Martin Amis: The Information. NY: Vintage, 1996. 384 pp.
Reading The Information is like eating popcorn – never filling, never satisfying, but once you’ve started, it can be oddly difficult to stop. Novelist Richard Tull works at Tantalus Press. (The name is carefully selected – in Greek mythology, Tantalus is the one who suffers eternally from unfulfilled desires). He is the type who would come over and drink your liquor, steal your girl, dump her, then come over again to drink more of your liquor and commiserate. “He takes in the disgust of the world and churns it out as disgust.” (Sam Spade, Amazon reviewer, 2011)
The plot involves Richard’s efforts to befuddle his friend, fellow author and rival Gwyn Barry, before going on to worse, much worse. What he never figures out until the end is that Gwyn responds in kind, only with far greater effectiveness. This suggests that Richard’s point of view, which controls the story for long stretches even though he is not the narrator, is not entirely to be trusted. Which in turn raises a few questions: To be sure, Gwyn achieves popular success, but does that really make him a writer of “complete crap”? Maybe yes, maybe no. (To judge by the book titles alone, probably yes.)
And is Richard really a neglected genius? This is how he sees things, but his objectivity is open to question. He reminds me of the New Yorker cartoon by Bek (Dec. 5, 2011). Sitting in the book-lined office of his agent or publisher, an author explains what his latest novel is all about: “It’s structured as a set of two parallel stories that no one would ever want to read.” This fits Tull to a T, as he is rejected not just by readers, but eventually by his own publishers.
When it comes to zingers, Amis delivers. “He was in a terrible state, that of consciousness.” (pg. 4) “He was the type of criminal who knew what recidivist meant.” (pg. 14) “These days he smoked and drank largely to solace himself for what drinking and smoking had done to him.” (pg. 30) “His obscurity was the only celebrated thing about him… He never even made it into Neglect.” (pg. 62ff) “Like all modern burglars he knew something about antiques.” (pg. 170) “He emerged, leaving behind a toilet resembling the kitchen of a serial murderer in slapdash but hyperactive career phase.” (pg. 213)
Plot and characters? Not so much. Only a few of them are interesting, and the author himself seems at times somewhat bored with his tale. Imagine – a crime story with zero suspense. As the reviewer for The Economist said of Lionel Asbo, the book “is a clutter of clever sentences that add up to little more than a guilty pleasure.” (June 30, 2012, pg. 86) Most readers will be checking and rechecking the final page long before reaching it, and doing the mental arithmetic – only 154 pages to go! To say nothing of the passages one is reading and – even before finishing them – wishing one wasn’t. For example the rather savage delight he takes in describing various circus-animal afflictions. (pg. 255)
What about language? Amis has a weakness for showing off his exalted vocabulary and making obscure, inside jokes. Striving to avoid the commonplace, he ends up wearying the audience. If you spend much time trying to figure out how, for instance, “suspension” can be “pluralistic,” this will turn into a long read indeed. (pg. 277) And what about his tic of repeating a sentence, changing just one word without thereby altering the meaning in any non-trivial way? The habit is annoying, as we waste time looking for some special significance that is just not there (tip of the hat to reviewer R. Russell Bittner for pointing this out first). While not a great novel, The Information may deserve first prize in the category “best over-written novel.”
Then there are the missed opportunities. Amis knows full well it would have been better to work his list of malapropisms into the character’s speech (as his father did, for example, in The Russian Girl), but he decides not to, claiming it “contorts the narrative.” (pg. 188) Let’s be honest – what he means is that he was unable to do so without contorting his narrative. And maybe the description of a man eating a grape (just one) would contribute somewhat to the tension if we knew beforehand – not just retrospectively – that the man doing the eating is a burglar in the midst of a job. It’s as if, when given the chance to create a bit of drama, Amis deliberately chooses not to, fearing someone might accuse him of being tawdry, of writing like – gasp! – Gwyn Barry.
Many times I seriously considered returning The Information to the used book store where I bought it and trading it in for something that did not baffle or annoy me quite so often. And yet I plowed ahead, hoping the next page might yield another of the highly polished gems scattered through the text. Such as “the dumb insolence of inanimate objects,” or “the flat smile of the deeply inconvenienced.” And he has an undeniable talent for coming up with faintly ridiculous book titles (The Wouldbegood: A Life of Edith Nesbit). Sometimes Amis’s cleverness is so subtle, it can slip by unnoticed. When Gwyn’s wife says (repeatedly) that “he can’t write for toffee,” she doesn’t mean that he can’t write well, as one might think; what she means is, “he can’t write for peanuts,” that is, for nothing, for no remuneration. “Much of the book seems an exercise in the author’s cleverness” – (hat tip to reviewer dreisnerbooks at Amazon, Sept. 3, 2010).
Who is the ideal audience for this book? It would probably have to include the super-smart types who wear their hipness on their sleeve. In the end, one keeps turning pages in a permanent mood of wry amusement until one’s lips get a bit tired of all that curling.
© Hamilton Beck
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