Experience

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It is moving, angry, honest, and above all wonderfully stylish; it is packed with incident and anecdote, and very, very funny. The second part is mainly about his father's dying and increasingly I realised this was more a biography of dad than of Martin, perhaps to show dad's biographer that he hadn't always got it right and that the son knew far more. He mentions Nabokov and Joyce throughout Experience, first for what he perceives as a physical fraternity (all three had to have all their teeth removed. In silence Kingsley went down on one knee, there on the doormat, and the boys, also silent, and unblinking, dubbed him in turn with a touch of the blade on either shoulder.

This memoir really isn’t for the women (the many women, it seems) in Martin’s life, but for his father Kingsley, his ‘twin peaks’ (Nabokov and Bellow), Christopher Hitchens, his mother Hilly, brother Philip, and his cousin Lucy Partington.I disliked its spleen, smugness, resentment and lack of self-knowledge, the marks of the pampered and the overpraised down the ages. He clearly wanted to show that he wasn't the spoilt brat the press had described and he didn't have all that dental work done for vanity. He also suggests that Christopher Hitchens is, "funnily enough", Kingsley's ideal reader -- a judgement that, on the basis of the evidence presented in this book, sounds more convincing.

He readily acknowledges the nepotism that got him published and widely reviewed at the age of twenty-one.

Experience was published in 2000, partly in reflection of his father (passed in 1995), and also in response to the discovery – decades later – of his cousin Lucy’s remains among the many victims of Frederick and Rosemary West (1994). Far from setting the record straight Amis seems to have largely obscured it (except, perhaps, some of the stuff about the teeth, and the fact that everyone cried at Kingsley's funeral -- the only facts he really seems to care about). Before him in the silence lay the stilled battlefield: the state of Israel, thoroughly outmanuvered, comprehensively overthrown.