Experience

It's somewhat a vindication of himself, a vindication of everything bad ever said about him. That he's so vain e spends a fortune on cosmetic surgery, he replies with the quite terrifying and harrowing tale of his teeth; that he had a poor relationship with his father, he demonstrates the opposite; that the West's murder of his niece was partly because his family were tragically torn apart, he counters with the real sorrow of being a mourning family of the victim; and it works for me. He clearly has a strong rapport with his father. etc but what struck me most of all was his harrowing account of his cousin's murder. Of course, there is no rhyme or reason to those sort of brutal events but if I was put up against a wall and would be show more murdered myself if I didn't give one, I would say Martin Amis has been able to share such an awful event with the world in a manner that helps us all have a better insight into how this sort of sorrow must feel.

I deducted a star for the jumpy narrative and excessive footnotes. (If it's good enough to make a footnote, it's good enough to be seamlessly incorporated into the story) (and brackets so I'm somewhat hoist on my own petard!) show less

Martin Amis warns the reader very early on in his memoir that he's going to do a lot of name-dropping. It's a good strategy, since "Experience" is to literary memoirs what "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" is to album covers. It seems that Amis has shared a cup of coffee or had an intimate friendship with just about anyone who's published anything of importance in the British Isles at any point during the last seventy-five years. When I was reading Richard Ellman's biography of James Joyce, it struck me how often all those Modernist authors met up, exchanged letters, or became friends. At the time, I assumed that things were different now and that the world was too large – and literature's market too fragmented – for that sort show more of clubbiness to occur anymore. While I'll take Joyce over the younger Amis any day of the week, "Experience" suggests that this isn't quite so: famous and important literary types still know how to find each other, and they do so with surprising regularity.

I also think that Amis made a good choice when he decided that his memoir wasn't gonna be a chronological history but a freewheeling collection of loosely structured anecdotes. Considering the enormous amount of alcohol that's been consumed in Amis's vicinity, it's sort of hard to avoid comparing "Experience" to a particularly talky and entertaining drinking session, and I'm not sure Amis would argue with this comparison. He's both expansive and digressive throughout, and his use of footnotes to insert additional commentary only adds to this book's conversational tone. Amis is, after a fashion, rather suited to this literary form: his eye for detail is as sharp as ever, and the wry cynicism that has made it difficult for me to really love him as a novelist serves this material well. Among all the anecdotes, Amis does manage to touch on the big issues: there's the death of his father and of Ricardo Fonseca, an artist friend, the birth of his children, and the disappearance of Lucy Partington, a cousin who was later discovered to be one of Fred West's victims. And, as others have mentioned, there's an awful lot about his teeth, which are, apparently, almost as awful as Shane McGowan's. There are also a few things missing here. There are few details in "Experience" about Amis's own love affairs or about the business of writing. Indeed, it almost seems that Amis considers novel writing to be a day job that he'd rather not talk about when he's not at the office. Perhaps he's saving those subjects for his next memoir, to be written when he reaches appropriately advanced age, perhaps a decade or two from now. show less

One of the most unique works of autobiographical fiction I have ever come across, this epic covers different aspects in the life of Martin Amis - his murdered cousin, his relationship with his father, his teeth - in a spectacularly non-linear way. Brilliant.

The memoir is a guided tour, no free ranging research with the price of admission. It is likely closer to a slide show. One mustn't shuffle the sequence. It alleges itself as a report, an account. It isn't submission. That is unseemly. I often felt ill at ease when reading Experience. My friends and I read Zachary Leader's biography of Kingsley Amis a few years back. The sordid details of the home life and its philandering projections really bothered me. Such an upbringing also gave a context to Marty's less than stellar moments. The pauses, omissions and gaffes fuel the narrative. The footnotes underscore the narrative. We must agree with Kingsley's observation that life is grief and labor. I suppose Forster is also on target and I show more should feel that Amis connected with me, the reader, though I'm not sure I welcome such. show less

Fascinating, very personal insight into the lives, loves and losses of one of the great, late twentieth-century English literary families. Non-linear structure adds to interest, intercutting late teenage school & university letters home with later events, making the links between the major themes across time. Particularly strong on the decline and death of his father. Flashes of laugh-out loud humour. A master prose writer.

It is all kinds of strange and inconsistent to have read this so early in the game: I'd only read Money, a few somewhat-forgotten chapters of London Fields and his dad's big, obvious book. Pretty entertaining for a book that uses most of its space to settle completely obscure scores: the idea of transforming from "Yorick" to "Hamlet" is a good conceit, the descriptions of his wrecked teeth and subsequent dentistry are suitably horrifying and the Lucy stuff induces dread. The section about Kingsley Amis's death is pretty good. Low points are Amis gushing about John Travolta's focus and his fevered hyping of Saul Bellow's Ravelstein, below.

I liked the review that described this as the love story of a father and a son. Don't advise reading this if you're having teeth issues.