In The Information, a pitilessly professional literary agent explains that nowadays the public can only keep in mind one thing per writer. Authors need definition: ’”[l]ike a signature. Drunk, young, mad, fat, sick: you know”’ (p. 130). Amis’s handle could well be: insatiable. And not just because he has become such a Post-Modern operation that, as we used to say of Madonna, even his publicity gets publicity. One of his favourite metaphors - for accumulating phone-calls, deals, anxieties - is of jets stacked in the sky above some fogbound airport (perhaps ‘Manderley International Junk Novel Airport’) (p. 318), a consummate image for contemporary over-stimulation and over-supply, for what can barely be accommodated and yet won’t nearly suffice. Amis once proposed ‘never being satisfied’ as Philip Roth’s great theme (Moronic Inferno, p. 44) but it is the boundless nature of need that he, too, endlessly celebrates and satirizes. And if Amis is the poet of profligacy, the expert on excess, it is because he is himself full of what he might call male need-to-tell, what John Updike has diagnosed as an urge ‘to cover the world in fiction’.234 Money may have been the definitive portrait of Eighties materialism, but Amis has a sly suspicion that we haven’t yet tired of reading about the things we cannot get too much of - like fame and money, sex and information.
Amis’s latest anti-hero suffers from too much information, and not nearly enough fame, money or sex. Richard Tull, a ‘“charisma bypass”’ (pp. 172, 174, 449), lives on the obscure margins of the literary world … Richard’s lot goes beyond the common unhappiness of the mediocre. The morning post brings demands from his publishers for the return of advances on unwritten books, and a solicitor’s letter from his own solicitor; he is acutely impotent, and - plagued by intimations of his own mortality (having just hit 40) - cries to himself in the middle of the night. What twists failure’s stiletto ever deeper is the corresponding success of his only friend, Gwyn Barry. Gwyn has written a blandly accessible novel about a New-Age Utopia and, inexplicably, become an international bestseller. Richard is more than bitter: he is consumed beyond all reason, ‘exhaustingly ever-hostile’ (p. 103). And so, in the best tradition of Amis characters, he formulates a plan, a mission: ‘to fuck Gwyn up’ (p. 38).
Of course, Richard proves no better at revenge than at anything else……As [his] strategies variously fizzle out or detonate in his face, the narrative takes the form of one of the many books he’s failed to write: ‘The History of Increasing Humiliation’ (p. 129). We soon realize that all plot lines, all other characters exist only in so far as they serve to detain Richard in a never-ending ‘Mahabharata of pain’ (p. 41). If Gwyn never quite seems a worthy subject of Richard’s outsize fury, it is because he never carries much conviction as a subject. Similarly, the women in the novel remain mere objects of desire and disappointment. They may know all about tears (a woman crying is ‘make-up in melt-down’ (p. 291)), but they don’t get to read Proust, write books or take any decisions: Amis frankly gives up on the attempt to make them more than two-dimensional, acknowledging ‘difficulties of representation’ (p.256). He also reminds us more than once that literary genres are in a muddle, now that ‘[d]ecorum is no longer observed’ (p. 53), but perhaps another decline is unintentionally mapped in this novel, a descent from black comedy to mechanical farce. For despite the ever-entertaining wit, the only twist is that there is no twist, and a terrible predictability sets in, as though Richard’s chronic habit of failure had consumed the novel itself.
The Information makes much of rivalry and hatred between authors, but to describe the book’s subject as literary rivalry seems a category mistake … Rather, The Information is a study of envy and egomania that happens to play itself out in the world of publishing … there is no sense of one writer warding off another’s potentially crushing influence, or of the fragile accommodations made between near-equals … If The Information has anything to say about literary rivalry, it is because, for Amis, writing is an activity as inherently confrontational as tennis, or tag wrestling …
If The Information fails to induce apocalyptic awe, it may be because, apart from the droll sketches of literary circles, this new novel is a very familiar Amiscellany. There’s too much of the same: male envy, not least between authors and near twins; furious games of tennis … ; alcohol-fuelled trips to America, empire of trex [rubbish, junk];235 sad men staring disgustedly in bathroom mirrors at faces blasted with age and ridden with ‘bigboys’ (p. 197); villains who speak a post-Yardie patois and believe in getting their retaliation in first; talk of ‘batch’ [batchelor] (pp. 36, 78,166, 264 - see also Money, pp.63, 171) and ‘spinst’ [spinster] (pp.36, 37, 78, 165, 264, 269), and orthodontic descriptions of urban decay (‘the sound of fiercely propelled metal as it ground against stone… the whole city, taking it deep in the root canal’ (p. 67)). The cosmological interludes of London Fields return with a vengeance: ‘[t]he quasars are so far away and getting further away so fast. This is to put Richard’s difficulties in context’ (pp. 163-4). This is also to risk a sense of fatigue, for over-use can make such astronomic comparisons seem all too dull and sublunary, perhaps prompting us to recall the Total Perspective Vortex featured in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979), that exquisite torture which does nothing more than show you your ultimate significance in relation to the rest of the universe.
Yet the loss of all sense of proportion is, of course, why Amis is so enjoyable to read … we may feel that with The Information Amis has ended up down a cul-de-sac, but his writing is still fantastically rich. There is no better place to find the spot-on perception: Americans call everybody ‘sir’ but manage to make the word sound like ‘mac or bub or scumbag’ (p. 323); people’s mouths ‘nuzzle the necks’ of cellular telephones (p. 105), and bike messengers wear ‘city scuba gear’ (p. 102); a flock of birds rears up ‘like a join-the-dots puzzle of a human face or fist’ (p. 103); in pre-natal classes, adults sit around on the floor and gaze up at teacher ‘like the children they would shortly bear’ (p. 164).
The offbeam precision of the Martian poet is only one of Amis’s modes, but it lends his writing such casual authority that frequent assumptions of the first person plural are unusually persuasive, even when ‘we’ would rather be included out: ‘[b]itter is manageable. Look how we all manage it’ (p.42). ‘We may think we are swearing at others, at traffic. But who is the traffic?’ (pp.466-7). Hungry for the universal, and attentive to the vagaries of excess, Amis will go places other writers won’t: ‘[i]f we think about it, we all know the sneak preview of schizophrenia, with the toilet paper, those strange occasions when there seems to be no good reason to stop wiping’ (p.236). Often, though, Amis’s imagined reader seems more specific, a product of what Richard’s son calls ‘“male-pattern boldness”’ (p. 66): ‘[t]he sense of relief, of clarity and surety a man feels, at the prospect of temptation, when he knows he has washed his cock before leaving the house’ (p. 175).
In his earlier novels, a more-or-less recognizable ‘Martin Amis’ might appear and make playful remarks, such as: ‘“I really don’t want to join it, the whole money conspiracy”’ (Money, p. 262). Martin Amis’s presence in those books modishly alluded to Heisenberg’s principle (an observed system interacts with its observer) and dramatized the unequal, even sadistic relationship between author and creation. The Information features more of ‘Martin Amis’ but less of the playfulness. Richard can’t seem to decide if our present ironic age ends up with stories about writers, or with stories about ‘rabble, flotsam, vermin’ (p. 129). Certainly it is the latter which allowed Amis and ‘Amis’ to come into their own. Where in London Fields we learn that Keith Talent went through his mid-life crisis at the age of 19, or read that ‘[i]n common with Leo Tolstoy, Keith Talent thought of time as moving past him while he just stayed the same’ (p. 172), the gap between the protagonist’s low-life awareness and the author’s cruelly superior understanding was the joke, the ironic motor for the fiction. But The Information is dominated by Richard Tull, a figure who (success and readab
ility apart) is much like Martin Amis. Admittedly ‘Martin Amis’ tells us about the very specific perils of teenage dating when you stand only 5-feet-six (‘or 5’ 61/2”, according to a passport I once had’ (p.281)), but he, too, takes his kids to Dogshit Park, shares many of Richard’s thoughts, and would seem to know what it is to experience a mid-life crisis - or, rather more grandly, ‘a crisis of the middle years’ (p. 62).
That crisis finds narrative expression in a kind of theatrical throwing-up of hands: ‘how can I ever play the omniscient, the all-knowing, when I don’t know anything?’ (p. 63). Amis-the-narrator keeps reminding us that he doesn’t control his own characters (‘To be clear: I don’t come at these people. They come at me. They come at me like information formed in the night’ (p.260)). Where the unstoppable John Self knew he had our sympathy (even if he wanted ‘much, much more of it’ (p. 29)), ‘Amis’ makes a show of interrupting himself, dismissing language and fiction as inadequate to the task, losing his patience like a harassed teacher: ‘[w]e are agreed - come on: we are agreed - about beauty in the flesh’ (p. 15). But this forsaking of authority is everywhere betrayed by flexes of authorial muscle (‘I think we might switch for a moment to the point of view of Richard’s twin sons’ (p.43)), and by the sheer virtuosity of the writing. No one since Sterne has described impotence with such relish, even summarizing the theme in literature (‘as for Casaubon and poor Dorothea [in George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch (1871-72)]: it must have been like trying to get a raw oyster into a parking meter’ (p. 168)). Perhaps the one thing Amis cannot do, we realize, is communicate a Beckettian sense of exhaustion, or a feeling that he is no longer in control. When he declares that ‘the information is telling me to stop saying hi and to start saying bye’ (pp. 124, 282), we can’t help but note that only Amis would say it that well, with that vernacular spin - and, of course, want to say it at such length.
Redundancy is integral to the Amis project. Richard lull delights in the self-defeating way in which abbreviations - MW for microwave, FWD for Four Wheel Drive - contain more syllables than the words they represent. Similarly, Amis flourishes three dazzling similes when one would do, or conjures up the perfect image, only to take it one step further: ‘[i]f the eyes were the window to the soul, then the window was a windscreen, after a transcontinental drive; and his cough sounded like a wiper on the dry glass’ (p. 46). Amis likens the beer-sticky streets of Ladbroke Grove to the darkness and fire of Pandemonium, and indeed his similes are increasingly Miltonic, always threatening to detach themselves from the main narrative and strike out on their own. Thus Richard, about to enter Gwyn’s large and lavish house:
Gwyn’s set-up always flattened him. He was like the chinless cadet in the nuclear submarine, smalltalking with one of the guys as he untwirled the bolt (routine check) on the torpedo bay: and was instantly floored by a frothing phallus of seawater. Deep down out there, with many atmospheres. The pressure of all that Gwyn had. (pp. 17-18).
The primary pleasure of reading The Information is that of being regularly swept up in these epic, frothing digressions. The effect is like the description of an American interviewer Richard encounters, whose superficial ‘warmth’ and ‘niceness’ (p. 295) have been turned up on the dial ‘as if these qualities, like the yield of a hydrogen bomb, had no upper limit - the range had no top to it - and just went on getting bigger and better as you lashed them towards infinity’ (pp.295-6). Such passages are so enjoyably overwhelming, so addictively all-consuming, that you feel you want to read a novel by Martin Amis even when you are reading a novel by Martin Amis.236 □
The responses of Loose and Mars-Jones are part of the process by which the reputation of a novel, the reputation of a writer, are formed, and John Nash’s essay ‘Fiction May be a Legal Paternity’ considers The Information in relation to issues of critical reception, academic syllabi, and ‘canonization’ - the admission of a text to a ‘canon’ of works which are held to have ‘literary value’:
■ The recent publishing and journalistic excitement surrounding Martin Amis’s latest novel, The Information, is a timely addition to the critical debate over the canon. It raises the issue of the necessity of judging contemporary writers while simultaneously revising the criteria of the literary……In interview, Amis has explicitly raised the question of literary status as regards his own writing, and it is the subject-matter of The Information. An important issue raised by the novel is that of a reader’s responsibility when faced by a fictional text that asks the question of value, and in doing so values that very question. In valuing the question, then, any answer remains only tentative. This novel proposes the necessary inevitability of a judgement that is at once invoked and left open, along with the question of how to value. In The Information Amis relates this question to genre and style, and to the question of canonicity, as well as raising the issue of our own responsibility towards current ‘serious’ writers. The novel is a timely reflection that anxieties over the canon may themselves be canonical for academic literary studies.
Amis has said that his latest novel is based around the problem that there are no demonstrable means of distinguishing good writing from bad (yet the distinction is still operative), and that one must simply place faith in one’s talent.237 Time, we are often told, will tell. In The Information, the principal protagonist, Richard Tull, repeats these lines with specific reference to the institutionalization of the problem within English studies:
you cannot demonstrate, prove, establish - you cannot know if a book is good … The literary philosophers of Cambridge spent a century saying otherwise, and said nothing (p. 136).
We are then offered one-sentence summaries of the work of LA. Richards, William Empson and F.R. Leavis.
There has indeed been a certain obfuscation of the boundary between author and character. A recent interview with the Guardian Weekend displayed a forlorn-looking Amis on its front page, head encircled by a background dartboard, with the title, ‘An Interview with Mr Talent’, a seemingly deliberate evocation of the arrows-artist Keith Talent from London Fields.238 Most obvious in such journalism, of course, is a certain glorification of the writer, which invites confusion only to reinforce the singular talent of the author. This will be particularly important for The Information.
Behind Amis’s questioning of literary value is a belief in its ultimate possibility, in what he calls (in a piece on Bellow) ‘the luck of literary talent itself (Moronic Inferno, p. 9). In The Information the sympathetic Richard is a critic more than a writer, someone whose value system more or less accords with a literary establishment or syllabus, at odds with the short-term values of a world that praises the prize-winning Amelior, written by his rival and oldest friend, Gwyn Barry. Richard works at a smalltime publishers, the Tantalus Press, home to the talentless. This is how the relationship between the two writers is described:
The unspoken wisdom was that Richard … reserved the right to keep it clear that he thought Gwyn’s stuff was shit… Oh yeah: and that Gwyn’s success was rather amusingly - no, in fact completely hilariously - accidental. And transitory. Above all transitory. If not in real time then, failing that, certainly in literary time (p. 112).
Writing in this conceptualization operates on a dual temporality: as a commodity in ‘real’ history and autonomously in a … ‘literary’ dimension in which ‘Shakespeare is the universal’ (p.253). At the intersection of the two is the manifestation of talent, a sort of ur [primitive, original, earliest]-literature. However, it is often difficult to recognize that talent because of our local temporal horizons……
[I]n The Information,… Richard’s interior voice has been dislodged, which he blames on Gwyn’s easy success. ‘He wants to do to Gwyn what Gwyn has done to him. He wants to assassinate his sleep. He wants to inform the sleeping man; an I for an I’ (p. 91). Richard’s desire for repose has been terminally disrupted: good cannot be told from bad and voice has also become indistinguishable. Traditions of the literary and the marketplace become commens
urable discourses.
Amis’s characters include varieties of the self-referential. There are the writer Martin Amis in Money, another writer, M.A., in London Fields, and I in The Information. Notably, the degree of explicit authorial intrusion has steadily diminished over the course of these three novels. At the same time that Amis writes his name out of these novels, the topic of writing and value becomes increasingly important for their plot and structure. In Money the literary value of writing is associated only with the character Martin Amis; writing is here much more about other denominations of value. In London Fields the quality of the written is a vehicle of exasperation for the narrator, jealous of the apparent success of M. A. By the time The Information is with us, however, literary value is the thrust and point of the book, and here Amis shows himself only in silhouette: in sign-language initials to a nameless child, in physical description.
Yet there is an I voice for The Information which is associated with Amis. And this voice worries too about its reception:
In a million millennia, the sun will be bigger. It will feel nearer. In a million millennia, if you are still reading me, you can check these words against personal experience …
Later still, the oceans will be boiling. The human story, or at any rate the terrestrial story will be coming to an end. I don’t honestly expect you to be reading me then (p. 114).
The Amis figure thus places himself in the literary timeframe, which is metaphorically also that of universal explosion.
Richard’s restlessness is also that of the mid-life crisis (MLC), post fatherhood, and the information that comes to him at night, with ‘[i]ntì-mations of monstrousness’ (p. 64), is the knowledge of his mortality. Amis’s own MLC has been well-publicized in interviews. For this is the occasion when one first views the intersection of real time and literary time. For [Harold] Bloom, literature is itself a form of MLC: ‘[a]ll that the Western canon can bring one is the proper use of one’s own solitude, that solitude whose final form is one’s confrontation with one’s own mortality’. Bloom is no longer in the spring of life and a certain morbidity creeps into his polemic. ‘The canon’ we learn ‘is the minister of death’. It is, however, itself a rather aged minister not up with our times. ‘We possess the canon because we are mortal and also rather belated.‘239
The Fiction of Martin Amis Page 23