There was news today that Martin Amis has died. I read a number of his novels as well as his books of collected literary criticism. As a literary critic, I found his work interesting. I wasn't as enamored of his novels and I honestly don't remember much about most of them. But his 1995 novel, The Information, has really stuck with me.
It was one of those novels where I reached the end and immediately re-read it to figure out how Amis manipulated my emotions. It is the story of two writers (the successful writer Gwyn Barry and the less successful writer Richard Tull) and their friendship/enmity. It is a mid-life crisis novel.
Tull and Barry have been friends since university and Tull is very (VERY) jealous of Barry's success and manufactures increasingly convoluted plots to cause Barry inconvenience without Barry knowing it was Tull who is doing it. But Barry eludes them all causing Tull to become increasingly deranged and his plots to become more and more dangerous.
By the final third of the novel, Tull's state of mind is so far gone that I began to find the novel almost unreadable, so ridiculous were his thoughts and the plots he was concocting. Key to the novel is that the reader starts to, if not sympathize with Barry, at least think that Tull is completely mad to think Barry is as bad as Tull thinks he is. Then, as the novel wound toward the end, one plotline began to take precedence and I assumed the author was going to go in a direction that was so predictable that I found myself talking aloud to him, saying "Oh, please. Don't do that! How predictable!" But he surprised me and went in a different direction at the very end that found me switching places with Tull in terms of state of mind. Tull ends the novel relatively complacently while I was left furious with Barry and wishing Tull could really have "got him".
It isn't by any means a pleasant book and I've never felt like going back to it. But I did think it was structured in a beautiful way and I've always remembered it.
