Martin Amis

Martin
Amis

We live in the age of mass loquacity. We are all writing it or at any rate talking it:
the memoir, the apologia, the c.v., the cri de coeur. Nothing, for now, can
compete with experience — so unanswerably authentic, and so liberally and
democratically dispensed. Experience is the only thing we share equally, and
everyone senses this. We are surrounded by special cases, by special
pleadings, in an atmosphere of universal celebrity. Why should I tell the story of
my life? I want to set the record straight (so much of this is already public), and
to speak, for once, without artifice. Though not without formality. The trouble
with life (the novelist will feel) is its amorphousness, its ridiculous fluidity. Look at
it: thinly plotted, largely themeless, sentimental and ineluctably trite. The
dialogue is poor, or at least violently uneven. The twists are either predictable or
sensationalist. And it's always the same beginning; and the same ending ...