Product Description

Martin Amis is perhaps the most gifted and innovative novelist of his generation. His prose refashions the English language into a lean and brilliant instrument, dazzling readers with its energy and wit. In this much anticipated memoir, Amis writes with striking candour about his life and looks intimately at the process of writing itself.As the son of a famous writer, the great comic novelist Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis' explores his relationship with his father and writes about the various crises of Kingsley's life, including the final crisis of his death. Amis also examines the case of his cousin, Lucy Partington, who disappeared without trace in 1973 and was exhumed in 1994 from the back garden of Frederick West, Britain's most prolific serial killer. Inevitably, too, the memoir records the changing literary scene in Britain and the United States, with many anecdotes and pen portraits.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #36544 in Books
• Published on: 2001-04-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 401 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
At one point in this remarkable book, Martin Amis refers to a phrase he coined in a 1983 newspaper piece on Saul Bellow. "Higher autobiography", intended to convey a fork taken by late 20th century literature, lingers on the palate long after the final page, awash with pictures of his various children. He is no longer "the kid", as Bellow puts it to him after the death of father Kingsley in 1995, and this generational shift is sharply in evidence within the quietly smouldering pages of Experience. Shunning orthodox chronology for more satisfying linearity, Amis explores the issues that have dogged his life and his reputation for too long. Though he is angry--mostly with the English media--the tone of the book is one of patient memorial and reconciliation, with most obviously Kingsley, and his own manifestations, but also with his "missing"--the cousin, Lucy Partington, a victim of Fred West's "prepotence", and the daughter, Delilah, by an earlier relationship. Gossip column titbits are confronted head-on: divorce, the change of literary agent, the falling-out with Julian Barnes, the row with Kingsley's biographer Eric Jacobs and, of course, the Teeth (actually deserving of a full set of capitals; the hardest heart would flinch and whimper at the reconstructive surgery he endured, ignorantly disparaged as "cosmetic").

The revelation of the book, however, lies in the body of the book, in its weave and stitching. Copious footnotes adorn most pages, not digressive but novelistically collusive to a self-defeating desire to "speak without artifice". A book of love, it is also one of the funniest books ever to wear the cloak of death and mortality so constantly. Money was a novel, says Amis, about "the fear that childlessness will condemn you to childishness". This volume, about how many people leave a room compared to entering it--to quote a recurrent theme--exorcises that particular fear, and a more general dread that has perpetually haunted his prose. Experience, pitched between his splendid journalism and his fiction, is a wake-up call to those who have too easily dismissed his work. It is a considerable, haunting work. --David Vincent

Review
`a scrupulous and candid writer' --The Guardian

About the Author
Martin Amis is the author of nine novels, two collections of stories and five works of non-fiction. He lives in London.

Customer Reviews

Songs of innocence & experience
Experience is great read. It is a very selective and stylised autobiographical memoir, with a haunted look about it, and surprisingly humble. After reading it you wish that Kinglsey Amis could come back to life, such is the warm, flawed human portrait drawn of him in the book. I like Experience so much that I keep my copy of it on the bedside table, and reread it in a loop. The bit where a beer can sprays beer over Kingsley is my favourie scene. My only complaint would be that Martin Amis uses too many words like "infarction", "ablution" and "bathetic". I think the book would have been just as good (better, even?) if it had been written in good old ordinary words like "lump", "washing" and "high-falluting". But hey, I have a low IQ so please excuse my episteme!
This book is top quality. Buy Two copies in case you lose one!

Hard work for a lazy reader but worth it
I borrowed this book from the library and am now buying it because I want it on my bookshelf. I'm one of those readers who trips over themselves trying to get to the end of the paragraph before finishing the beginning. Consequently the footnotes and dense prose of this book had me working very hard indeed but it was so worth it. I found it extremely moving and surprisingly humble. Perhaps he bangs on about his teeth too much but, as someone who has experienced the trauma of extensive dental work, I can understand how it can permeate all conscious thought and experience.

I've always been very fond of both Martin & (more so) Kingsley Amis' work but have been slightly uncomfortable about their more hard-boiled attitudes and their misogyny. However, I can generally forgive people most things if they make me laugh and this book is also very witty. Like his father, Martin Amis' writing can make you cackle/snort out loud and, most importantly, forget the tedious tube/train journey you're taking.

A remarkable and truthful memoir that should dispel previous
.I'm female and a loathed journalist, to make things worse -- but I found this book extraordinarily impressive. I read it in two days and nights and was blown away by its exact, original and always modern voice. He uses prose like a knife thrower, coming up with the exact word or phrase that cuts to the quick. I admired him for his courage in revealing the pain and consequences of today's family traumas -- betrayal, adultery, divorce, re-marriage -- and his willingness to face the fact that those we claim to love most, our children, suffer most. He is generous towards his friends, betrayers, and even his dentist. He knows when to keep silent (not a word of criticism of his first wife, let alone of his father). This book dispels a whole lot of preconceptions about Martin Amis and makes him (he'll hate this) admirable to the point of being lovable. When I had finished it I wanted to send him a fan letter, but I feared my literary style wouldn't pass his 'war against cliche' test.

You may hitherto have categorised Amis as arrogant, sexually predatory, aggressive, foul-mouthed and over-rated. Read EXPERIENCE and be proved wrong. Maybe middle age has humbled him, maybe the death of his father has freed him, maybe his second wife has mellowed him ... whatever the reason, this book shows him to be a better, subtler & more sensitive human being than he ever let on before.