A swimming-pool of cock-camembert
The title here is a quote from ‘The Rachel Papers’ and is about the revolting dick-cheesy smell of superglue. I am utterly enchanted but then Amis had me on the first page with the crushing truth that “Twenty may not be the start of maturity but, in all conscience, it’s the end of youth.” I remember my own twentieth birthday with nothing but bitterness and a slight wince at the thought of the handle of $9 Iceberg vodka I took to bed with me at around 4p.m. that dreadful day.
Now I have a shifty past with Martin Amis. When I was 12 or 13, Amis was all the rage – sort of the literary equivalent to BritPop – and everyone with an airline bag and a copy of Pulp’s ‘Different Class’ had a copy of either ‘Money’ or ‘London Fields’ strewn around their room. I greedily had both and made a number of abortive attempts to read through them but remember finding them so back-slappingly irritating and snide that both were eventually assigned to the shelf for show and nothing more (hello Tibor Fischer, Somerset Maugham, the first copy of the still-as-yet-unread-Proust I ever foolishly bought). Somebody I fancied at 14 urged me to read ‘Dead Babies’ and much as I find coked-up yuppies torturing dwarves an entertaining conceit it just didn’t really penetrate any further than a second-rate freak show. Somewhere around there, to my enormous relief, ‘The Information’ was published to mass critical savaging and with the exception of his memoir ‘Experience’, Amis remains unable to get back on the horse after that. Everyone mocks him, it’s almost expected. I feel validated in my pubescent choices.
All of that shit said, this is really pretty amazing. Rachel will beat me for not mentioning ‘Catcher in the Rye’ here but to be perfectly honest, having never managed to get through it I can only make arch and vague allusions to the type of book I know that is. Holden Caulfield – whatevs. Charles Highway – a legend. Flicking through the book now, almost every page is marked with my stupid star symbol and even the occasional embarassingly redundant ‘ha!’. It is reassuringly vile about the self-centredness of being teenaged (mentally, if not physically) while recognizing how important, how tempting and how lovely that gross state of being can be. I adore this and yearn for all of my friends to procreate so I can shamelessly distribute copies of this to their fifteen year old offspring.
It’s worth mentioning that Charles is nothing if not misogynistic but this in and of itself is nothing to be put off by. Amis’ own repugnant personality makes it hard to ignore the suggestion (and actual acknowledgment) that much of the material and sentiment are autobiographical and yet you can’t help but cheer Charles’ innate and unshakeable awfulness. The conclusion allows the possibility of some silly redemptive change but then pisses all over that in a delightfully satisfying way.
Ditching the Cuckoo’s Nest for this was the very best of ideas, Rachel. I am not so convinced the same will be true of your next choice (Kiran Desai’s ‘The Inheritance of Loss’) but I look forward to a good fight about magical realism. I am only 50 pages in and already a dog has been compared to Audrey Hepburn and an overly gloomy cat has made an appearance.
Take care,
Dave
