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A review by bryce_is_a_librarian
Inside Story by Martin Amis
5.0
Inside Story was always going to be a dicey proposition for me, centering as it does around a tribute to Christopher Hitchens, a man whose greatest accomplishment in life was somehow managing to serve as a useful idiot for *every* side of the political spectrum.
The first half wasn't bad so much as just semi baffling, pulling extensively as it does from The Pregnant Widow, that most universally beloved book of The Amis Canon. Never quite coalescing into the book I thought it was going to be (I thought the Amis/Hitchens friendship versus the Amis/Larkin friendship would be the engine of the book) and while it's unfair to criticize a book for not being the book that you had in your head, wrong footed is wrong footed.
But the second half builds in power until it becomes quite overwhelming. For all its flaws, this is a reckoning on career, life and art from the author who is most likely the most important of my thirties. I cannot help but be moved. It does what it says on the tin.
The first half wasn't bad so much as just semi baffling, pulling extensively as it does from The Pregnant Widow, that most universally beloved book of The Amis Canon. Never quite coalescing into the book I thought it was going to be (I thought the Amis/Hitchens friendship versus the Amis/Larkin friendship would be the engine of the book) and while it's unfair to criticize a book for not being the book that you had in your head, wrong footed is wrong footed.
But the second half builds in power until it becomes quite overwhelming. For all its flaws, this is a reckoning on career, life and art from the author who is most likely the most important of my thirties. I cannot help but be moved. It does what it says on the tin.