is memoir as anatomy of obsessions, and in the most profound way, it illuminates the source and power of Amis's remarkable work. --Mary Park

Customer Rating:
Summary: and the implied loss of innocence
Comment: How many opportunities is one likely to have to read a well-regarded literary author's memoirs about (among other things) his relationship with his well-regarded author father? (Has either Susan or Benjamin Cheever even come close to matching their father's achievemtents?) It was fascinating to read about this father-son relationship from the son's point of view. While Martin clearly admired Kingsley, he was not blind to his father's weaknesses (both as a writer and as a husband); and he was fully aware of their differences on political and gender issues.

But these memoirs cover Martin Amis's life up to the present, the present being several years after his father's death. While Kingsley is a key figure, he is not the only relationship that gets examined. (His portraits of his mother, Elizabeth Jane Howard, Philip Larkin, and Saul Bellow are especially vivid.) And although this is not a grim book, much of what Amis recounts is about profound losses--his own loss of innocence due to childhood sexual abuse, the loss incurred when his parents divorced, the death of a cousin at the hands of a serial killer, and the loss of friendships (especially Julian Barnes's) from the furor surrounding the publication of Amis's book, THE INFORMATION. Implied losses, delicately mentioned but never examined, are those of his relationships with the women in his life.

Toward the end of the book, Amis writes, "My life, it seems to me is ridiculously shapeless. I know what makes a good narrative, and lives don't have much of that--pattern and balance, form, completion, commensurateness...but the only shape that life dependably exhibits is that of tragedy." (p. 361) It is tragedy that Amis can accept but courageously, if futilely, seems to want to protect his own children from.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: The fascinating Messrs Amis
Comment: "Experience" is the finest memoir I've read in a dozen years. It has a post-modern format with a variety of voice tones that range from witty to profound and poetic. Amis's narrative jumps back and forth in time and deals with his extended family and distinguished friends, among whom are: Philip Larkin, Saul Bellow, Christopher Hitchens, Salman Rushdie, Allan Bloom and Robert Graves. The portrait of his father, Kingsley Amis, a hard-drinking, woman lover, dominates the book. The memoir, written by a man of great charm, held me absorbed from first page to last.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: 90 Percent Proof
Comment: I gave Amis's memoir 5 stars because I have to---it is that good. ("Pale as a Sex Pistol," is not nearly his best, and it's very, very good.) And, admittedly, I was nearly finished with the book before it hit me that Amis almost had me convinced that chronic alcoholism can actually put a spring in one's step if you only had a sense of humor!

The deepest impulse behind this memoir is to protect his father's image and reputation. It was a preemptive strike against future excavations by lesser sorts who write biographies, are too pc, etc., into Kingsley Amis's life.

Martin Amis is very clear that he was concerned about his father's reputation vis-a-vis posthumous publication of his father's letters. He didn't want his father to suffer the fate of Philip Larkin.

What is brilliant about this memoir is how Martin uses language that consistently plays down his father's behavior and incites (thereby diminishing) the behavior of others. Nothing is Kingsley's fault. Nothing. There is a near-Christ like depth of understanding and forgiveness that permeates his take on his father.

I am just doing this from memory but here are some examples. During a bad time in the marriage between Kingsley and his second wife, Elizabeth Jane Howard, Martin Amis witnesses Jane doing all the work, including a lot physical work, in order to move house. While Kingsley sits around doing nothing but drinking, Jane's moving furniture is "maschochistic." Kingsley is "gently incapaciated." It's striking how Martin uses a perjorative term for Jane and obliquely soft language for his father. In this case, why wouldn't Kingsley be passive aggressive, or destructive?? Why is Kingsley's behavior described with utter homeliness and Jane's sent to the hells of pyschology?

The breakup of the first marriage ("remember," his father intoned to Martin and his brother, "I will always love your mother")... Well, I grew up with an aloholic, too -- and not a literary one-- and by God if that's not the exact same words my father said to my siblings and me -- and you could be sure Kingsley was drunk. Yet, this statement is treated as if it comes from some fathomless well of love. All evidence suggests that Kingsley's behavior towards his first wife was serially cruel.

I defy anyone to find a passage where Kingsley is not held up in a better light than anyone else who walks through the memoir.

Martin Amis has been called the Mick Jagger of literature but he has more in common with the fictional/cinematic Michael Corleone. Amis is a genius and his talent is beyond dispute but he was gifted with something else -- he manages to stay stable under the most strange, difficult circumstances. His mother noticed this -- she said he was born under a lucky star; his father stated, "...he is sane."

As Experience draws to its close, Amis is sitting at his father's bedside in the hospice. He is working on a review of Gore Vidal's first memoir and he is able to write it, while is emotions are "woefully disordered."

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Experience -- you can say that again!
Comment: If you are a reader with a capital "R", this book is a must read. Martin Amis' gift with language, his sense of humor, and the rich material of his family life come together to make the reading of the book an experience in itself.

I've literally read and re-read this book so many times the cover has fallen off. I like Mr. Amis' fiction writing but this book is, in my opinion, his best, and easily one of my alltime favorites.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Pretty damned honest for an artist in mid-journey
Comment: Sometimes these Amazon reviews are more entertaining than the books they are ostensibly describing. Take a look herein for the one from Betty Burks of Nashville. Clearly it's a wind-up, but the writer comes so close to the line you might not catch the reviewer's penetrating insights into Amis pere and fils.

And this made me realize what a massive, risky hangout Martin Amis was making with this book. I mean, he goes pretty far into the truth, maybe as far as he can manage unassisted. How full of himself he is! So disgusting (doesn't take care of his teeth, probably doesn't wash), so full of 60s snobbery and 70s-liberal chuckleheaded cliches. I think he overwrites at times in order to justify himself--OK, I am a s**t, I admit, but please notice I write like an angel!

How excruciating, and how admirable. To read the book reviews and journalistic gossip from the mid-90s (the famous Julian Barnes squabble) you'd think that Amis was nothing more than a spoiled brat who happened to have been very lucky in the inherited-talent department. Lucky Martin. Actually his whole life is a long train of episodes of repellent dreariness.

Like Hemingway, though, Amis is more interesting than his fiction. I'd be happy to read volume two of his autobio, but he has not yet persuaded me to read any of his major novels.

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