Martin Amis

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Gavin

Scalding and fantastical send-up of novelists and readers. About a nasty little man made insane by being low status - or, rather, by his friend becoming high status. He's completely destroyed by valuing position so much, by his crab mind:

  Richard, who would not mind being poor if no one was rich, who would not mind looking rough if no one looked smooth, who would not mind being old if no one was young.


This is all the worse because he has taste and good ideas, between his maudlin self-pity and terrible ideas:

   It would be a book accounting for the decline of the status and virtue of literary protagonists. First gods, then demigods, then kings, then great warriors, great lovers,then burghers and merchants and vicars and doctors and lawyers. Then social realism: you. Then irony: me. Then maniacs and murderers, tramps, mobs, rabble, flotsam, vermin.

Literature describes a descent... Literature, for a while, can be about us... about writers. But that won't last long. How do we burst clear of all this? 



Richard's complete, painful self-absorption shows that literary envy, male rivalry, and the fear of death are similar if not the same: childish rage when you can't get what you want.

Amis keeps interrupting Richard (himself) to talk about outer space, the fate of stars, the rounding error that we are: Amis undercuts pathetic irony with ultimate meaning, which is the reverse of the usual trick. I think this author insertion is why people call it 'postmodern', though of course it's an ancient trick and Amis doesn't share their mean ideology. There's also self-reference:
What was Richard? He was a revenger, in what was probably intended to be a comedy.
Or maybe it's because Richard is a bland modernist (which here means: no fun) and Amis is taken not to be. Richard has violent thoughts and a violent worldview but is not violent, he fails to be violent; and Amis contains that container.

There are unannounced focal shifts every couple pages, three of which focalisations sound very similar to each other (whether psycho Steve, revenger Richard, misanthrope Martin).

  
 This, surely, is how we account for the darkness and the helpless melancholy of twentieth-century literature. These writers, these dreamers and seekers, stood huddled like shivering foundlings on the cliffs of a strange new world: one with no servants in it. 



It's not just about books; the underworld of 90s Britain also gets it:

  
 the criminal resembles the artist in his pretensions, his incompetence, and his self-pity.



You have to go a very long way - through tell of murdered children, celebrated suicides, denied misogyny, embraced misandry, deep duplicity - to get the merest possibility of redemption and getting over yourself. (And even that subverted: The season of comedy... Decorum will be observed.) The middle drags terribly. It's worth it. 

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* The titular Information is hard truths, avoided thoughts, intimations of inadequacy and mortality.

  
The information is advertising a symposium of pain. Pains of all faiths and all denominations... It is ordinary and everyday. On the beach the waves do it ceaselessly, gathering mass and body, climbing until they break and are then resummoned into generality with a sound like breath sucked in between the teeth.

Weakness will get you where you are weakest. Weakness will be strong and bold, and make for your weak spot. If in the head, then in the head. If in the heart, then in the heart. If in the loins, then in the loins... The information is nothing. Nothing: the answer is so many of our questions. What will happen to me when I die? What is death anyway? Is there anything I can do about that? Of what does the universe primarily consist? What is the measure of our influence within it? What is our span, in cosmic time?



* Richard's friend is called Gwyn (Welsh for blessed).
* His book 'Untitled' is so serious that it causes its readers physical harm, like a petty version of the samizdat in Infinite Jest.
* Amis is more like Gwyn than Richard in career terms (got an unprecedented £500k advance for this) but is obviously temperamentally more like Richard.
* The more literary a work, the less it says plainly: the fewer hints you get. That is, *puzzles* are part of the essence of literariness. The bad reading of this is that it's all about showing off: how clever and sphinxish the author is, how clever and oedipal the reader, how able to delay gratification (or go without it) each is. Amis' books are quite puzzley, Richard's very much so, Gwyn's not a jot.
* This line works as a diss on New Labour:

  It often seemed to him, moving in the circles he moved in and reading what he read, that everyone in England was Labour except the government.


even though the book was written in 1994, before New Labour. A joke which survives inversion!
* Presented without comment.

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