Travel Blog

Finally finished Martin Amis’s Inside Story. It took me months. It is a great grab bag of a book as the author alights on a multitude of topics, including, on a couple of occasions, his rules for writing. (The book’s subtitle, printed on the title page but not the cover – where it is boldly proclaimed “A Novel” – is “How to Write.”) Most of his rules I agree with: avoiding cliches, using a thesaurus to find a word with the right number of syllables to fit a sentence’s rhythm, never employing three dashes in a sentence (see previous sentence). Though I take exception to his taking exception to what he call’s Elegant Variation, finding a synonym to avoid repeating the same word in a sentence (see previous sentence). And I would add another, very important rule for authors: Don’t finish your book, as Amis does, and then artlessly tack on two superfluous chapters.

After being bid adieu – a not totally successful Amis trope here is to occasionally address his reader as a guest in his home – the reader (no EV now) turns the page to find an “Afterthought: Masada and the Dead Sea,” which, as the title suggests, is a meditation on Israel. There is much in the book about anti-Semitism, and Amis’s admirable abhorrence of it (he pretty much dismisses Virginia Woolf as a writer because of her qualifications as an anti-Semite), but … really? He decides to close his “novel” with this essay? No, actually, he doesn’t, because when the dear reader, having already once thought she had finished the book, turns the page – more eager than ever to close the cover and be done with the thing – she finds “Addendum: Elizabeth Jane Howard,” a heartfelt tribute to the author’s stepmother. Yes, it’s interesting, but the reader’s pleasure in reading it is diminished by the thought of what might still await (because of the index – yes, this is a novel with an index – there are more pages behind it) and pestered by the idea that there were no editors at Knopf brave enough to say, “Martin, perhaps these last two chapters would work better in your next collection of essays.”