The word 'schadenfreude', which has a German etymology and has recently been co-opted by the English language, means, "pleasure derived from the misfortunes of others". I propose that "The Information", Martin Amis' scathingly funny blockbuster novel, concerns itself with an opposite concept: "misfortune derived from the pleasure of others". Ever the amateur neologizer, let me call this concept 'freudenschad', before I tell you how it acts as but one tasty treat in this wonderfully expansive and expressive book.
Authors Richard Tull and Gwyn Barry are ostensibly best friends. They went to school together, share afternoons playing friendly games of pool and tennis and chess, and even commiserate about their lack of literary success. That is until recently, when Gwyn (who "can't write for toffee") found himself the author of a runaway worldwide best-selling novel. And Richard, who's stuck in the muck writing reviews of horrid biographies for a little magazine (dubbed "The Little Magazine") and writing and rewriting his own interminable novel (titled "Untitled"), just can't handle it. After a few trips into London's underworld, and an assignment following friend Barry on his American book tour (the book's best section, a wondrous romp from L.A. to Boston), it becomes clear to Richard that Gwyn must pay for his crimes. He must feel pain.
Despite their outwardly different lives, Martin Amis and the protagonist Tull are very similar characters. Sure, the real-life former is the product of literary royalty (he's the son of Kingsley, don't you know), a dashing socialite as prone to getting his name in the papers for his doings as his writings, while the fictional latter lives on the bottom rung of literary society, who is safe from publicity no matter what he does. But both men are fiercely principled, holding literature up as the ideal, and more than willing to scorn those who don't rise to their lofty standards. "Like all writers," Amis writes here, "Richard wanted to live in some hut on some crag somewhere, every couple of years folding a page into a bottle and dropping it limply into the spume." But just when you think Richard's in the game for the purity of the pursuit, Amis continues the thought, with the following nugget: "Like all writers, Richard wanted, and expected, the reverence due, say, to the Warrior Christ an hour before Armageddon." Two thoughts less sympathetic, along the same lines, you would be hard-pressed to find. But they do wonders explicating the nature of Richard's, and Martin's, characters.
(The two men also share an affinity for purple prose; but in a delicious twist Amis, whose lithe wordplay is unmatched in my view, has written a character whose writing is so dense it causes migraines -- and other, more serious ailments -- in all who read it.)
Amis tells his story from four distinct viewpoints. The first belongs to Tull himself. Instead of serving as an unreliable narrator, as some have argued, I see Tull as more of a hyper-reliable narrator. His keen eye and astuteness with words allow him to see and relate his own experiences with pinpoint accuracy. He's a character self-aware enough to realize that his "passion was the American novel [but] he had never been to America. Which about summed him up." He's cynical enough to reply, in response to Gwyn's assertion that, "A million people can't be wrong", with what might as well be the cynic's war cry: "A million people are always wrong." But lest you think Richard is an incurable misanthrope, Amis includes some wonderful scenes of him and his two sons, Marco and Marius. He's teaching them to read, and, although he becomes frustrated by their mistakes, he plugs away in an attempt to pass the knowledge of the father down to the sons.
The second viewpoint is Gwyn's. Gwyn is a pretentious fop, a one-time gym teacher who probably got into novel writing because that's what all his friends were doing. He's the kind of fake who would set up a workbench in his basement, just so he could tell all those who interview him that he does carpentry because he "finds it therapeutic". He's so sickeningly sweet that, for a television piece on "The Seven Vital Virtues", he chose 'Uxoriousness' (gosh, I love it when Amis sends me scurrying to my dictionary). We don't get inside Gwyn's head until very late in the game, but when we do, it's ride worth waiting for.
The third viewpoint, and in my opinion the least successful, belongs to a complex ruffian of a character named Scozzy. He's the man Richard turns to when he wants the fear of God put into Gwyn. But Scozzy's scenes, which feature a wide variety of colourful characters with colourful names who use colourful slang, disrupt the satirical tone of the novel. Instead, it appears that Amis has written a series of parodies on London gangs, and felt the need to shoehorn them into his narrative. Thankfully, Scozzy and his ilk disappear for long stretches near the book's middle, so they don't ruin things too much.
The fourth viewpoint is Amis' own. He intrudes on the story, periodically, to offer a kind of a Greek chorus commentary, expanding on the main themes and offering new ones. One such theme concerns the story's place in the universe, its effect on the cosmos. If offered by a lesser writer, the conceit of this kind of literary astronomy would crumble like a poorly engineered sandcastle at high tide. But in Amis' hands, the exploration makes so much sense.
He rationally justifies the Tull-Barry feud by claiming that "writers should hate each other… they are competing for something there is only one of: the universal." Words are weapons, and Amis is a master swordsman.
"Who was said to be the last man to have read everything? Coleridge?" Amis asks and answers. He goes on to note that, "Two hundred years on, nobody had read a millionth of everything, and the fraction was getting smaller every day. And every new book held less and less of the whole." The author, once a magical and influential figure, becomes a smaller and smaller tile in the grand mosaic. And Amis, through his characters, appears to be working out this anxiety.
My favourite bit involves this much-quoted (by me, at least) axiom: "For human beings, the history of cosmology is the history of increasing humiliation." I am tempted to explain this one to death (as is my wont), but I'll leave it be for you to discover on your own.
I wonder if I've made "The Information" sound drab and dull so far. Let me take this opportunity to say that it isn't. Not by a long shot. Amis could never write a less than interesting book, on the strength of his prose alone, and his curmudgeonly wit always gets me laughing. He's an author who adores the English language, and every new book reads like an opportunity to take that old girl out for a spin. There's the passage describing an action of Gwyn's, where Amis self-consciously notes that "here the adverbs would say thoughtfully, wistfully, tenderly." Or the fact that a minor character, a very gray man whom we barely meet, is named Roy G. Biv (have you taken a look at your colour wheel recently?). He even includes a half-page dissection of "The Simpsons" for goodness sake! Tell me that's not an author clearly in love with the writing process.
Unless, of course, he writes purely out of fear. Amis, like Richard, "can't give up [writing] novels… because then he would be left with experience, with untranslated and unmediated experience. Because then he would be left with life." Oh, and I was trying so hard there to make the whole enterprise sound like a romp. Amis' hard-fought-for cynicism can't help but poke its head in.
"There is a beautiful literary law," Richard thinks at one point, "which decrees that the easier a thing is to write then the more the writer gets paid for writing it." I'm hard-pressed to believe this truism, because, despite the fact that Amis received the largest (and possibly the most-publicized) advance in British publishing history for this book, "The Information" shows, at every turn, the blood, sweat and tears that Amis' poured into it. His efforts have produced a novel that is at once exceedingly literary, terribly comic, nearly tragic, but always difficult to put down. Amis is near the top of my personal literary canon, and this, I feel, is the best representation of his work.
Recommended:
