Book this blog entry will be about: Martin Amis, The Information
Book that was the bane of my existence for the last two weeks: Martin Amis, The Information
Book that I can't decide whether I liked or hated: Martin Amis, The Information.
My sister suggested that I restrict each post to just one or two books so that she doesn't have to wade through pages and pages of rambling (or rather she still does, but if it's only one book at a time she doesn't have to lose her place in the rambling) so, here goes, What I Thought of Martin Amis' The Information.
First off, sorry, but this is a mean boy book, and I don't mean this in the John Grisham sense of the term - I can deal with evil corporate lawyers and their scheming, since you know the good guys will win in the end - more in the Saul Bellow/John Updike sense, where everyone is mired in their lives of quiet desperation and unhappy tense marriages that are seething with horrific untold secrets and bad behavior but everyone keeps playing bridge and drinking cocktails anyway. It's the combination of hyperarticulateness combined with a teensy bit of arrogance about said hyperarticulateness that results in a misanthropic miasma over the whole book, and the poor reader (me) feeling alternately too stupid to be an adequate audience for all the literary gymnastics and irritated at him for thinking he's that much cleverer than the entire rest of the world. Minor revelation: the act of reading (I am thinking of this for the first time, so this thought might not come out right, but bear with me) puts the reader in the same situation as the _characters_: i.e. none of you really know what's going to happen next, you're all quite invested in finding _out_ what's going to happen next, and you're all at the whim of the author, so when the author creates mostly despicable characters you feel depressed yourself, lumped in with all these people who cheat on their spouses and spend their child support money on drugs and sabotage their friends' careers out of jealousy (just to pluck a few random examples out of the air), even if you yourself are a decent-ish person who doesn't do any of those things. Yes, I think that's it.
He (Martin Amis) is indubitably a fantastic writer on a sentence-by-sentence basis: there were some really, really, really nice phrases that just stopped me in my tracks (although if the writing stops you from continuing to read is that good writing? hmm. to ponder), and a few metaphors that had me giving little out-loud grunts of pleasure. I didn't, of course, bring the book with me to the coffee-shop where I am sitting now - in fact, it was a loaner copy, so it is out of my hands forever - so I can't flip through and look for particularly juicy ones, but I do remember "the eye-hurting metallic colour of the sky" in Miami mmmmm yes eye-hurting perfect adjective.
HOWEVER, big-picture beef with this book (I won't say Martin Amis, since I haven't read any of his other novels, but I am definitely wary) is the lack of any even remotely sympathetic character anywhere in the book - they really are all either stupid, mean, petty, grasping, unreliable, psychotic, or a combination of the above - and the stops and starts in the plot. It was a bit like an opera, in that the action happens in brief flurries of slightly wacky recitative (which if you haven't read the plot synopsis in the program might not make a whole lot of sense), and then everyone stands around and sings for ten minutes about how they feel about what just happened. Sort of the same with this except it doesn't come with a handy plot synopsis, so when on the third to last page there was an apparent child-abduction followed by random release of unharmed same, another character getting assaulted (vs. murdered, I couldn't tell), and either a spontaneous or purposely-staged episode of cheating spouse caught in flagrante with vengeful backstabbing friend, after pages and pages and pages and pages and pages and pages and pages of nothing happening, I was totally thrown for a loop.
I will sneak in a brief mention of The Piano Teacher, by Janice Lee, which I am probably not going to finish. I was hoping a dumb novel about glamorous 1930's Hong Kong would be full of spicy sex and political intrigue, but the spice/intrigue/glamour factor is, I think, too far outweighed by the dumbness. I'll give it another chapter before I pack it in...
