Awards
A New York Times Notable Book of 2000.
Synopses & Reviews
Martin Amis is one of the most gifted and innovative writers of our time. With
Experience, he discloses a private life every bit as unique and fascinating as his bestselling novels.
The son of the great comic novelist Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis explores his relationship with this father and writes about the various crises of Kingsley's life. He also examines the life and legacy of his cousin, Lucy Partington, who was abducted and murdered by one of Britains most notorious serial killers. Experience also deconstructs the changing literary scene, including Amis's portraits of Saul Bellow, Salman Rushdie, Allan Bloom, Philip Larkin, and Robert Graves, among others. Not since Nabokov's Speak, Memory has such an implausible life been recorded by such an inimitable talent. Profound, witty, and ruthlessly honest, Experience is a literary event.
Review
"Martin's elliptical memoir is a very odd mixture, but easily the most memorable and moving thing in it is his portrait of his father....In Experience, Martin eschews any...attempts at political whitewashing. If anything, he rubs in Kingsley's displeasing opinions, though as part of a rounded, penetrating, touching description of his father, in hs prime and in decline." Atlantic Monthly
Review
"Experience is a portmanteau of personal history, ancestor worship and promiscuous opinionizing, and a piñata of literary gossip that Amis beats with a stick, causing many names to drop....And if we stay put till the last 100 pages, it will break our heart. But meanwhile we go far too often to the dentist." John Leonard, New York Times Book Review
Review
"Experience is not just an exploration of the father-son relationship, but also of what it is to be a writer; more specifically, what it is to be a writer in a culture obsessed with the idea of celebrity." David Lodge, Times Literary Supplement
Review
"The entertainingly footnoted volume loops back and forth in time to chronicle the author's coming of age with becoming earnestness and humor and serves up some charmingly antic set pieces including what must surely stand as the darkest and funniest account of dental surgery ever written. The book will be best remembered, however, for its wonderfully vivid portrait of the author's late father, the comic novelist and poet Kingsley Amis...In Experience,..,Mr. Amis speaks...of the 'ordinary miracles and ordinary disasters' of real life of what it means to be a son, and what it means to be a father with children of his own. The result is Mr. Amis's most fully realized book yet a book that fuses his humor, intellect and daring with a new gravitas and warmth, a book that stands, at once, as a loving tribute to his father and as a fulfillment of his own abundant talents as a writer." Michiko Kakutani, New York Times
Review
"Sure, Experience shows an evolution in Amis' work, and a great tenderness in the portrait of Kingsley, even from a distance, as well as hurt and betrayal over his rift with writer Julian Barnes. But where Experience doesn't deliver on its autobiographical promise is in its avoidance of the lesser horrors and humor of everyday defeats: the divorces, the responsibilities to your kids, the unspectacular and unsensational events." Graham Joyce, Salon
Review
"Fuses humor, intellect and daring with a new gravitas and warmth." Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
Review
"Hums with the same antic prose and looping comic riffs that characterize Amis' fiction.... [Amis is] a splendid writer." Time
Review
"With its recurrent themes and nimble shifts from one period to another, Experience is well made and ingeniously stitched together. It's also extremely well written." The Globe and Mail
Review
"[Experience is] a sublime essay giving shape and meaning to [Amis's] chaotic life.... Experience is an unexpectedly emotional odyssey. Experience is a novelist's memoir in which events are cunningly cross-threaded and intercut like a plot." National Post, May 18, 2000 (profile)
Review
"Like only a handful of other literary memoirs, Experience is more than the mere facts of the author's life collected in neat chronological order. Experience succeeds where most other memoirs fail because it's really a superbly written novel starring Martin Amis as its amusingly self-deprecating central protagonist, his crotchety but ultimately loveable father and fellow novelist, Kingsley Amis, as his foil, and with the difficulties and joys of family life firmly in place as its central theme.... Experience is a long, wise poem in typically ebullient Amis prose in praise of all that endures: creativity, friendship and love. Most novels should be so richly fulfilling." The Toronto Star
Review
"What mustn't get lost is that the rest can be wonderfully, wryly funny. Adolescent torpor is sleepily reimagined." The Hamilton Spectator
Review
"Striking and satisfying. It's an edgy and electrifying read. [Amis's world is] a wonderful place of privilege, celebrity and intellectual intrigue on the one hand, and a dark, woeful realm of emotional tragedy, physical pain and public persecution of the other." NOW Magazine
Review
"His unflinching portrayal of his fraught but ultimately loving relationship with the father gives Experience a dimension that the Martin Amis oeuvre, for all its acid brilliance, has too often lacked. This is a compassionate book, and a very moving one.... He ends up with a book that's true to the way memory really works obsessive, elliptical, incomplete, maddeningly non-linear, but deeply revealing." Calgary Herald and The Gazette (Montreal)
Review
"Rather than focus extensively on the literary high life, Martin Amis uses his formidable skills to dissect the more troubling aspects of a life very much in progress. The result is an unusually skillful and unconventional memoir with the tension and release of great fiction." Ottawa X Press
Review
"[A] tender, funny...sometimes gut-wrenching memoir.... Fans of the brilliant and eccentric Amises moral satirist father and satiric misanthropist son will be amply gratified by the sheer energetic range and depth and human circumstance, of the experience that heaves itself up from these pages.... His book thrills and breaks the heart." London Free Press
Review
"Rather than focus extensively on the literary high life, Martin Amis uses his formidable skills to dissect the more troubling aspects of a life very much in progress. The result is an unusually skillful and unconventional memoir with the tension and release of great fiction." Ottawa Free Press
Review
"Those who have marvelled at the wry and unforgiving fiction its prose like a strobe light dancing over vistas of urban sleaze and greed will likely be taken aback. They may be compelled to tears by a book which is the most touching Amis has written." Noel Rieder, Hour
Review
"This memoir engagingly reads like a novel where the literary gifts of the son's sardonic wit, linguistic candour are shown off in the eulogizing of the father, Sir Kingsley Amis, as a womanizer, alcoholic and storyteller whose footsteps Amis traces in his own coming of age as a writer." The New Brunswick Reader
Synopsis
Martin Amis is one of the most gifted and innovative writers of our time. With Experience, he discloses a private life every bit as unique and fascinating as his bestselling novels.
The son of the great comic novelist Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis explores his relationship with this father and writes about the various crises of Kingsley's life. He also examines the life and legacy of his cousin, Lucy Partington, who was abducted and murdered by one of Britain's most notorious serial killers. Experience also deconstructs the changing literary scene, including Amis' portraits of Saul Bellow, Salman Rushdie, Allan Bloom, Philip Larkin, and Robert Graves, among others. Not since Nabokov's Speak, Memory has such an implausible life been recorded by such an inimitable talent. Profound, witty, and ruthlessly honest, Experience is a literary event.
Synopsis
NATIONAL BESTSELLER - "Fus ing] humor, intellect and daring with a new gravitas and warmth" (New York Times), one of the most gifted and innovative writers of our time discloses a private life every bit as unique and fascinating as his bestselling novels. The son of the great comic novelist Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis explores his relationship with this father and writes about the various crises of Kingsley's life. He also examines the life and legacy of his cousin, Lucy Partington, who was abducted and murdered by one of Britain's most notorious serial killers. Experience also deconstructs the changing literary scene, including Amis' portraits of Saul Bellow, Salman Rushdie, Allan Bloom, Philip Larkin, and Robert Graves, among others. Not since Nabokov's Speak, Memory has such an implausible life been recorded by such an inimitable talent. Profound, witty, and ruthlessly honest, Experience is a literary event.
Synopsis
NATIONAL BESTSELLER - One of the most gifted and innovative writers of our time discloses a private life every bit as unique and fascinating as his bestselling novels.
"Superb memoir...a moving account of Amis's] coming of age as an artist and a man." --San Francisco Chronicle
The son of the great comic novelist Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis explores his relationship with this father and writes about the various crises of Kingsley's life. He also examines the life and legacy of his cousin, Lucy Partington, who was abducted and murdered by one of Britain's most notorious serial killers. Experience also deconstructs the changing literary scene, including Amis' portraits of Saul Bellow, Salman Rushdie, Allan Bloom, Philip Larkin, and Robert Graves, among others.
Not since Nabokov's Speak, Memory has such an implausible life been recorded by such an inimitable talent. Profound, witty, and ruthlessly honest, Experience is a literary event.
Synopsis
The son of the great comic novelist Kingsley Amis, the author explores his relationship with his father and writes about the various crises of Kingsley's life. "Experience" deconstructs the changing literary scene, too, including Amis's portraits of Saul Bellow, Salman Rushdie, Allan Bloom, Philip Larkin, and Robert Graves. of photos.
About the Author
Martin Amis is the best-selling author of several books, including London Fields, Money, The Information, and, most recently, Experience. He lives in London.