For the man himself though the experience isn’t proving quite new enough

For the man himself, though, the experience isn’t proving quite new enough.”I was aware I’d embarked on a different genre, and I thought in a way, ‘What a pity, it’s all going to come back to me again.’ That’s been the trouble all along in the novels, that they don’t stand alone somehow. There’s practically nothing revealed in this book which hasn’t been in the newspaper pages in some form or other; all I’m doing is giving my version of things that are already public. It’s not a tell-all.”It’s not, either, an autobiography, even though Experience is being relentlessly billed as such. It is, says Amis, “a meditation, an essay on the literary life as I have led it.

The main thread is my father, and the rather dedicated following of a vocation. I hope that comes across.”That does come across, and what also comes across is the tension between the Amis lives as lived and the Amis lives as portrayed in the newspapers. Essentially, pÿre et fils have lived lives dominated by intense scrutiny, criticism, discussion and production of the written word. But in the words written about them, these central concerns are transmogrified into pretensions and pettifogging side-issues, weapons taken up to win some other, less honourable battle. It is the communalities – sex, love, family, dentistry, death – that have been moved to the centre. (Amis notes that when his father died he was described in The Sun as “author of Lucky Jim and uncle of Lucy Partington”.)Seeing this spread out on the pages of Experience, one realises how much people seem to crave the right to empathise or identify nowadays.

Perhaps that is part of the reason why a straightforwardly empathetic comedy such as Bridget Jones’s Diary is roundly greeted as a masterpiece, while a more complex and demanding comedy such as The Information is suspected of self-absorption The eponymous hero of Bridget Jones is everywoman. The men at the centre of The Information are specifically, exclusively writers, and therefore essentially other.The general trend is one that Amis describes as “the great democratisation of everything. You see this most clearly on the internet, where everyone has the right to be a critic, and in some ways that’s a good thing.” Amis does not seem entirely certain that it is a good thing, though and, after a few moments thought, confirms his ambivalence. “De Tocqueville said that American democracy would end in flab, in paunchy, flabby thought in a generalised democracy, but it’s us who seem to have got there first.”Oops! He’s done it again. Amis catches himself comparing Britain unflatteringly to America, and regroups himself.