ALSO BY MARTIN AMIS
FICTION
The Rachel Papers
Dead Babies
Success
Other People
Money
Einstein’s Monsters: Stories
London Fields
Time’s Arrow
The Information
Night Train
Heavy Water: Stories
Yellow Dog
House of Meetings
The Pregnant Widow
Lionel Asbo
The Zone of Interest
NONFICTION
Invasion of the Space Invaders
The Moronic Inferno
Visiting Mrs Nabokov
Experience
The War Against Cliché
Koba the Dread
The Second Plane
The Rub of Time
EDITOR
Philip Larkin: Selected Poems
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF AND ALFRED A. KNOPF CANADA
Copyright © 2020 by Martin Amis
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape, an imprint of Vintage Publishing, a division of Penguin Random House Ltd., London, in 2020.
www.aaknopf.com
www.penguinrandomhouse.ca
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC. Knopf Canada and colophon are trademarks of Penguin Random House Canada Limited.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
Curtis Brown, Ltd.: Excerpt from “In Memory of W.B. Yeats” and “September 1, 1939” from Another Time by W.H. Auden, copyright © 1940 by W.H. Auden, copyright renewed 1967 by W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd.
Faber & Faber Ltd.: Excerpt from “Jerusalem” from Yellow Tulips: Poems 1968-2011 by James Fenton, copyright © James Fenton. Reprinted by permission of Faber & Faber Ltd.
Faber & Faber Ltd and Farrar, Straus and Giroux: Excerpts from “Aubade,” “Annus Mirabilis,” “This Be the Verse,” “The Trees,” “To the Sea,” “Vers de Société,” “Next, Please,” “Going, Going,” “Love Again,” “High Windows,” “Self’s the Man,” “Dockery and Son,” “The Mower,” and “The View” from The Complete Poems by Philip Larkin, copyright © 2012 by The Estate of Philip Larkin. Reprinted by permission of Faber & Faber Ltd and Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
Ebook ISBN 9780593318300
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Amis, Martin, author.
Title: Inside story : a novel / Martin Amis.
Description: First American edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2020. | Includes index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020021012 (print) | LCCN 2020021013 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780593318294 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593318300 (ebook)
Subjects: GSAFD: Autobiographical fiction.
Classification: LCC PR6051.M5 I57 2020 (print) | LCC PR6051.M5 (ebook) |
DDC 823/.914—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020021012
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020021013
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: Inside story / Martin Amis.
Names: Amis, Martin, author.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200228269 | Canadiana (ebook) 20200229834 | ISBN 9780735281301 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780735281318 (EPUB)
Subjects: LCSH: Amis, Martin—Fiction.
Classification: LCC PR6051.M58 I57 2020 | DDC 823/.914—dc23
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cover photograph by Geraint Lewis /Alamy
Cover design by Chip Kidd
a_prh_5.6.0_c0_r0
To Isabel Elena Fonseca
Contents
Preludial
PART I
1 | Ethics and Morals…The American eagle
Guideline: Things Fiction Can’t Do
2 | Phoebe: The Business…So I went round there
Guideline: The Novel Moves On
3 | Jerusalem…Bitter furies of complexity
Guideline: Literature and Violence
4 | The Night of Shame…She’s scaring me, Hitch
Transitional: The Sources of the Being
PART II
1 | France in the Time of Iraq 1: Anti-américain
2 | September 11 1: The day after
3 | September 11 2: The day before the day after
4 | September 11 3: The days after the day after
5 | France in the Time of Iraq 2: Shock and Awe
Interludial: Memos to my reader, and ‘Oktober’
PART III—DISSOLUTIONS: ANTEPENULTIMATE
1 | The Shadow-Line…Nobodaddy
2 | Hitchens Goes to Houston…He’s an ox
3 | Politics and the Bedroom…Not left wing enough
4 | Hitchens Stays On in Houston…The synchrotron
5 | And say why it never worked for me…Invidia
PART IV—PENULTIMATE
Preamble: The Fire on New Year’s Eve
1 | Christopher: Everyone Pray for Hitchens Day
How to Write: The Mind’s Ear
2 | Saul: Idlewild
How to Write: Decorum
3 | Philip: The Love of His Life
How to Write: Impersonal Forces
4 | Beelzebub
How to Write: The Uses of Variety
5 | London: Phoebe at Seventy-Five
PART V—ULTIMATE: DOING THE DYING
‘It seemed that out of battle I escaped’
The Poet: December 1985
The Novelist: April 2005
The Essayist: December 2011
Postludial
Afterthought: Masada and the Dead Sea
Addendum: Elizabeth Jane Howard
Illustration Credits
Preludial
Welcome! Do step on in – this is a pleasure and a privilege. Let me help you with that. I’ll just take your coat and hang it up here (oh, and incidentally that’s the way to the bathroom). Sit on the sofa, why don’t you – then you can control your distance from the fire.
Now what would you like? Whisky? Common sense, in this weather. And I anticipated, I divined your needs…A blend or a malt? Macallan’s? The 12 Years Old or the 18? How do you like it – with soda, with ice? And I’ll bring in a tray of snacks. To keep you going until dinner.
…There. Happy 2016!
My wife Elena will be back around seven-thirty. And Inez will be joining us. That’s right – stressed on the second syllable. She’ll turn seventeen in June. We’ve been pared down to just the one child for now. Eliza, her slightly older sister – Eliza’s been doing her gap year in London, which after all is her home town (she was born there. As was Inez). Anyway, it so happens that Eliza was planning a visit – and she’s just touched down at JFK. So it’ll be the five of us.
Elena and I, we’re not there yet, but the next phase in our lives is already in plain view. I mean Empty Nest…There are only about half a dozen real turning points in an average span, and Empty Nest looks to me like one of them. And you know, I’m not sure how worried I ought to be about it.
Several contemporaries of ours, having watched their last fledgling flutter off into the distance, succumbed within minutes to passionate nervous breakdowns. And at the very least my wife and I will start to feel
