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Overview
Perhaps the most gifted and innovative novelist of his generation, Martin Amis has been the object of obsessive media scrutiny for much of his career. In this much anticipated memoir, he writes with striking candor about his life and, in the process, gives us a clear view of the 'geography of the writer's mind'.The son of 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 reflects on the life and legacy of his cousin, Lucy Partington, who disappeared without trace in 1973 and was exhumed nearly twenty years later from the back garden of Frederick West, Britain's most prolific serial murderers.
Inevitably, too, the memoir records the changing literary scene in Britain and the United States, including a wealth of anecdotes along with memorable pen-portraits of Saul Bellow, Salman Rushdie, Allan Bloom, Philip Larkin, Robert Graves, and Elizabeth Jane Howard, among others.
The result is a remarkable work of autobiography -- profound, witty, and ruthlessly honest. As a writer's self-portrait, it is destined to become a classic of its kind.
Synopsis
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.
May 20, 2000 - The Independent
Amis has written an utterly fascinating self-portrait...and an enthralling account of the fragility of life.
Editorials
LA Times
Holden Caulfield meets Herzog, and it is goodSF Examiner
...discover not only the expected literary brilliance, but also a wholly unanticipated portion of warmth, humanity, friendship - and, yes, love - all without an iota of sentimentality...has the satisfactions of a superior novel...Martin Amis has given us a memoir for the ages.New Yorker
Experience is not ordered chronologically. The technique works wonderfully.Time Magazine
..riveting memoir...The portrait of his father... is fascinating and moving...a splendid writer.inside.com
The acerbic novelist rewards his fans with this highly entertaining memoir ..Amis novices may be surprised by the compassion he's found.— June 13, 2000
Andrew Roe
...a balanced, haunting work of memory and memorial, a surprisingly gentle meditation on fathers and sons, mortality, the loss of innocence, divorce, friendship, love -- what Amis calls "the main events," those "ordinary miracles and ordinary disasters" that shape you and define you and remain forever in your blood and being.— Salon
Vogue
A lovely and gossip-rich tour of his life. As a literary performer, he is still close to peerless.—May 26, 2000
Mirabella
An openhearted remembrance, which...divulges neither too much or too little.—May 26, 2000
The Independent
Amis has written an utterly fascinating self-portrait...and an enthralling account of the fragility of life.—May 20, 2000
The Guardian
Experience is a beautiful, and beautifully strange book, and it is unlike anything one expected.—May 2000
The Daily Telegraph
Funny, sad, moving and absolutely riveting. Amis is a seriously good writer, and never on better form than now. Experience, the book of his life, may be the book of his life.—May 2000
Publishers Weekly
The big book on this new publisher's first list is an occasionally combative but more often sweet-natured account of a literary life with an extraordinary father. Even by English standards Kingsley Amis, whom his son rightly sees as the finest comic novelist of his generation, was a highly eccentric figure: a man who loved women in the flesh as much as he appeared to disapprove of them in principle, an alcoholic who managed to create a large body of clear-headed work, a man who couldn't bear to be alone in a house at night, but whose mastery of invective was second to none--a difficult man to live with, it would seem, yet here recalled by Martin in the most fond and generous terms. The book revolves around a small group of seminal figures in Amis's life: his father; Saul Bellow, whom he seems to have adopted as a father figure; his young cousin Lucy Partington, who disappeared in 1973 and was later found to have been a victim of child-killer Frederick West; and longtime friend Christopher Hitchens. The controversial elements in his life aren't glossed over: the so-called cosmetic dentistry, about which the press so gloated at the time of Amis's parting from his previous agent for a larger book deal through Andrew Wylie, is shown to have been an attempt to correct, with extensive and painful surgery, a long-neglected condition of his teeth and jaw. His belated discovery of a previously unknown daughter is described with eloquent sweetness, and the account of the squabble with Kingsley's biographer, Eric Jacobs, over an account of the novelist's last days he gave to English newspapers is rendered more in sorrow than anger. There seems no doubt that a certain pugnaciousness in Amis has led to perplexingly hostile behavior toward him by the English press; it will be interesting to see how this candid, often funny and far from arrogant book will be treated there. B&W photos. (June) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.|Library Journal
Following in the steps of Christopher Dickey (Summer of Deliverance; LJ 7/98) and V.S. Naipaul (Between Father and Son, LJ 1/00), Amis offers another portrait of the sometimes troubled, often poignant relationship between a writer son and his writer father. The younger Amis (The Information) chronicles father Kingsley s (Lucky Jim) drunken debauches, his parents marriage and subsequent remarriages, and the grimness of Kingsley s final days. But Amis also weaves into his narrative accounts of his own failed first marriage, relationships with his children, friendship with Saul Bellow, and coming to terms with the disappearance and death of his cousin. In addition, Amis details his well-publicized dental nightmares and his falling out with novelist Julian Barnes. Though passages describing his relationship with his father are very moving, the rest of the book descends into a sophomoric and sometimes self-important exercise in namedropping and name calling. The book will appeal to fans of father and son and is recommended for large libraries and libraries where the two are popular. Henry Carrigan, Lancaster, PA Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.David Lodge
...a major literary event...The book is full of delectable humor at the author's expense, by which he avoids the danger that this kind of writing always courts, of seeming narcissistic, self-justifying and egocentric...There is a great deal of art in Experience, not only in the style, as you would expect from this writer...—Times Literary Supplement
Michiko Kakutani
...Amis' remarkable new memoir... Amis' most fully realized book yet -- a book that fuses his humor, intellect and daring with a new gravitas and warmth, a book that stands, at once, as a loving tribute to his father and as a fulfillment of his own abundant talents as a writer.—The New York Times
Joyce Hackett
Amis's portrait of a complex father-son relationship lit by floodlights is solidly real and well worth reading.—The National Review