THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, May 21, 1995 TAG: 9505200253
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY DAVE ADDIS
LENGTH: Medium: 91 lines
THE INFORMATION
MARTIN AMIS
Harmony Books. 374 pp. $24.
IT IS entirely possible that more printers' ink and public-radio air time have been devoted to debating the circumstances of Martin Amis' new novel, The Information, than to debating the book itself.
The author should be thankful. The clatter of gossip surrounding the book has distracted from the reality that Amis (Money, London Fields, Time's Arrow), for 20 years the bright young genius of British letters, has produced a disappointingly flawed novel.
To summarize the clatter: Amis set tender British sensibilities on edge when he demanded an $800,000 advance for The Information. To get that, he dumped his longtime British agent - the wife of one of Amis' closest friends - and turned to a saw-toothed American agent who sealed the deal.
In the United States, where $800,000 is about the price of a second-rate shortstop or an NBA benchwarmer, Amis' maneuvering was viewed as just good business. To the British it was high treachery, a stunning breach of some code of purity to which aesthetes there are expected to cling.
The critics set out to put young Amis - at 45, not such a pup anymore - in his place. It got so ugly across the pond that Amis was accused of engaging in this debasing scuffle for money because he needed a new set of caps for his vain little teeth.
``I ask you to understand how weary I am of this whole subject,'' Amis said when all this was dredged up in an interview on National Public Radio. ``I haven't chopped anyone up and put them under my kitchen floorboards. . . . It doesn't sound very headline-grabbing in American terms today.''
Indeed. Let's stick to the book.
The Information, the author admits, is somewhat autobiographical and in no small way a midlife-crisis novel. Its narrator is Richard Tull, a literary legend in his own mind who had some small success with his first two books, but hasn't sold anything in years. He clings to the periphery of letters by editing horrid tomes for a vanity publisher, writing reviews of stale biographies of little-known poets and editing a little magazine called The Little Magazine, whose audience matches its title.
Having just turned 40, Tull is choking on self-doubt. His wife works to support the family while Tull house-husbands their two young boys and grinds away at what he hopes will be his breakthrough novel, disastrously titled Untitled. His wife has given him an ultimatum: Succeed with this one or hang it up. Tull has responded with a bout of impotence.
Were all this not difficult enough, Tull's best friend, Gwyn Barry, has become a literary meteor with a warm-and-fuzzy book about a utopian society. Gwyn is a horrible writer and something of a twit. But he has a drop-dead gorgeous wife with connections to royal society. And he has much of the literary world laying palm fronds at his feet.
In short, he has a lot that Tull had dreamed would be his own.
Disbelieving at first, then cancerous with envy, Tull sets out to destroy his friend. He plants hideous gossip in high places, conjures an intricate plot accusing Gwyn of plagiarism and engages a posse of strange, young netherworlders to stalk Gwyn and beat him senseless.
Amis draws this plot, and its characters, with brilliance. At its best The Information is a dark and brutishly funny tale of unchained envy and the internal terror of a man at midlife watching helplessly as his world stumbles out of control.
But the writing - incomparable in many places - stumbles out of control as well, often enough to be wholly annoying.
A running gag has it that every editor who attempts to read Tull's new novel is stricken by a crippling migraine by page eight. It is tempting to believe that Amis structured some of his own prose to give readers of The Information a small taste of what Tull's readers are suffering.
Amis even steps out from behind the narrator, at strange and inappropriate intervals, to speak directly to the reader as Martin Amis, author of the novel. The reader is tempted to shout back at him, ``Oh, shut up and get on with the story.''
And that's why The Information may prove the British critics right, that it will never cover Amis' $800,000 advance. When the story is allowed to evolve, it is deliciously entertaining. But when the author becomes enamored of the beauty of his own writing, as Amis often does, the reader has to wonder whose gratification he had in mind when he wrote this book.
- MEMO: Dave Addis is a staff writer. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
GARY ISSACS
Martin Amis concentrates too much on himself and not enough on his
plot in ``The Information.''
by CNB