Be interesting!

John Lanchester

  • Experience by Martin Amis
    Cape, 401 pp, £18.00, May 2000, ISBN 0 224 05060 5

In the middle of the current memoir boom it is easy to forget that the novelist’s memoir is a distinct and recent genre. There are, it goes without saying, any number of first-rate writers whose main claim on our attention is their autobiographical work; there are great writers whose letters and/or diaries add up to masterpieces of self-portraiture (Byron, Woolf, Flaubert); there are, and this, too, is a contemporary phenomenon, writers who turn to fiction after an explicitly autobiographical first book. But none of those cases is quite the same as that of the novelist of established reputation and readership who at some mid or late point in his career (the pronoun is not quite gender-neutral, since for some reason it is usually a man) sits down to tell the story of his life. Nabokov’s Speak, Memory is in this and other respects an important book, and it also establishes the defining problem of the genre, which is how to give the memoir an artistically gratifying shape while remaining true to the messiness and quotidianness of lived life. It’s a problem which, to my mind, the great man outrageously flunked, settling for a spurious and cod-mystical belief in pattern, as if life were as pretty in its shapes and echoes and motifs as a work of fiction – his fiction. The much-acclaimed result, while full of astounding things, is also hysterical and, in some important sense, feels false.

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[*] There are a lot of footnotes about at the moment, and I thought I’d hop onto the bandwagon before it gathered any more speed. The footnotes in Amis’s book are often short diversions into memory or literary criticism, away from the main emotional axis of the book. Another literary memoir causing a storm at the moment is A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers, a 30-year-old American writer (and editor of the literary periodical McSweeney’s) who is currendy hoovering up the laurels in the USA. Eggers uses a huge repertoire of Post-Modern tricks – jokey prefaces, footnotes, frontpapers, etc – to moderate the main current of feeling in his memoir, which is about his parents’ near-simultaneous deaths and his subsequently having to bring up his younger brother. It’s as if he uses the footnotes to deflect, or escape from, the strength of his own feelings; which isn’t a zillion miles away from Amis’s use of them.