29/05/18: Anita Brookner – The Debut (1981)

Not many novels mention Totteridge, so I was pleased to read this: “Mrs. Cutler had spent the previous weekend with her sister-in-law, whom she loathed, in Totteridge (‘Beautiful place she's got there. Just like the country’).”

The Debut is a witty and insightful look at families and how dysfunctional they are. Ruth, an earnest young academic researching the works of Balzac, ends up putting her ambitions on hold as a result of her eccentric and demanding parents. There’s real poignancy, with plenty of laugh-and-cry-at-the-same-time moments. The character of Ruth’s mother, a minor actress, is especially well drawn.

Ultimately it’s a sad book about the ways our hopes and dreams are so often limited by the actions of others and circumstances beyond our control.

07/05/18: Martin Amis – The Rub of Time: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump and Other Pieces, 1986–2016 (2017)

I’m a big fan of Martin Amis and his collections of essays have always been as entertaining as his novels.

This book is organised around loose themes such as literature, politics, sport and more personal preoccupations. Most of these pieces are compelling even when you don’t care much for the subject – Princess Diana, the porn film industry and losing at poker in Las Vegas.

He can be very funny in places: “I went to see Four Weddings and a Funeral at a North London cineplex. Very soon I was filled with a yearning to be doing something else (for example, standing at a bus stop in the rain)”.

He absolutely savages Jeremy Corbyn, calling him “undereducated” and “humourless”, with “no grasp of the national character”. And he’s extremely astute about Donald Trump in a piece written in May 2016: “Telling it like it is? Yes, but telling what like what is? Throwing off the shackles of political correctness, Trump is telling us that he, like every other honest Republican, is a xenophobe, and proud of it. That is worth knowing. And what he is additionally telling us is that roughly 50 per cent of Americans hanker for a political contender who a) knows nothing at all about politics, and b) won’t need to learn – because the old ‘politics’ will be rendered defunct on his first day in office.”

Some of the other political essays were less riveting, and occasionally certain pieces don’t quite deliver. A review of a Philip Roth biography by Claudia Roth Pierpont, for example, simply consists of Martin’s own thoughts on Philip Roth’s career. Almost nothing is said about the book he’s meant to be reviewing.

I was disappointed to find some errors, too. The inside jacket states that “Martin Amis is the author of 10 novels”, then the list of his fiction offers 16 titles – of which 14 are novels. Similarly, it’s a shame to see Don DeLillo’s name spelt as “De Lillo” on page 234 when it was written correctly on pages 177–185. Given how much Martin values and writes about precision in language, he should at least have had a decent proof-reader go through this.

One of the most enjoyable offerings is an affectionate portrait of his friend Christopher Hitchens from 2010, written after he became ill but before his death (December 2011). “The Hitch”, Amis claims, thinks “like a child”, writes “like a distinguished author” and speaks “like a genius”.

Best of all are his illuminating articles on literature. Amis really gets to grips with J.G. Ballard, Philip Larkin, Vladimir Nabokov and John Updike, and brings sparkling insight to their work.