Inside Story
MARTIN AMIS
(JONATHAN CAPE, 560 PP, £20)
Tablet bookshop price £18 • Tel 020 7799 4064

Known as the “bad boy of literature”, Martin Amis certainly demonstrates a good amount of bad: arrogant, opinionated, elitist. He is a clever-clogs who enjoys being perverse, showing off and showing up. So what to make of his new so-called novel? He tells the reader his work won’t read like a novel and invites us to think of it more as an anthology or a set of linked short stories. Fictional characters and imagined conversations appear alongside autobiographical features such as photographs, footnotes and index.

The temptation to think of Inside Story as a grab-bag should be resisted. Not a random selection of memories and ideas, it is rather a love letter to the power of friendship and the English language. To take last things first (Amis fashion), the final section of this long book is devoted to three deaths – of the novelist Saul Bellow, the poet Philip Larkin and the essayist Christopher Hitchens, Amis’ lifelong friend. All these people Amis loved deeply, as mentor, father figure and best mate.