Amis' Information on Our Shores

BOOK

The Information

by Martin Amis

Harmony Books, $24.00, 374 pp.

It's surprising that Martin Amis hasn't made many waves on this side of the Atlantic.

In England, the author's relatively minor difficulties, mental, dental and love-related, make the front page of Vogue magazine. At Oxford University, (where every other boy has a leather jacket and a pocket Wittgenstein, where every other haircut resemble's Bono's on the 1983 cover of the "War" album, and everyone pretends to scoff at success) Amis is a normal topic of discussion. I couldn't find a single person at Harvard who had even heard of him.

The former Oxford roaring boy is certainly a big name among the American literati, (securing an interview with him proved impossible) but he hasn't made the impression on popular culture that he has in Britain.

There certainly were a lot of people attending Amis' reading at Waterstone's Bookstore last Wednesday, but they were all, well, old people.

The few college students I saw must have been there to get an autograph from Will Self, who, apparently following a self-styled recovery plan, has stopped shooting heroin and started getting drunk at seven o'clock.

But I digress. Self, the opening act, recited quite beautifully from memory a morbid, witty short story called "Scale." Amis read from his latest novel, The Information, to much laughter and applause from the old people (and me).

Amis' latest novel is a scathing satire of the literary establishment that created him, or, at least, made him a big name. Though The Information is not as corrosively funny as some of its predecessors, (I'm thinking of London Fields in particular) it is terribly addictive, witty and engaging.

The Information centers around Richard Tull, a ridiculously obscure, soon-to-be ex-novelist. Richard is of that most quintessentially English brand of heroes: he is a loser. (In fact, the first installations of Amis' novel appeared in an issue of Granta magazine called "Losers.") To some extent, the author embodies, in Richard the stereotypical English hatred of success. His (anti) hero is an unmitigated failure whose humiliations Amis delights in recounting.

Richard is also a hopeless anachronism, still mired in the swamp of post modernism. (His latest novel has 16 unreliable narrators.) The guy still snorts coke. He doesn't know it's the nineties.

Richard's best friend and worst enemy is the daft, cheerful Gwyn Barry, whose glib utopian novel, Amelior, has rocketed to the top of the bestseller list. Stupid, shallow and immensely popular, Gwyn resembles Tod Friendly, the ex-Nazi from Amis' last novel, Time's Arrow. Of course, the public laps up Amelior, as Richard (who, as a soon-to-be-ex-novelist, has plenty of time on his hands) begins to plot revenge.

Luckily, Richard does have one fan, a psychopath named Steve Cousins (a.k.a "Scozz,") the only person in the world to have read and understood a Richard Tull novel. (He stole it from a hospital library where it was making the patients sicker.) Scozz, "a true professional, someone who hurts people in exchange for cash," agrees to help Richard "fuck Gwyn up."

Of course, things don't exactly turn out as planned. Scozz doesn't prove to be much help at all. As Richard tries everything: wife-stealing, scandal-mongering and slander to get Gwyn out of the picture, he slowly goes mad. Naturally, Gwyn foils every one of Richard's attempts at revenge. In the end, Gwyn exacts his own revenge for Richard's petty crimes, and he gets the girl too. This climatic scene is a little much, and, after 300-something pages, a bit of a let-down.

This dilemma is typical of Amis' writing. As in London Fields, the details in The Information are often brilliantly rendered, but the big picture doesn't quite add up. Still, Amis' ability to transform the mundane into the morbidly funny makes the novel worth reading. The passages describing Richard are gems:

"In fact, physically, at times, [Richard] felt epiphanically tragic. His doctor had died four year ago ('Unfortunately, I am terminally ill.') And that, in Richard's mature opinion, was definitely that. He had a large and lucent lump on the back of his neck. This he treated himself, by the following means: he kept his hair long to keep it hidden. If you went up to Richard Tull and told him he was in Denial, he would deny it. But not hotly."

Advance word on The Information was that it was a roman a clef of sorts about Amis' relationship with his friend, the novelist Julian Barnes. But Amis is too subtle for those kinds of games. Looking for the author in the text denies the fact thatThe Information is capable of standing on its own.

As ludicrously high-minded as it might sound, Amis is interested in art, and the self-indulgent nature of art. The real pleasure of reading The Information comes in the author's adeptness at conveying this:

"The truism is true," he writes," and the criminal is like an artist (though not for the reasons usually given, which merely depend on immaturity and the condition of self-employment): the criminal resembles the artist in his pretension, his incompetence and his self-pity."

Amis willingness to laugh at himself, and at literature in general is one of the biggest strengths of the novel. Amis' gift became particularly important Wednesday night at Waterstone's. Desperate for an interview, I went to get my copy of The Information signed, forgetting that I had taken notes for my review on the dedication page. "Martin Amis is really (I had written absent-mindedly in the margin)...SHORT." Martin Amis read that little inscription as he signed my book. He smiled at me with his brand new, ten-thousand dollar teeth; but it was a British smile, revealing nothing.