Experience: A Memoir
by Martin Amis
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Book Summary Information
Author: Martin AmisEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2001-06-12
ISBN: 0375726837
Number of pages: 432
Publisher: Vintage
Book Reviews of Experience: A Memoir
Book Review: 90 Percent Proof
Summary: 5 Stars
I gave Amis's memoir 5 stars because I have to---it is that good. ("Pale as a Sex Pistol," is not nearly his best, and it's very, very good.) And, admittedly, I was nearly finished with the book before it hit me that Amis almost had me convinced that chronic alcoholism can actually put a spring in one's step if you only had a sense of humor!
The deepest impulse behind this memoir is to protect his father's image and reputation. It was a preemptive strike against future excavations by lesser sorts who write biographies, are too pc, etc., into Kingsley Amis's life.
Martin Amis is very clear that he was concerned about his father's reputation vis-a-vis posthumous publication of his father's letters. He didn't want his father to suffer the fate of Philip Larkin.
What is brilliant about this memoir is how Martin uses language that consistently plays down his father's behavior and incites (thereby diminishing) the behavior of others. Nothing is Kingsley's fault. Nothing. There is a near-Christ like depth of understanding and forgiveness that permeates his take on his father.
I am just doing this from memory but here are some examples. During a bad time in the marriage between Kingsley and his second wife, Elizabeth Jane Howard, Martin Amis witnesses Jane doing all the work, including a lot physical work, in order to move house. While Kingsley sits around doing nothing but drinking, Jane's moving furniture is "maschochistic." Kingsley is "gently incapaciated." It's striking how Martin uses a perjorative term for Jane and obliquely soft language for his father. In this case, why wouldn't Kingsley be passive aggressive, or destructive?? Why is Kingsley's behavior described with utter homeliness and Jane's sent to the hells of pyschology?
The breakup of the first marriage ("remember," his father intoned to Martin and his brother, "I will always love your mother")... Well, I grew up with an aloholic, too -- and not a literary one-- and by God if that's not the exact same words my father said to my siblings and me -- and you could be sure Kingsley was drunk. Yet, this statement is treated as if it comes from some fathomless well of love. All evidence suggests that Kingsley's behavior towards his first wife was serially cruel.
I defy anyone to find a passage where Kingsley is not held up in a better light than anyone else who walks through the memoir.
Martin Amis has been called the Mick Jagger of literature but he has more in common with the fictional/cinematic Michael Corleone. Amis is a genius and his talent is beyond dispute but he was gifted with something else -- he manages to stay stable under the most strange, difficult circumstances. His mother noticed this -- she said he was born under a lucky star; his father stated, "...he is sane."
As Experience draws to its close, Amis is sitting at his father's bedside in the hospice. He is working on a review of Gore Vidal's first memoir and he is able to write it, while is emotions are "woefully disordered."
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