EXPERIENCE
By Martin Amis
Talk Miramax Books, 406 pages, $23.95
The many surprises in Martin Amis’ “Experience” include his discovery that he fathered a daughter during a long-ago affair, and the eventual revelation of what befell a cousin who disappeared in 1973.
But one of Amis’ biggest jaw-droppers is his casual confession that he has saved none of the letters from his novelist dad, Kingsley Amis, nor those of his intelligentsia friends and family. And yet, this memoir by the author of “London Fields” and “The Information” is crammed with his own college-age missives, even though Amis himself derides their “tally-ho facetiousness.”
In other words, “Experience” is a very subjective autobiography, one that combines self-mockery with considerable self-absorption. If you’re an Amis fan (father or son), you probably won’t mind. If you’re not familiar with either of them, you’ll be lost in the book’s vacillations between precise detail and elusiveness. Even longtime readers will occasionally tire of Amis’ parodic use of footnotes; they litter and even swallow nearly every page of the book — academic arguments, amusing asides or flat-out digressions about the writer’s life.
Near the start, Amis warns the reader he may indulge in “certain bad habits,” including name-dropping. But since he has met so many interesting people –including Saul Bellow and family friend and poet Philip Larkin — that’s a prime selling point of the book. He was also a college-era boyfriend of Tina Brown, former editor of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker and now of Talk, the magazine whose book branch is publishing this memoir.
Interweaving memories of his bohemian youth, his jovially prickly relationship with Kingsley and his own role as a father, Amis creates what appears to be a comprehensive tapestry. But actually he avoids some areas you’d like to hear more about.
For instance, he devotes whole chapters to excruciating, $30,000 reconstructive dental surgery. But he sidesteps writing much at all about his first, failed marriage or his relationship with Isabel Fonseca, the woman he left his wife for and the dedicatee of his memoir.
In the book’s final third, Amis focuses on his relationship with Kingsley as the older writer’s health starts to fail. It’s here that the witty but often chilly writer finds emotional grounding, as he observes his dad in decline, losing the very mind that made him one of England’s notable literary voices.
Emotional resonance also comes from the figure who haunts the book even more than Kingsley does: Martin’s cousin Lucy Partington, who failed to come home one December night in 1973 and seemed to have vanished from the planet. She hadn’t. But more than 20 years passed before her family learned her fate.
A long-delayed memorial service for Partington and the senior Amis’ funeral color the book’s last pages. They’re two examples of what lends the book its title –the kind of experience that Amis calls “that miserable enemy.”
Though his memoir avoids certain areas of his life, by its end Amis has at least revealed some of the real losses that fuel the smart/funny fury of his fiction.
