… [An] apt image of the narrative of Time’s Arrow is provided by a famous passage in the field whose metaphorics, as I have argued, underlie the conception of the novel. The second law of thermodynamics, pointed out the Victorian physicist James Clerk Maxwell,
is undoubtedly true as long as we can deal with bodies only in mass [that is, en masse], and have no power of perceiving or handling the separate molecules of which they are made up. But if we conceive a being whose faculties are so sharpened that he can follow every molecule in its course, such a being … would be able to do what is at present impossible to us.230
Take, in Maxwell’s example, a closed container full of air; even at a uniform temperature, it will be full of molecules with varying amounts of kinetic energy, which is to say, traveling at different speeds.
Now let us suppose that such a vessel is divided into two portions, A and B, by a division in which there is a small hole, and that a being, who can see the individual molecules, opens and closes this hole, so as to allow only the swifter molecules to pass from A to B and only the slower ones to pass from B to A. He will thus, without expenditure of work, raise the temperature of B and lower that of A, in contradiction to the second law of thermodynamics.231
This hypothetical ‘being’, soon christened ‘Maxwell’s Demon’, would apparently violate the second law of thermodynamics by transferring heat from a cooler region to a warmer or (what is the same thing) by producing order without work, decreasing the entropy of a closed system, reversing Eddington’s arrow of time. If Time’s Arrow offers a thermodynamic vision of history, it is a vision in which narrative occupies the place of that most famous of thermodynamic personages, Maxwell’s Demon……
In Time’s Arrow … Maxwell’s Demon becomes the muse or presiding spirit of the art of postmodern fiction. History in this novel, like the Holocaust that represents its cruellest and most inescapable productions, is a supremely thermodynamic phenomenon. Like Maxwell’s Demon, Amis’s narrative reverses these thermodynamics to generate a new order counter to the inevitability of the tragic narrative of thermodynamics, of heat-death or Holocaust: heat flows backward, entropy decreases, human bodies are created in the violence of fire, wry comedy and a sort of piquant pathos swamp tragedy and banality. But against the sparkle and spectacle of the narrative flows history, brutal, banal, unchangeable, Other. Time’s Arrow never lets us forget that its narrative, like Maxwell’s Demon, is only a thought experiment ……Although the Maxwell’s Demon of Amis’s narrative imaginatively restarts the motor by moving backward and decreasing entropy, it nevertheless offers a metaphorics in which the consumption of human lives in the Holocaust may be considered along the same thermodynamic lines as the consumption of goods in contemporary America. Time’s Arrow itself, then, betokens a certain postmodern falling-off of distinctions. Indeed, the very logic of postmodernism, like claims that at the end of the millennium we have reached the end of history, may postulate a thermodynamics of history in which entropy now predominates. After the portentous and apocalyptic millennial murder-mystery-cum-snuff novel London Fields - for which Amis had considered the title ‘Time’s Arrow’ (London Fields, ‘Note’ after Contents page) - Time’s Arrow, Amis’s first post-Cold War novel, might well be taken as an emblem of the heat-death of history.232 □
Menke’s concluding comparison between London Fields and Time’s Arrow implies the superiority of the latter work and reinforces the widespread view, amply demonstrated by the critical material in this chapter, that Martin Amis had achieved a new stature with his seventh novel. It might have seemed, even from the initial review responses, that Time’s Arrow had at last established him as a serious writer who combined dazzling stylistic and structural skills with profound moral, social and historical concerns. But then came The Information - and, as the next chapter will show, Amis was once more embroiled in controversy, this time of an especially vicious kind.
CHAPTER NINE
That Comes at Night: The Information (1995)
IN DISCUSSING Martin Amis’s eighth novel, The Information, it becomes very difficult - at times, virtually impossible - to separate strictly literary criticism from an analysis of ‘Martin Amis’ as a cultural phenomenon, a highly public player in the field of literary success and fame. It is not only that the appearance of The Information was preceded by much publicity, and vehement controversy, about Amis’s apparent pursuit of a half-million pound advance for the novel, and his oral and marital difficulties as he sought expensive dental treatment and his first marriage broke up, but also that the novel itself takes literary success and failure as a key theme, further blurring the boundaries between fiction and reality, literature and life. Two detailed and fascinating reviews, however, did succeed in discussing The Information as a literary work rather than a publicity phenomenon. The first appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, by Adam Mars-Jones -whose account of Einstein’s Monsters, and attack on Amis’s style, was quoted in chapter six of this Guide. Mars-Jones does not mention the real-life publicity but sets the novel in the context of Amis’s previous work, offers a complex verdict on the strengths and weakness of The Information, and provides a more general analysis and appraisal of Amis’s writing:
■ Martin Amis’s new novel has everything in common with Money … and London Fields … in terms of tone and territory. Without continuous characters or an overarching structure, the three books can’t really be said to form a trilogy, but they certainly make up a mighty triptych, a love poem to West London from which love is excluded. There is no character in the new book with the brute stature of a John Self or a Keith Talent, and even the surnames of the main characters have lapsed into realism (Tull, Barry [but see John Nash’s comment later, p. 169, on the surname ‘Barry’]), but it would be impertinent to imagine that Amis had mellowed.
If the reader senses exhaustion in the author as well as the characters by the end of the third volume (it is a characteristic of Amis that he doesn’t develop his characters so much as wear them out), there is no loss of performance page by page. It’s more a sense that the glittering steely nets Amis throws around the world are tightening around him. Disconcerting to encounter new notes of desperation in an author whose subject has always been precisely that: desperation.
Amis’s originality as a stylist has been to separate verbal beauty from the cause it has traditionally served, to detach lyrical language from the lyrical impulse. Why should intense verbal music be the privilege of those who love life in however contrary a fashion, the Nabokovs, the Updikes? The closest Amis has come in his literary persona to joie de vivre was a disillusion crackling with scorn, and that was not recently: there was a time when he scowled more brightly on the world. Life is low, he sings, all life is low-life, and this is not what we are accustomed to call a song……
Much of the new novel is structured around … the trope of rancorous twins. The protagonist and his antagonist are two talentless novelists, one of them (Richard lull) hyperliterary and caricaturally unsuccessful, the other (Gwyn Barry) subliterary and caricaturally successful. Richard and Gwyn were born a day apart, and the novel opens on Gwyn’s fortieth birthday, the eve therefore of Richard’s. This pattern is repeated with almost suspicious obligingness by Richard’s two sons, Marius and Marco.
The strangest pairing, though, is of hero and narrative voice. In Amis’s last novel, Time’s Arrow … , the disjunction between the describing presence and the experience described was the whole subject and method of the book [see previous chapter of this Guide], but when your hero is a literary man, there seems no reason to double the point of view……Richard is rendered in the third person, where traditionally there can be free play and fertile overlap between creature and creator, but here the distinction is strongly defended, and a first person keeps butting in.
The trope of rancorous twins creates a polarized world based on the exaggerated differences between two essentially similar characters (untalented, heterosexual, white British male novelists of fo
rty), and this disguises or compensates for the absence of what is for many people the essential business of the novelist: the finding of common ground in the apparently dissimilar……
The Information is full of sentences that are compulsive hostages willing to die for their author’s sake, pressing their pleading faces against the paragraph windows and crying, ‘Take me, I saw it all. I can explain.’ One particularly insistent passage proposes that the four principal literary genres (tragedy, comedy, romance and satire) have by now all bled into each other. Amis himself, however, is locked into satire, the only genre which invites and requires negative emotion, the one in which empathy is dilution and blunder.
Humour in satire is based on exaggerating differences, while in comedy it moves towards recognizing affinities, and this suits Amis well. Only in satire, above all, could he write so many pages (the London triptych runs to well over a thousand) full of commandingly vivid detail, none of it sensuous. Not a sensation enjoyed, hardly even a tune heard with pleasure, no food taken into the body without latent or patent disgust. The only activities in the three books that are genuinely identified with are smoking and drinking - pleasures that punish. Food and sex are tolerated and even craved when they approximate to this mortificatory condition……
Satire is pre-eminently the mode of diminishing returns, and Martin Amis has been practising it longer than most. In the literary typology that he proposes, satire corresponds to winter, but he came to it in spring. As a writer, he has always looked on the blight side.
His persona has been the malcontent, regarding vigour as incipient decay and life as a special case of death.
A writer who in his twenties considers the body a site of embarrassment and humiliation will have much to write about in his forties. The only surprise about this is that Martin Amis seems surprised by it. It’s as if he made a bargain that by not identifying with his youth, by affecting to despise it, he would be spared the indignities of ageing. When the hero of The Information launches the familiar agonized tirades against his hair and skin, tirades that for consistency’s sake are yet more hyperbolic with every book, the reader may be tempted by a rebellious interior murmur of Martin, when you told us the body was a bad joke, remember? Weren’t you listening?
The Information has a plot, but as with its predecessors it isn’t the sort that drives its sap through every sentence and makes every phrase, however flowery, align itself with an unseen sun. As the plot impinges on the reader, it can be summarized like this: things can’t get any worse, and then they do. Amis is canny enough to winch Richard up a little bit from time to time, thus enhancing the impact of his next fall, but any bungee rope attached to his ankles is guaranteed to be that little bit longer than the drop.
Amis shies away from a more ambitious reversal of the plot’s depressive current. After almost 400 pages of continuous immersion in Richard Tull’s hysterical rancour, the point of view shifts to his nemesis Gwyn Barry. It would be both shocking, after so much demonizing, and shapely as a piece of narrative construction, to make Gwyn at this point less than a monster, merely mediocre. The Amis of Success …
might have enjoyed that, but the Amis of The Information makes him more smugly appalling than his enemy could dream, with the strange result that he seems worthy of Richard’s tedious hatred.
Comic set-pieces suffer from the same reflexive hyperbole. It’s as if Amis has lost the knack of going just too far enough. Richard’s novel Untitled turns out to be so unreadable that it breaks the health of anyone who attempts the task, which means that every time the book acquires a reader we brace ourselves for a more extreme diagnosis. Infinitely better are passages that remember to cut overstatement with understatement, like a description of a car accident retailed so offhandedly it sounds like good news.
When mechanical comedy is combined with a female character, the book is at its weakest, as it is with long passages about Richard’s wife Gina and her love life before their marriage, when she slept her way through the literary establishment of London. Satire is always cartoony, but Amis’s satire operates a discriminatory cartooniness, making men huge and absurd, women absurdly diminished.
If Nabokov did, as Richard lull reports, describe himself as ‘“frankly homosexual”’ (p. 29) in his literary tastes (a man who read men), then Martin Amis is that mythical beast, the man who makes women lesbian. There is nothing for women in The Information beyond the prose masterclass, the lessons in how to make a verb curdle or an adjective explode. Gina may be the hero’s wife, but everything she does is generic and labelled as such. On page 1, ‘[s]he was a woman. She knew so much more about tears than he did.’ She is sympathetic as a fact of gender. It is no credit to her. On page 85, Richard says that without his fiction-writing all he would have would be life. ‘And this was a disastrous word to say to a woman - to women, who bear life, who bring it into the world, screaming, and will never let it come second to anything.’ Women’s reproductivity is their essence, they love life as a fact of gender.
You could learn more about women from reading Genet, for whom at least femininity is an important and sometimes a coveted category, than you can from The Information. Much is conceded to woman -emotional responsiveness and love of life - but the gifts are invariably poisoned. The world is reformulated right away to downgrade the yielded territory. In the area of the emotions, it’s as if women have pulled a fast one: by feeling more they suffer less, and as for love of life, doesn’t that prove they’re shallow? Life? Who’d love that?
It is bizarrely easy to take Amis’s female characters more seriously than he does himself. When Richard’s impotence is described in inverted romance terms, for instance (‘[i]n the last month alone, he had been impotent with her on the stairs, on the sofa in the sitting-room and on the kitchen table’ (p. 90)), we know how he feels about it, but how does Gina feel? Does she even notice? This reviewer, being homosexual, has a sentimental respect for the Other Persuasion, and likes to think that two people are present in a marriage, or even a coupling. In a first-person or virtual first-person narrative, the exclusion of Gina’s responses might be pointed or strategic, but Amis has made the choice of the rancorous-twin point of view. And on the irrelevance of Gina to her own sex life the twins agree.
In the whole book, Gina’s head contains only one thought not expressed in dialogue, and that turns out to be something about Richard, not something about herself (she knows he will never turn his verbal violence on her). His unlikely attractiveness to her, current or past, remains unexplored, but perhaps love too is generic and female. We know that Richard married her not out of love but sexual obsession, on the advice of a man who said this was the thing to do. The marriage-crisis strand of the book ends with a single sentence more appropriate to a short story than to a 500-pager: ‘[b]ecause if he forgave her, she could never leave him now’ (p. 494). The key to the marriage’s survival is in one partner’s hands only.
Within the negatively defined world of his fiction, Martin Amis has all the time been reaching for a positive, that is, a double negative. Looking for an Unholy of Holies, a big No to say No to, he has been drawn to the Bomb (Einstein’s Monsters) and the Holocaust (Time’s Arrow). He has also been drawn to ways of looking at the universe that don’t put human beings at the centre of it - nuclear physics in London Fields, and now astronomy in The Information.
These rhetorical moves have had different degrees of success. The borrowing of imagery from physics for London Fields sometimes made it seem that he was using a black hole as a paperweight, particularly as it was combined with a fear of environmental collapse. In private life, Amis may be the largest single contributor to Friends of the Earth, but a literary persona incredulous of purity and reassured by adulteration makes him an unlikely ecologist in his fiction. His urban portraiture, for instance, which must be some of the best ever written, comes into its own at precisely the point where the city ceases to be a nice place to live, becomes soiled and inhumane.
The attraction
of the astronomical digressions in The Information is presumably their distance from the human, but they are given explicitly to the author himself … In The Information, Richard lull is in the third person, and ‘Martin Amis’ occupies the first … Nothing that ‘Martin Amis’ says about himself clashes with what we know of our author, and some of it - about the awfulness of being a short teenager, for instance - would be touching in another context, but this solution to the negativity problem is a problem in its own right……The separation of ‘Martin Amis’, with his astronomy and his literary theory, from the world he describes breaks down before too long. He starts describing people he sees on the street in astronomical terms (a ‘yellow dwarf (pp. 124, 125, 280, 282), for instance), and before you know it Richard is comparing his family to the solar system.233 □ Some of Mars-Jones’s criticisms of The Information - for example, of its stereotyped representations of women - are echoed by Julian Loose in the London Review of Books, but on the whole Loose is more sympathetic, and he particularly applauds what he sees as Amis’s stylistic inventiveness, especially his ‘epic, frothing digressions’. Like Mars-Jones, Loose is able to set his appraisal of The Information in the context of Amis’s other writing; in contrast to Mars-Jones, however, he does allude, if discreetly (the reference in brackets to ‘publisher’s advances’, for example) to the controversy preceding the novel’s publication and to the real-life Martin Amis.
■ Clearly, for Martin Amis, enough is nothing like enough. To read him is to discover an author as voracious as his characters … Amis goes to any length to remind us of our whole-hearted addiction to the unwholesome - to alcohol, say, or nuclear weapons. The central character in his new novel, The Information, is so committed to smoking that he wants to start again before he’s even given up …
The Fiction of Martin Amis Page 22