Inside Story: A Novel by Martin Amis (Jonathan Cape, £20)

It is 20 years since Martin Amis published his memoir, Experience. A great deal has happened to him since then. Amis, his wife — Isabel Fonseca, who is Jewish — and their younger two daughters moved from London to Brooklyn. There has been a series of devastating deaths: his sister Sally; his mother, Hilary; Christopher Hitchens, his closest friend for almost 40 years; and Saul Bellow, often referred to as Amis’s literary father figure. And he has continued to be as prolific as ever. Inside Story is his eleventh book in 20 years.

It is huge and curiously hard to categorise. It is subtitled, A Novel, but it is really part novel, part memoir. And it is not difficult to decide which part is better. The novel is too long, largely dull and should have been better edited. There is too much irritating name dropping (“my pal Salman”) and verbiage (“a kind of anti-afflatus”, “that vertiginous plunge in self-belief”, “suicidal ideation”). The references to Trump are predictable and uninteresting.

Confusingly, some names are changed, some are not. There’s an awful lot about a woman called Phoebe Phelps whom Amis did (or didn’t) have an affair with almost half-a-century ago.

The memoir, though, is fascinating, the story of “a poet, a novelist and an essayist.” The poet is Philip Larkin, a lifelong friend of Martin’s father Kingsley from their Oxford days, a dark and deeply troubled presence in the middle of the book.

The novelist is Saul Bellow, whom Amis first met in the early 1980s. Amis was in his early thirties, half Bellow’s age. They remained close friends until Bellow’s death in 2005. Bellow was responsible, in a way Updike and Roth were not, for the Americanisation of Amis’s writing. He gave Amis a new literary voice and a great subject, “the moronic inferno”.

Perhaps above all, he introduced Amis to a kind of Jewishness that increasingly mattered in the younger writer’s work. Jewishness and “the deeps” (a phrase of Bellow’s), a preoccupation with the dark centre of the 20th century, the Holocaust and the Gulag. Inside Story makes it clear how important Nabokov, too, was to Amis but it would be absurd to call Nabokov a father figure to him. And when Kingsley Amis died, Martin called Saul Bellow and said: “My father died at noon today… So I’m afraid you’ll have to take over now.”

Probably Amis’s most intense relationship was with the essayist, Christopher Hitchens, himself the son of a (reluctant) Jewish mother. Both were born in 1949, both went to Oxford in the late 1960s and started out in literary journalism together. The wonderful photo on the cover of Inside Story is of the two young men together. There is much talk about sex, drink and cigarettes, but the best talk is about politics and death. When Bellow and Hitchens are centre-stage the “novel” really comes to life. The mood darkens, the book grows up. The descriptions of Bellow’s decline into dementia and Hitchens’s battle with cancer are excellent. They are Martin Amis at his best, and that is very good indeed.

David Herman is a senior JC reviewer