Tenderness and sorrow: Inside Story, by Martin Amis, reviewed

Inside Story is called, on the front cover, which boasts a very charming photograph of the author and Christopher Hitchens, a novel. It also has a good and comprehensive (14-page) index. I’ve been a book reviewer for 35 years and I’ve lost count of the number of times I have wished, professionally, for larger novels to have an index; but I’m not sure I can remember seeing one before. A non-facetious one, that is. This index is very much non-facetious.

Novel or not, then? I’ll try to get rid of this question as quickly as possible, but it has to be addressed (as I write these words, I have a feeling most of this review will be taken up with this, one way or another). There are characters called Martin Amis and Christopher Hitchens; there is Hitchens’s wife, Carol Blue; there is Amis’s wife, Isabel Fonseca (here called by her second name, Elena). There’s even a photograph of her. I know it’s her: she cooked me dinner once. But Amis often describes himself in the third person — ‘the loincloth’, he calls it at one point, as if he feels exposed unto nakedness by using the word ‘I’. (He is always ‘I’ in the footnotes, though, which are here in glorious abundance; perhaps he feels that the blocks of prose above them offer cover.)

On a first reading, I didn’t let this bother me too much, although it can get mildly confusing at times. I was just in a rush to finish the book, and not just because of time pressure: it was because I was enjoying it so much. Amis’s prose, as you should know by now, has a rush and a power that sweeps you along like surf: you’re never going to get a sentence that isn’t pulling its weight.