The Information by Martin Amis Harmony 386 pp. $24.00 Review by E. Scott Slater Featured in BBR August Martin Amis was the first writer to authentically portray the urban, comic, clever, slangy, dirty, well-educated, undogmatic voice of his generation. When encountered for the first time, his prose is both breathtaking and familiar, both a revelation and as ordinary as an evening with one's hippest and smartest friends. But there is obviously much more to Amis than mere style. It is increasingly clear that Martin Amis is one of the great comic moralists of 20th-century letters, a brilliant experimenter whose books resist easy categorization or compartmentalization. Readers find a wide variety of things to like or dislike in his work, which is ambitious in its breadth and verve, and constantly on the move intellectually. Amis may stumble, but it is never a dull stumble. His novels, especially Money and London Fields, belong simultaneously to the 19th century of Jane Austen, George Eliot and Charles Dickens (Amis acknowledges his debt to Dickens in the first chapter of London Fields when he lists the names of Keith Talent's multiracial girlfriends - like many of Amis's women, Dickensian grotesques - ending up with a "God bless them all") and the twentieth century of V.S. Pritchett, Philip Larkin, Vladimir Nabokov and Saul Bellow. (Amis has written engagingly about Austen, Pritchett, Larkin, Nabokov and Bellow, and often mentions the latter two as special influences). The jacket of Martin Amis's latest novel, The Information, describes the book as "a stellar accomplishment from one of the brightest young talents at work in the English language." Though it is undeniably true that Amis is one of the brightest talents of his generation, can the 46-year-old author of a 386-page meditation on mid-life crisis, literary envy and exhaustion (among other things) be described as a young talent? Even the literary quarterly Granta, in its Spring 1993 Best of Young British Novelists issue, was forced to define young as being under forty (though most of those included, being born in 1954, barely made it). Amis's concern is the central problem of our generation: our youth, and most especially the end of youth. The undoubted star of London Fields was Keith Talent, Amis's greatest character to date and one of the long line of English literary rogues. Keith Talent might have been an older brother to John Self of Money. Richard Tull, the protagonist of The Information, might be the baby brother in the Talent/Self family, the one who went to college. He drinks and smokes as enthusiastically as most of Amis's protagonists, vicarious pleasure being merely one of the many sorts of pleasures Amis bestows upon his readers in the course of his digressive novels. (Not many people can do digressive. If you are going to do digressive, and you are not Melville or Balzac, you proceed at your own peril. Astutely, Amis's digression is not the digression of the nineteenth century giants - there are no chapters on sail-rigging or paper-making - but rather the digression of the indefatigable raconteur, with his asides and witty turns). The Information is Amis's loosest and at first glance his least carefully constructed novel, but the rewards of Amis's highly personal version of digression are many and varied. Take Amis on the sun: Now here is something very sad to think about. The sun will die prematurely, in the prime of life, cut down at the age of fifty-three! One can imagine a few phrases from the obituaries. After a long struggle. Its brilliant career. This tragic loss. The world will seem a duller....Looking on the bright side, though (and Satan, when he visited it, found the sun 'beyond all description bright'), we mean solar years here, not terrestrial years. A solar year is the time it takes for the sun to complete an orbit of the Milky Way. And this is a good long while. The Information might momentarily disappoint those who read the excerpt published in the Spring 1994 issue of Granta. Most fans eagerly seized upon this slice of vintage Amis after the trickery of his Time's Arrow, and exulted in the story, the jokes, the subject matter; this was more like it. In the completed novel the excerpt is expanded, and at first reading I felt that Martin Amis's ear seemed off - he was making the old mistake of over-explaining and over-extending his jokes. One of the best bits in the Granta version is about the misery Richard Tull feels at having to bring his vacuum cleaner into be repaired: By the time he had wrestled the vacuum cleaner from its sentry box beside the boiler Richard had long been weeping with rage and self-pity. By the time he was out of the apartment with it he was wondering if he had ever suffered so. By the time he reached the hall downstairs he was busy concluding that Samuel Beckett, at some key juncture in his life, had been obliged to take a vacuum cleaner in. Beautiful in its three-beat simplicity, and hilarious. In the published novel the first line is followed by a paragraph about crying. After the second line there is a paragraph about the servantless world's effect upon literature. After the third line Amis makes an old stand-up comic mistake, that of not leaving well enough alone, of not trusting the joke. "CŽline too, and perhaps Kafka - if they had vacuum cleaners then." But once one becomes involved in the novel, one hesitates to give this expansion up. Quibbles are overcome during the happy experience of reading The Information (especially upon the second reading the book deserves) and ultimately one is pleased to have both versions. At the beginning of The Information, Richard Tull has just turned forty. ("Turned is right. Like a half-cooked steak, like a wired cop, like an old leaf, like milk"). He is the author of two published novels, Aforethought (published in Britain and America) and Dreams Don't Mean Anything (published in Britain only) and at least four others, all unpublished, including his most recent, Untitled. "And stacked against the future, he knew, were yet further novels, successively entitled Unfinished, Unwritten, Unattempted and, eventually, Unconceived." Richard supports himself at three jobs. As Literary Editor of The Little Magazine - The Little Magazine, for many years now, had lurked and lurched across town with the ruddily averted face of bum or baglady. Evicted often and forcibly from this or that blighted flatlet, it sometimes lingered in the dark behind the beaten door like a reeking squatter in his vest...On the other hand, The Little Magazine...really did stand for something, in this briskly materialistic age. It stood for not paying people. As Special Director of the (vanity publisher) Tantalus Press, second in command to owner Balfour Cohen - "Private" publishing was not organized crime exactly, but it had close ties with prostitution. The Tantalus Press was the brothel. Balfour was the Madame. Richard helped the Madame out. Their writers paid them...And a writer ought to be able to claim that he had never paid for it-never in his life. And as a book reviewer - "...busy reading all this crap about third-class poets and seventh-rate novelists and eleventh-eleven dramatists - biographies of essayists, polemicists, editors, publishers...he faced a catastrophe of deadlines." He has to write 700 word reviews about 700 page biographies, whose titles form a running joke throughout The Information - Antilatitudinarian: The Heretical Career of Francis Atterbury, or The Soul's Dark Cottage: A Life of Edmund Waller, or The Proverbial Husbandman: A Life of Thomas Tusser. He is married and the father of twin six-year-old sons, Marco and Marius. Richard wonders, on the morning of his fortieth birthday, what exactly he has done to deserve the life, and the face, he has. "These days he smoked and drank largely to solace himself for what drinking and smoking had done to him - but smoking and drinking had done a lot to him, so he drank and smoked a lot." The previous day his "oldest and stupidest friend," Gwyn Barry, had also turned forty. Gwyn is the author of two novels, the autobiographical Summertown, featuring the "clumsily and perfunctorily disguised (still the promiscuous communist with his poetry and his ponytail)" Richard, and Amelior. If Richard had chortled his way through Summertown, he cackled and yodeled his way through Amelior: its cuteness, its blandness, its naively pompous semi-colons, its freedom from humor and incident, its hand-me-down imagery, the almost endearing transparency of its little color-schemes, its tinkertoy symmetries.... Richard Tull eagerly awaits Amelior's publication day, and it is anticlimactic. "Amelior had been out for about a month. No stir had been caused by it, and therefore no particular pall had fallen over the Tull maisonette." But one Sunday morning Richard, at his breakfast table, reads some horrifying news - Amelior has entered the bestseller list at number nine. Richard's subsequent howl of agony distracts the more fragile of his young twin boys, Marco, into upsetting a table in the other room, which in turn provokes Richard into striking the child. It is a day of import in the lives of his family - the day Richard's patience collapses, along with his marriage and life. (Richard's impotence with his wife Gina is merely one aspect of the subsequent fall-out). "He made me hit my kid," is Richard's justification, his mantra, for the remainder of the novel, which is about his campaign (his "task. A literary endeavor, a quest, an exaltation...") to "fuck Gwyn Barry up." A clichŽ of literary success is that after a certain level of it a writer has nothing more to write about except literary success. The Price of Success is the overriding concern of much of literature, and one doesn't have to imagine how most authors would have handled the subject - one can read how in virtually any second or third novel written by an American. Martin Amis manages to avoid this pitfall not only by avoiding most of the earmarks of the genre, but by having as a protagonist a literary failure. (All the success happens to Gwyn Barry.) Besides being effective - failure is more entertaining than success - one gets the feeling that Amis is well acquainted with both sides of the equation. His oeuvre bears this out - Success, Money, London Fields and The Information all concern rises and falls, haves and have-nots, yobs and nobs, Princes and Paupers, there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I's. Richard Tull had at one time been effortlessly better than Gwyn Barry at everything. He had never lost to Gwyn. It used to be that Richard was better at everything: chess, snooker, tennis, but also art, love, even money. How casually Richard would pick up the check, sometimes at Burger King. How thoroughly, and with how many spare magnitudes, did Gina outshine Gilda. How good Dreams Don't Mean Anything had looked, in hard covers, when placed beside the weakly glowing wallet of Gwyn's footnotes to The Maunciple's Tale... Now it is Gwyn Barry who is winning, with the best-seller, the fortune, the beautiful and titled wife, the literary fame, the ceaseless media attention. (Richard still wins at chess, snooker, and tennis, but Gwyn is taking steps to remedy this). Richard Tull considers various schemes to "fuck up" Gwyn Barry, of varying cruelty and cleverness. He is forced to ultimately consider an act of violence - that is, having someone else commit an act of violence at his behest, even though Richard feels that this lacks "artistic justice," since there isn't really a point if Gwyn couldn't at least suspect who was responsible (as there would be, say, if Richard seduced Gwyn's wife, which he also attempts). He is amazed to learn that he could have "Gwyn killed for a thousand - for eight book reviews!" The source of this piece of information is one Steve Cousins, an autodidactic, pornography-impaired quasi-feral gangster who is a fan of Richard's books (which are literally unreadable - almost everyone who tries develops migraines or diplopia or worse) and a habituŽ of the tennis club Richard and Gwyn frequent. Richard Tull's conversations and plottings with Cousins and other characters occupy much of his time and the first two sections of The Information. Gwyn Barry's agent Gal Alpanalp, an old friend of them both, agrees to represent Richard Tull's novel Untitled, which she manages to place with an American publisher, and more or less in exchange Richard agrees to accompany and report on Gwyn Barry's eight-city American book tour for his third novel, Amelior Regained ("And why did they need to regain it? They never lost it," Richard grouses). Richard has never been to America, a fact "...he would tell you quite frankly, raising his pentimento eyebrows and tensing his upper lip with a certain laconic pride." One always looks forward to Martin Amis on America and Americans, because, unlike with most Englishmen, one doesn't come away feeling the deck was stacked. (The English were outraged that Amis was as hard on them in Money as he was on America and Americans). Besides having an American mother and wife, Amis has lived in the United States; his take is not the knee-jerk anti-Americanism of the typical London Labour Literary man. Most of the third section of The Information takes place in airports, hotels, receptions - just the sort of experience any self-respecting anti-American uses to accumulate cheap shots. Amis instead uses the simultaneous book tours (Richard is doing several radio shows and signings concurrently with Gwyn Barry) as a vehicle to satirize book-touring English literati. Richard had not, so far, found much to do in Washington, which was only the center of the world. All afternoon he reclined on his hotel bed in a trance of cunning. While Gwyn had done four photo sessions and six interviews in a variety of mediums, while also finding time to visit the Phillips Collection, the Senate, the Library of Congress and the National Museum of the Holocaust, Richard had succeeded only in washing his hair. This is not to say Amis doesn't excoriate the American publicity machine, Americans, and America. He appears on the Dub Traynor radio show in Chicago: We're almost fresh out of time here, and we were going to be talking to Gwyn Barry about his vision of a new direction for our troubled species, but here we have another British writer, Richard Tull, whose new novel has just appeared. Richard Tull. We know from the Amelior novels of your friend and colleague where he would have us go. How about you? What's your novel trying to say? "...It's not trying to say anything. It's saying it." "But what is it saying?" "It's saying itself. For a hundred and fifty thousand words. I couldn't put it any other way." "Richard Tull? Thank-you very much." Or his musings on the use of "Sir" in America: It was a nice idea, Americans calling everyone sir, addressing everyone - waiters, cabbies, toilet attendants, serial murderers - as . The consequence was, though, that they made sir sound like mack or bub or scumbag. In creating these literary rivals, Amis made clever choices about what sort of novelists Gwyn Barry and Richard Tull are. These choices are revealing about Amis's tastes and opinions, and about what he hopes to accomplish as a novelist. On the one hand, there is Gwyn Barry's Amelior: ...twelve youngish human beings foregathered in an unnamed and perhaps imaginary but certainly very temperate hinterland some time in the near future....Every racial group was represented, the usual rainbow plus a couple of superexotic extras....Each of them boasted a serious but non-disfiguring affliction: Piotr had hemophilia, Conchita endemetriosis, Sachine colitis, Eagle Woman diabetes...sexual characterizations were deliberately hazed....In the place called Amelior there was no beauty, no humor and no incident; there was no hate and no love. It is clear Amis has little patience for current fashions in literary publishing. On the other hand, there is the fiercely modernist Richard Tull: Essentially, Richard was a marooned modernist....Modernism was a brief divagation into difficulty; but Richard was still out there, in difficulty. He didn't want to please the readers. He wanted to stretch them until they twanged...Although his prose was talented, he wasn't trying to write talent novels. He was trying to write genius novels, like Joyce. Joyce was the best yet at genius novels, and even he was a drag about half the time. Richard, arguably, was a drag all the time. The Information is definitely a talent novel, a talent novel written by a comic genius. Martin Amis has said that one can feel or pick up Philip Larkin's cadences in his work - this is particularly so in the case of Amis's fiction - and Amis tips his hat to Larkin in The Information: "Richard thought that the adults [in Mick's Fish Bar] looked like child-murderers, and so did the children, with their hair-dos and earrings and their shallow, violent eyes." (From Larkin's How: "How few people are/Held apart by acres/Of housing, and children/With their shallow, violent eyes.") Other cadences from his favorite writers can also be discerned. But after reading The Information one understands that Amis's predominant cadence is that of literary quality,and a comedic voice unrivaled by other authors of his generation. E. Scott Slater is a writer living in Cambridge. &copy1995. Boston Book Review. All rights reserved.

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