He also seemed not to be getting around to many of the subjects that would have interested me most, which made his focus on things I didn't care about even harder to bear. Martin è stato un giovane talento e non ha mai dubitato che avrebbe scritto per vivere, l'esempio del padre, famoso donnaiolo, lo spinge a far presto esperienza anche in quel settore e, seppure con garbo e senza grossi intenti pettegoli, Martin ci elenca le sue innumerevoli compagne, fidanzate, più un paio di mogli e tutto il dolore che i passaggi di mano tra l'una e l'altra gli hanno causato. Kingsley’s book is fragmentary and episodic in design, but the prose is crisp and the text is genuinely funny; while Martin’s is incredibly touching in parts and more emotionally honest, does contain the same literary ticks that disturb me in his fiction. I got perhaps fifty pages on tooth pain, tooth anxieties, trips to dentists, and ruminations on the dental problems of famous novelists.

This image has been exacerbated by tabloid antipathy, the choice of subject matter of his most well-known works and the privileged position that came down to him from his father, Kingsley. I was a reluctant fan of the man before (wholehearted of his writing, though, I should make clear) but this memoir brings me into the fold.And when the man is a novelist -- why he's hardly to be trusted more than any of the members of the Fourth Estate Amis inveighs against. In the first, Amis reproduces letters, mostly from his childhood and young adulthood, which he sent to family members and friends. Experience is a remarkable book: savage, side-splitting and full of the kind of tenderness that sometimes risks sentimentality.

In all other respects, Blacker thought the book masterly: "In a deceptively cunning narrative weave, casting backwards and forwards from his childhood to his middle age, from his father's marriages to his own, he worries away at the polarities of innocence and experience, love and death. Amis also examines the case of his cousin, Lucy Partington, who disappeared without a trace in 1973 (a month after the publication of his first novel), and was exhumed in 1994 from the back garden of Frederick West, Britain's most prolific serial killer.Life is breathed through Amis, and he manages to recreate his father not as a heartless Tory or an ignoramus adulterer, but as a father who happened to follow a few selfish exploits and had less than common political mantras to uphold, but in the end was still a good father whom Martin, Philip and Sally could all respect and love.

Once those two facts have been clearly established he wouldn’t need to bang on about them in the prose and we’d no doubt have much more insightful novels. If only he'd stuck to writing about smoking, shagging and snooker, on the other hand, he might even have been the next Nick Hornby. In fact, Martin handles these scenes particularly well, but there is just too little information for those who aren't in the know. How can you not like a person who welcomes a previously unknown, illegitimate child with such excitement? I liked Experience sometimes (for its wit) and I was touched sometimes: It is truly elegiac when it comes to Kingsley's boozer's death.

Much of Christopher's discourse, at the dinner table in Vermont, can be found in this 8,000 word essay, which he wrote, so to speak, as a gentile. Martin obviously feels extremely strongly about this, and there is no arguing with such deep hurt and outraged feelings.

Looking back, he reflects that he probably made it past the interview period and into Oxford just by being himself. Shunning orthodox chronology for more satisfying linearity, Amis explores the issues that have dogged his life and his reputation for too long. All the kids' voices in Experience -- those of the narrator as a child and those of his own children -- are done with a clairvoyant accuracy that wrings the heart even though it's funny. Ian Hamilton, in the Sunday Telegraph, contrasted the pained, middle-aged Amis with the confident youth who had enjoyed instant literary success in the 1970s.Perhaps Amis is tired of this subject, fodder for the Fourth Estate for ages, but surely it deserves more comment than the brief passages on it and the letter he wrote to "Dear Jules". Whether you love or hate Amis, the sentences he crafts are as sparkling and witty and imaginative as anything, and his pronouncements are somehow uttered with this devastatingly quiet authority of hipness that you sort of can't help but take him seriously.