Kwik-E-Martin Amis
Or, the wittiest bits of Inside Story
At the sentence level, Martin Amis is the best writer going. He’s the one, after all, who declared the War Against Cliché. The sound of a sentence, its weft and warp, the precise meaning of each word: These are his obsessions.
At the book level, the sentences can get lost. His latest is Inside Story, billed on the cover as a novel but filled with other useful descriptors, such as life-writing, a baggy monster, and smirk novel. That last one is what results the successful novelist takes hundreds of pages to obsess over his sales numbers, critical acclaim, fabulous friends and gorgeous wife. Also, 9/11 and the Holocaust. Plus Saul Bellow, Philip Larkin, and The Hitch. And many, many footnotes. The monster’s bags overflow with life.
But back to his life sentences, and the wit therein. Here are my 10 favourites, culled from a file of 112 highlights from a 560-page book. (Not bragging, just laying out the stats).
Four Similes
An act of terrorism fills the mind as thoroughly as a triggered airbag smothers a driver.
While the ‘A’ novelists were carrying on as normal, the ‘B’ novelists (who had long been hazy presences on the fringe) were suddenly everywhere, composing novels as structureless as alphabet soup and as wayward as schizophrenia.
While Elena was making her final inspection he opened the window and stuck his head out of it: under one vast and lonely cloud (as wispily flotational as an elderly combover), in freakish sunshine, little figures paddling, splashing, jumping, running.
‘A hospital gym,’ I went on, ‘it’s a contradiction – like a Young Conservative.’
One Metaphor
A form of words like stifling heat or biting cold or healthy scepticism or yawning gap; adjective and noun, long-married couples who ought by now to be sick of the sight of each other.
One Anecdote
Advised not very late in life that unless he gave up smoking he faced imminent quadriplegia, Sartre said he would need a while ‘to think it over’.
Four Pearls
Envy is negative empathy, it is empathy in the wrong place at the wrong time.
The idea that sullen pessimism is a mark of high seriousness has helped to create an organic (perhaps by now a hereditary) resistance to the affirmative and a rivalrous attraction to its opposite – the snobbery of one-downmanship.
The death of the father kicks the son upstairs.
With the death of the mother, the son goes skyward too, clutching the banister, and more or less of his own volition – but he is seeking his childhood room and his childhood bed.
One Bonus Aside
Even the most dedicated Texan must see that the Lone Star is not a good name for an ambitious modern hotel.
Ten-ish, anyone? There’s 11 sentences, but there’s so much more from the man who proudly consults his thesaurus every hour, “just to vary the vowel sounds and avoid unwanted alliterations.” Here are three useful words from among the many I had to look up:
Deliquescence, n. - the process of becoming liquid, used to describe the feeling of hearing that one’s mother has died.
Formication, n. - a sensation like insects crawling over the skin. Huge difference here between the letters m and n.
Iatrogenic, adj. - relating to illness caused by medical treatment. Or as Amis tells Hitchens in the cancer ward: “It’s not the disease that’s doing it, it’s the fucking doctors.”
The baggy monsterness of this book may be communicable, so I’ll butt out here. But that reminds me: Smoking turned Martin Amis’s tongue black, and “It turned out to be nothing that half an hour with a toothbrush and a bar of soap couldn’t put right.”
Fine, one more observation, just to close it off:
‘You’re upper class and you’ve got a very loud voice. Is it congenital?’ I once asked an upper-class friend. ‘Yes. It comes’, he blared, ‘from centuries of talking across very large rooms.’ If upper-class girls were in the vanguard of the Sexual Revolution, which they were, it came from centuries of loudly asking for what they wanted and expecting to get it.
Link link, nudge nudge
What better palate cleanser for a boomer novel full of delicate sentences than a Gen Z viral video full of stomped punchlines? Sure beats scrubbing your tongue. (h/t, jenkins)
Therein lies Get Wit Quick No. 72, a veritable smirk de soleil that also doubles as a book report. To write Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting, I put my thesaurus in a bag and tossed that bag into the river. Betcha it’s deliquescent by now. Martin hated puns but Bellow and Hitch welcomed them. I welcome taps to the ❤️ below.
Recently discovered this newsletter and it is already one of my favourites.
I look forward to sitting down this Sunday and taking a deep dive through the archive.
Thanks you for taking the time to do this and put the work out there.
Tom.