The Good of the Novel

by Liam McIlvanney

  I never knew my poor mother to do much more than bark with derision. And yet I think of her as my poor mother. As I grow older myself I perceive her sadness, her bewilderment that life had taken such a turn, her loneliness. She bequeathed to me her own cloud of unknowing. She comforted herself, that harsh disappointed woman, by reading love stories, simple romances with happy endings. Perhaps that is why I write them.

  When Mr Neville’s offer comes, Edith must refuse it, as the dictates of Brookner’s novel insist. For just as she’s about to send off a letter to David, renouncing their relationship, once and for all, she spies Mr Neville at dawn, post-in flagrante delicto, as he is leaving the bedroom of Mrs Pusey’s daughter, and the mortification is too great. Mr Neville is no Mr Rochester. But what is Edith’s David back home? The closest thing she’s known to love. Or to the fundamental satisfactions of the flesh, body for body. ‘My life,’ she refers to her lover, as her father had done her mother. Such succumbing in the absence of reciprocation (David has made no effort to contact her, of course, though he knows where she is) can be fatal for a sincere young woman with little experience to go on, with ruinous implications, lasting for years, or even a lifetime. When Edith writes, and finally sends, a note containing the simple word ‘Returning’ to her lover, our hearts sink. Returning to what? He’s gone.

  I have often wondered why it is that I have continued reading Brookner year after year, when she has so often disappointed me. I, too, have been annoyed at her characters who can’t seem to struggle out of their straitjackets. (I am also unpleasantly reminded of private ones of my own that I can’t seem to wriggle out of, either.) But the dilemma of what to make of one’s life, of how to become oneself, of how to reconcile the conflicting obligations toward oneself and others, especially toward one’s parents, and, most essentially, of how to live in the world in the absence of having achieved one’s heart’s desire is eternal, and Brookner sounds it again and again, for this is her Sisyphean burden.

  At one point in Leaving Home, Emma Roberts comes upon the son of a possible compromise companion, a somewhat older doctor who is separated from his wife, as she’s searching for a bathroom upstairs in his house. The son, a beautiful young man, is naked – asleep in a bedroom she accidentally enters, and she can’t refrain from stealing into the room to look more closely at him. ‘For a moment I contemplated him, as Psyche once contemplated Cupid, raising her lamp, willing him not to wake and witness her transgression. At the sight of his surrendered nakedness I saw what had been missing from my life. It was another coup de foudre, information received, though not knowingly given.’ This is a breathless moment, a summoning up of an indelible image – the Delaistre sculpture come to life. And yet the realisation itself is strangely marvellous, too, for it captures the essence of life, the essence of beauty, the essence of time: it is the captured moment of revelation. Such moments of consciousness are Brookner’s gift to us. The myth of Psyche and Cupid is just another myth, of course. We know that Edith’s Cupid will never come to reclaim her. Still, she has known his caresses, and that in itself is some kind of victory.

  6 Martin Amis, The Information

  JASON COWLEY

  In 1992 Martin Amis published an amusing short story about male narcissism and rivalry called ‘Career Move’. Its turbocharged engines were, for Amis, the familiar ones of ironic inversion and paradox: two writers, a poet and a screenwriter, experience a remarkable reversal in fortune when the poet finds himself being flown first-class to Hollywood, where he is feted by agents and directors competing extravagantly to make a major movie of one of his poems, ‘Sonnet’; meanwhile, the screenwriter is condemned, as most poets usually are, to submitting his work, wearily and with increasing desperation, to an impecunious, low-circulation arts magazine as he seeks publication in any format, anywhere. The two writers, once friends, become ever more anguished rivals, especially when the movie of Sonnet opens in 437 theatres and ‘does seventeen million in its first weekend’.

  Male rivalry – especially between writers – is a recurrent theme in Amis’s fiction. ‘All writers,’ he once said, ‘if they mean business, if they’re ambitious, have got to think they’re the best. You haven’t got a chance of being the best unless you think you’re best.’

  As the son of a famous novelist, the late Kingsley Amis, and an ardent reader of Saul Bellow, with whom he became close friends, as well as Nabokov, Amis was from the beginning unusually interested in style, in what it means to write fiction in a style that is ostentatiously your own. ‘I don’t want to write a sentence that any guy could have written,’ he told an interviewer, staking out territory, issuing a challenge. No, he wasn’t here to make up the numbers and, like his father, he would write comedy, but with a twist of nastiness.

  His first novel, The Rachel Papers, published in 1973 when he was twenty-four, was a work of aggressive exhibitionism. The fancily-writing, smart-talking narrator, Charles Highway, is a kind of amalgam of Holden Caulfield and Patrick Bateman, the nihilistic anti-hero of Brett Easton Ellis’s American Psycho. Highway, who is nineteen, and preparing to go up to Oxford, is willfully cruel in the way he seduces and then spurns young women. He keeps fastidious records – his papers – of his conquests and couplings. He is an auditor of the carnal. The novel has a young man’s dread of and disgust for the middle-aged, for what time does to us all. ‘The skin had shrunken over her skull,’ Highway writes of his mother, ‘to accentuate her jaw and commodious collerage for the gloomy pools that were her eyes; her breasts had long forsaken their natural home and now flanked her navel; and her buttocks, when she wore stretch slacks, would dance behind her knees, like punch balls.’

  This much-quoted sentence – so showy yet funny and inventive, too – was like a declaration. Everything that would define Amis as a novelist and stylist was here in microcosm: the grotesque humour and revolt against pulchritude (‘her breasts had long forsaken their natural home’), the cruelty (who really would talk of their mother in this way?), the ironic knowingness and allusions (‘the … pools that were her eyes’ – Shakespeare, innit?), the baroque phrase-making. Young Martin was on his way; if he stayed fit, away from the booze and off the drugs, if he kept reading and writing, there would be little to stop him, because he had talent (a key word in the Amis lexicon) as well as the required tenacity, and evidently knew exactly what he wanted to say and how to go about saying it.

  In The Moronic Inferno and other visits to America, a collection of his journalism and essays published in 1986, Amis argued that Saul Bellow wrote in a style fit for heroes, the High Style. ‘To evolve an exalted voice appropriate to the twentieth century has been the self-imposed challenge of his work … The High Style attempts to speak for the whole of mankind … to remind us of what we once knew and have since forgotten.’

  Amis, too, wanted to write in the High Style, to develop his own exalted voice, and, on the whole, he achieved just that: working both as a novelist and literary journalist he continued to publish prolifically throughout his twenties and thirties, his novels all the time deepening and hardening in their preoccupation with decay and disaster. He wrote comic novels but without the usual consolations of comedy. He was drawn again and again to the defining crises of our modernity – to the corruptions of capitalism and Thatcherite excess (Money, 1984), to the nuclear threat (Einstein’s Monsters, 1987, a book of stories about the uneasy tensions of the Cold War), to the anxieties of millenarianism and visions of apocalypse (London Fields, 1989), to the Nazi catastrophe and the Holocaust of the Jews (Time’s Arrow, 1991), to the loneliness of a godless world (The Information, 1995).

  Amis is, wrote John Updike, an ‘atrocity-minded author who demands we look directly at things we would rather overlook’. It was as if in his restlessness and ambition he were seeking subjects worthy of the grandeur of his exalted style and of the seriousness of his intent, the big subjects of our time: genocide, nuclear war, environmental degradation. He wanted to write about the whole of society, not only a sm
all part of it. ‘The 19th-century British novel was, if you like, a superpower novel,’ he told the New York Times in 1990. ‘It was 800 pages long, about the whole of society. With [British] decline, the novel has shrunk in confidence, in scope. In its current form, the typical English novel is 225 sanitized pages about the middle classes. You know, “well-made” with the nice color scheme and decor, and matching imagery. I almost try and avoid form. What I’m interested in is trying to get more truthful about what it’s like to be alive now.’

  Whether or not he was succeeding in this, he was being read. People were listening. His ‘stuff’, as he likes to refer to his work, was news. He was becoming a literary celebrity in the American model: watched, gossiped about, well rewarded, admired. His mastery of different registers and modes of address, his blokeish banter and sardonic fascination with the tawdry excesses of contemporary popular and street culture – with porn, and booze, and drugs, and easy women – soon meant that, for better or worse, he became the novelist most widely imitated in style and voice by any number of younger British writers, from Richard Raynor to D. J.Taylor to Will Self to Tibor Fischer. Even now you can detect the influence of Amis’s urgent, rhetorical, insistently comic style, his riffs and repetitions, his improbable reversals and playful paradoxes, his inner-city locations, in the first two novels of the Booker-shortlisted author Zadie Smith.

  Yet in the early 90s something happened to Martin Amis. It was as if he had made a wrong turn. Attitudes hardened against him; reviewers traduced him; diarists and columnists eviscerated him. He was still the most influential writer of his generation, in the argot, but this influence was perceived increasingly as baleful. How did this happen? The answer can be given in two words: The Information. This was no ordinary novel. This was his superpower novel. Five years in the writing, it was marketed as The Amis Novel, a work of the highest verbal ambition, comparable in reach and achievement to the very best of Bellow or Updike or Philip Roth, something that would show us the truth of how it was to be alive in Britain at the end of empire and of the most violent century in human history. Amis certainly gave the impression, before publication, that he had produced something very fine indeed. His best novel?

  He had long been preoccupied by how good he was and by his place in the literary scheme of things. ‘People kept saying that I was the most influential novelist of my generation or whatever, and so I wanted to see what I was worth,’ he said at the time. So he instructed his agent Pat Kavanagh, the now sadly deceased wife of his long-time friend and fellow novelist Julian Barnes, to extract an advance of £500,000 from Jonathan Cape, the onceindependent imprint that had published him for more than twenty years. The amount was considered unreasonable even for an author as esteemed as Amis; though widely admired, his books were never bestsellers and he was seldom a contender for the main literary prizes, such as the Booker, which have an exponential impact on sales. Following much anguish and vilification, Amis found himself a new agent, and a new publisher prepared to pay the desired advance, HarperCollins, part of the Rupert Murdoch media empire. By the time it was published, in April 1995, The Information was as much a journalistic as a literary event – and was received as such; Amis, perhaps unfairly, found himself under review both as a man and as a writer. His moral character became part of the wider discourse; this was literary criticism as hatchet biography. The book was a commercial and critical failure; Amis would soon afterwards return to Jonathan Cape, his reputation diminished.

  I read The Information shortly after publication, and recall being exhilarated and frustrated in about equal measure. I had long admired Amis as a writer, especially the journalism. His profiles of American writers collected in The Moronic Inferno were one of the main reasons why, in my early twenties, I had wanted to be a journalist; those essays delighted me with their disciplined intelligence, their empathy, reach and invention, as much as if not more so than his fiction. I always thought something important was missing from the fiction, especially the early novels: heart, love, fellow feeling. I enjoyed some of the phrase-making, as well as the manic comedy, but seldom felt the urge to return to these books. It was the journalism that mattered most to me, when Amis was writing well to deadline, and within strict word limits, and about any number of subjects from literature to sport to pornography to celebrity. It is not that he has no hierarchy of taste: he is an unashamed elitist, dedicated to the great works of the Western canon. Rather, what made him such a good journalist is his curiosity and ability to consider all things, not of equal value, but of equal interest. He is no relativist. But he is open to all possibilities.

  The Information was about a mid-life crisis; Amis, who was forty-five in 1995, certainly seemed to be living through some kind of existential crisis of his own: his long-time marriage had ended; he was having expensive and painful surgery on his troublesome teeth, which had turned him into a figure of fun; and the details of his pursuit of a talent-affirming advance was being reported in the newspapers as if it were a story of national significance, like sudden severe shifts in the weather or the fall of a government minister. The media frenzy seems, in retrospect, absurd but for Amis The Information proved to be a terminus. After its publication, he was taken far less seriously and ceased to be the most influential novelist of his generation. Instead, in the following years, writers close to him, such as Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro, achieved the kind of career-defining commercial and critical success that he, above all literary novelists of that time, had once seemed destined to enjoy. He has written nothing notable since The Information, turning away from grand, 500-page state-of-the-nation-style novels as he experiments instead with other forms: noirish crime (Night Train, 1997), memoir (Experience, 2000), political narrative (Koba the Dread, 2002, a book about the crimes of Stalin and why the left for too long stayed silent about communist oppression), the novella (The House of Meetings, 2006) and the autobiographical novel (The Pregnant Widow, 2009). There was one shortish, hypercharacteristic novel, Yellow Dog (2003), which has the usual desolate inner-London setting; the usual comic cast of preposterously named grotesques, such as a tabloid-reporter called Clint Smoker (Amis evidently likes the name – a character called Smoker appears in The Information as well); the usual supercharged prose style, mixing the vernacular of the street with a more refined literariness. Unfortunately, Yellow Dog, as Michiko Kakutani, a longstanding admirer of Amis, wrote in the New York Times, ‘reads like a sendup of a Martin Amis novel written by someone intent on sabotaging his reputation’. It need not detain us here.

  So what of The Information? It certainly reads as if it were the culmination of an entire fictional project. All the old obsessions are here: male rivalry, inevitably; literary envy; the allure of dirty money; the unknowability and mystery of women; the impossibility of love; the fear of time’s irreversibility; metaphysical terror. The Information is a comedy of cosmic humiliation; the strivings of two writers, who both live in west London and turn forty as the novel begins, are set in the context of a godless and pitilessly indifferent universe. Throughout the book the omniscient narrator stands apart, mocking and commenting on the small struggles of his characters as he reminds us of the futility of artistic ambition, indeed of all ambition, and of the absence of larger meaning in our lives. We are hard-wired, he seems to be saying, to seek meaning in a universe in which there is none. This is the real information that comes in the night, that comes to us when we least expect and want to think about it.

  The Information begins well, with Richard Tull at home in west London and in bed with his wife, Gina; it is the middle of the night and he is weeping. The first sentence is rather lovely – ‘Cities at night, I feel, contain men who cry in their sleep and then say Nothing.’

  Who is the speaker here? Is this to be another first-person confession, in the style of Money, which was narrated by the junk-food-addicted, coke-addled John Self, or London Fields, narrated by Samson Young, an American in London who is dying from an unnamed wasting disease, possibly Aids? No
t quite. The ‘I’ of this first sentence turns out to be the omniscient narrator, a distinct, self-conscious character all his own. His initials are MA, as you would expect, and he directly enters the narrative when he meets Richard in a park, just as John Self in one of Money’s best set-pieces meets a writer called Martin Amis in a pub, observing how the writer is ‘small, compact, wears his rug fairly long’. This time, the role of Amis-as-narrator is much more directly controlling and interpretative. He is at once complicit in his characters’ miseries and at an ironic remove from them. Again and again he interrupts the story to apostrophise and pontificate, like a puppet master breaking the spell of performance directly to address his audience, which serves merely to remind us of the artificiality of the entire exercise and of the visibility of the strings through which he exerts control.