Less boring than I think, or more?
I’m reading The Pregnant Widow. I’ve heard some good things about it, and I thought The Information was intermittently brilliant, albeit irritating in places, and boring in places, so I’m reading it. The first few pages were electrifying, and I was all excited, thinking I’d struck gold. But then it turned out the first few pages were different from the next pages.
I’m pushing. Hard. I’m trying and failing to resist boredom and the resulting feeling of exasperation – the “why are you telling me all this?” feeling.
Anybody read it? Anybody love it?
Hmmm yes, that’s what I thought. NY Times review – doesn’t come right out and say it, but clearly finds it boring. Review is full of filler, then at the very end he (Graydon Carter) gets around to actually attempting to review the book, and…well he finds nothing much to say, and seems embarrassed about it.
Nothing goes on. There’s endless scene-establishing, and nothing happening. And it’s fucking boring. Self-indulgent and boring.
Don’t people notice when they’ve written a boring novel? Obviously they don’t, but they ought to.
I’m not familiar with the novel, but your account reminds me of my reading The Nannie Diaries. It opens with a brilliant little essay by way of introducing the novel. Which is terrible. And you realize that the essay must have been what was pitched to the publisher. This must happen a lot.
I am sympathetic, though not familiar with that book. I am plodding through Exuberant Skepticism by Paul Kurtz, and while I find his ideas very well thought-out and generally agreeable, the first half of the title is wholly undeserved. I promised myself I was going to review it, but I’m reconsidering that right now. I’m not much for either philosophers or academic writing, and this is both. Almost entirely abstract – the man has an aversion to examples…
I too liked the Information a lot – even more than London Fields. So I began The Pregnant Widow eagerly but found its lazy story and interminable dialogue like chewing cardboard. I gave up trying about halfway through. It’s now annoying to see it advertised on vast billboards on the London underground (‘SEX’ is the word that screams out from them, as the supposed selling point).
Dare I suggest Emperor’s New Clothes?
Beautiful cover on the hardback, but haven’t read it yet. I can enjoy just about anything by Amis because the style is so brilliant, but the best of the recent ones was House of Meetings I think. Something worth saying gets said in that. Mind you, I liked Yellow Dog too and that was pretty much derided by everyone else except for Nicholas Lezard. I think Yellow Dog is worth reading for the text messages alone, though. They are really, really funny.
Amis is a great writer but he’s not an important one. And, by God, he seems to want to be an important one.
He’s important to me Ben. I don’t really know what ‘important’ means otherwise, unless it is the EngLit sense of ‘canonical’ and it will be a good 50 years before the notices are in on that. Still, even from here, it is hard to argue that he hasn’t written at least one masterpiece (I mean most people would give him that much). A more generous estimate would be 4 or 5. And he is a very nice man too, when you meet him at readings. Very generous and thoughtful (and funny).
Read the Michiko Kakutani review in the nyt. She skewered it hilariously. I loved the Information and I guess forgave him for the boring/irritating bits. I want to know what by Amis is just as good. I keep meaning to read more of him.
Money, London Fields, and Time’s Arrow are all, in my opinion, better than The Information. And Experience, the memoir, is really brilliant too.
It’s funny how often the word ‘skewered’ turns up when people talk about Kakutani reviews. I would have thought ‘hatchet’ was more appropriate. She doesn’t really skewer anyone because she doesn’t cut through to the middle with precision and expose a book’s weakness, she just derides the ones she doesn’t like in extremely emphatic terms, terms which repeat from review to review. You could take any of her attacks and swap them with any other, just changing names, they are generally so non-specific to the book in question. It comes over to me like someone having a wild tantrum while holding their nose, which is quite funny to see the first couple of times, but not so much after that. The US press seems to be fond of this sort of thing perhaps a bit more than in the UK. I remember the brief celebrity of Dale Peck who also mistook his taste and feelings for literary criticism. Ironically, the person who is the best model for the alternative approach, the one that looks at the grain of the writing rather than just deciding (as he says somewhere) the way it ‘rubs you up’, is Amis himself. The Pregnant Widow may not be great, but I wouldn’t let a hack like Kakutani put you off.
Torquil – I mean that I think he wants to be of more literary/social significance than he’s ever going to be. (Not that that disqualifies something from being important. Calvin and Hobbes is important to me but I’m not sure it’ll be esteemed by future literary scholars!) That, at least, seems to be the only explanation for things like Koba the Dread (essentially a conversation that he should have in private with Christopher Hitchens). I get the impression, especially with recent works, that he’s trying to crowbar profundity into his prose.
On the other hand, perhaps I’m trying to crowbar psychological insight into my personal tastes.
Well, I liked Koba, although I agree that the embarrassing spat with Hitchens could have been left out. I thought the criticism that Stalin’s wickedness was already well known was strange. So what? Nobody had written such a personal account of trying to comprehend it in such style. As I remember, most of the mockery in the press came from what seemed to be determined misreadings. That bit about listening to a baby crying and then thinking about torture, for example.
The style isn’t so brilliant in this one. There are a few buried currants, yes, but overall, brilliance is conspicuously absent. If it were about nothing but brilliantly written, that would be another matter, but it isn’t. (I speed-read another big chunk yesterday and am near the end. It isn’t.)
Okay…since you asked about your reading selection, and I love to dish about books, I’ll venture to say something here even though I haven’t read Amis: There’s a trend in contemporary fiction, maybe you’ve noticed it too, Ophelia, of making much ado about nothing and seeming disinterested about it at the same time! That is, the author/the narrative self-consciously devotes attention to the ordinary while pretending to be bored with the characters and events or at least taking them casually (is this the case with Amis, perhaps?). It seems cruel, if you ask me. So…I don’t read contemporary fiction if I can help it. (If you enjoy a good mystery, I recommend Iain Pears’s Stone’s Fall. Extremely well written and old fashioned storytelling.)
I am a creature of habit these days. I devour non fiction and pretty much have only read a couple of Iain (M) Banks jobbies and reread some Alastair Mcleod (The Boat being the best short story I’ve ever read and all) in the last year.
Banks is never boring.
Anyhoo.
Rossana, yes I certainly have noticed it too, and once I noticed it, I kept noticing it more, and more and more, and my tolerance for it went down and down and down. I first noticed it while trying to read The Hours, and suddenly getting intolerably impatient with an endless chapter about a woman making breakfast (or was it lunch) and telling herself “I can do this” a lot (meaning she could do her boring life, she could be a mother, she could deal with having a baby and making lunch). That was a Turning Point between me and contemporary “serious” fiction.
Experience is brilliant, it’s true, but…it’s also excruciatingly egomaniacal. It’s also kind of bossy and contemptuous in a way that gets on my nerves – it’s one of the many places where he looks down on Philip Larkin from a great height because Larkin didn’t marry or have children and because his girlfriend was what Amis has repeatedly called “an eyesore.” He’s literally offended with Larkin for having an ugly girlfriend.
Yeah – I read a piece of his once where he makes a list of the addresses Larkin lived at and the modest holidays he took in the UK, as if this was totally contemptible and the sign of a deprived, empty life. Hull suited Larkin, the addresses where he lived are attractive, leafy places and holidays in the UK countryside are very agreeable as well as being less hassle than going abroad. Larkin led his life in a perfectly reasonable way which left him the space to write his poems, which were the most important thing to him. He wouldn’t have written better if he had gone from London to New York to Uruguay and back again.
As for Amis’s brilliance – don’t you get sick of it? Relentless noise – the prose can never let up. It’s wearisomely rococo.
Exactly. I’m so glad someone else has noticed. He did the “Monica was an eyesore” thing again just recently – ugh I hate it.
And yes, obviously I do get sick of it. There is a kind of tedious low-level “brilliance” in the writing of this one, but yes, given that there is absolutely no content of interest (while there is lots of contemptible “so and so was an eyesore”ing), I get very damn sick of it. I’m starting to agree with Kingsley that it’s too worked-over.
Rosie, it was you who shared my enthusiasm for KA’s Letters, right?
I love Kingsley’s letters. They are very funny. I’ve been reading Larkin’s Letters to Monica, which – well, they aren’t such a <i>performance</i> as Amis’s letters and in fact Larkin moans a lot about Amis throughout – what a show-off, how irresponsible he is – also Larkin is wildly envious of Amis’s glamorous career. If you’ve read both Amis’s letters and Larkin’s letters they are fascinating – a new slant on them both.
It’s a bit daft from a literary point of view to compare Amis Snr to Jnr just because they are father and son as they are different kinds of writers, but I find KA a vastly better novelist. He does comedy and has brilliant passages, but his writing relaxes. K Amis said of Nabokov’s prose that there is a e difference between an over-developed muscle man and a fit, healthy adult. I don’t know how true that is of Nabokov, but with M Amis the brilliance gets in the way of novelish things like story and character.
And the brilliance…well it’s a kind of vanity. Preening. Get me. KA gets on with it. People who write at tedious length – excessive length – generally seem to me to be somewhat rude and self-absorbed: as if thinking they are so Special that everyone must want to read 100 thousand words from them no matter how boring. Well it’s like talking bores, in fact – I always have the same thought about them. “My god you must think well of yourself to think I want to listen to all this.”
To be fair to M Amis here’s a piece he wrote about K Amis’s book The King’s English. It shows a feeling for the language and a real tenderness towards his father:-
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/may/27/martin-amis-father-english-language-kingsley?INTCMP=SRCH