James Wood Experience by Martin Amis (Jonathan Cape) Experience is a beautiful, and beautifully strange book, and it is unlike anything one expected. One feared a trough of plaint: either a sad, Gosse-like reckoning with the father; or an angry, journalistic reckoning with those journalists who have hunted Amis from tooth to tooth. But Experience is not quite a memoir, nor is it quite a portrait of his father, Kingsley, nor is it really an autobiography. It is an escape from memoir; indeed, an escape into privacy. In the very book that may, at first glance, seem most exhibitionist, most shamelessly metropolitan, Amis has retreated to the provinces of himself. This book often reads like a letter to his family and closest friends. It is sometimes embarrassing to read; the ordinary reader feels voyeuristic, but very moved. What seems at first just gossip and guest lists – sprays of names offered without explanation, diaristic footnotes, a refusal to universalise – becomes a tender defiance, as if Amis wanted the book to vibrate with an atmosphere of wounded privacy.
Thus Experience has an undulating, open-ended form, something like a notebook whose pagination has been erased. Chronology is scrambled, so that we may move from the mid- 1990s back to Amis’s earliest childhood, forward to the 1970s, then forward to the moment at which he is writing the book. Experience reminds us that life is lived backwards but is thought forwards. It is imbued with a sense of the past, especially childhood, as a future already determined. The book’s main theme is that innocence will necessarily become experience, song turn to growl. As Amis describes it, that change happened savagely and quickly to him, in 1994 and 1995. These years are the book’s pivot, the wound to which the text returns again and again. In 1994 Amis learned that his cousin, Lucy Partington, who had disappeared in 1973, was one of the victims of the serial killer Frederick West. Also around this time Amis lost an old friend (Julian Barnes), an old agent (Pat Kavanagh), separated from his wife and two children, became horribly famous for his teeth (not, of course, the extraction of a few molars, but the reconstruction of his entire jaw) and lost his father. He also learned that he was the father of a 17-year-old daughter, Delilah Seale, whom he had never met. Innocence had been vandalised. These experiences are wrought in a rich and sedimented prose that displays all of Amis’s usual powers of nimble paradox, with wonderful plumage and peacockery. Yet as the book describes Kingsley’s last days in hospital, Amis knows how to dilute his tangs, and let a flatter, harder prose report the inevitable: “How hard it is to die. You have to chase it, panting.” And finally this bony epitaph, as Martin looks at his father’s corpse: “It is 1995 and he has been there since 1949.” What is so moving is the rightful selfishness of those dates: he does not write “since 1922”, Kingsley’s birthdate, but “since 1949”, which is his own. Amis buries his patterns deep in the aesthetic textures of his book. At one point he tells us that a local Italian restaurant serves a dish that might be translated as “from grandmother’s handbag”. There is a joke that one might as well fancy “a plate of hairgrips and DentuFix”. The book has established teeth as one of its themes of hardship: there is a funny riff about the indignity of Martin’s having to buy Steradent for his dentures. Thus “DentuFix”. But why “hairgrips”? Seventy-four pages later we learn in a footnote that Lucy Partington’s body was found with rope, packing tape and two hairgrips. So a plate of “hairgrips and DentuFix” is essentially a plate of experience, a plate of pain. From such painful, painstaking pebbles, such subtleties of detail and implication, is this fine, affecting book built.