“Experience” by Martin Amis

This summer marks twenty-five years since the publication of this unconventional literary memoir by Martin Amis (1949-2023), written when he was fifty, and not long after the death of his father Kingsley Amis. It is not a typical autobiography in any shape or form. Any kind of chronological structure is avoided in favour of an approach in which selected aspects of the author’s life experiences are explored out-of-sequence and all mixed up together. This really should not work, and it does create problems for the reader, but it really does. I found this book to be compelling and very memorable. Parts bored me a touch. Amis includes a load of letters he sent to his father and step mother when he was at college and later at university, mostly asking for money. They demonstrate his extraordinary talent for writing, but really add nothing more. Then there are far too many passages about the extensive and expensive dental work he had done at various times. These are seriously tedious.

I would though recommend this book, particularly if you are already acquainted with the broad outline of Kingsley and Martin Amis’s lives and with their major novels. A certain amount of familiarity is necessary and rather assumed. It is not an easy read in that so much of it is concerned with mortality. Martin Amis’s cousin, Lucy Partington, was one of Fred and Rosemary West’s murder victims. She disappeared suddenly in Cheltenham one night in 1973, her remains later being discovered along with a dozen or so other sets buried beneath the cellar or garden of the West residence in Gloucester. She was a student at Exeter University where I now teach. The book explores the appalling and ever-lasting impact this murder had on Martin Amis’s wider family. Towards the end there is a lengthy section about the final illness and death in 1995 of Kingsley Amis. This is so extraordinarily well-written that it is difficult to stop reading it for an instant. The story of the hospital visits are mixed with memories of his father’s life, their sometimes awkward relationship and thoughts about some of his novels. It is really worth reading ‘Experience’ just for that eighty pages or so near the end that are entitled ‘one little more hug’.

The other aspect of this memoir which makes it well worth reading is Martin Amis’s perceptions of the large number of well-known and impressive literary people he has known in his life. Aside from Kingsley Amis and his second wife Elizabeth Jane Howard (who Martin admired a great deal), Philip Larkin, Saul Bellow and Christopher Hitchens are prominent. He also takes the opportunity to indulge in a bit of score-settling, particularly with Julian Barnes who he fell out with in the 1990 when he switched literary agents and decided he no longer wished to work with Julian’s wife Pat Kavanagh.