Martin Amis is one of the best prose stylists at work today, and this provisional autobiography combined with a memoir of his father, Kingsley, is beautifully fashioned: funny, moving, polished, fierce, and touched with the melancholy and alarm of a writer embarking on the hazardous waters of middle age. It is a rare thing, as Amis himself remarks, that a father and son should both be among the leading writers of their respective generations. Amis pere started out on the left but drifted steadily right until, in his last years, he had practically fallen off the edge. Martin Amis, who disagreed violently with much of his father's politics, nevertheless saw through the crusty carapace right into the old boy's tender though never sentimental heart. Experience is funny and fascinating on Martin's early days in Swinging London, and the letters from his youth with which he prefaces each chapter are by turns clever and clever-clever, but never without interest. This is a marvellous piece of writing.
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