The narrative structure poses unsettling juxtapositions — sanitation workers dispel trash, patients enter the hospital healthy and leave sick, and at Auschwitz, the mass killings appear to be acts of creation. David Lehman, writing in the Book Review, put it simply: “The very instrument of revisionist history is put to the service of heartbreaking fiction.”
It’s fitting that this novel about the consuming jealousy one writer feels for another was published to much tabloid coverage in Britain, in part because of how much money Amis was paid for it. “By turns satirical and tender, funny and disturbing, ‘The Information’ marks a giant leap forward in Amis’s career,” Michiko Kakutani wrote. “Here, in a tale of middle-aged angst and literary desperation, all the themes and stylistic experiments of Amis’s earlier fiction come together in a symphonic whole.”
In the Book Review, Christopher Buckley wrote: “Amis is quite dazzling here. ‘The Information’ drags a bit around the middle, but you’re never out of reach of a sparkly phrase, stiletto metaphor or drop-dead insight into the human condition.”
In 2019, the Times’s book critics included “Experience” among the 50 best memoirs of the past 50 years. Reviewing the book when it was published in 2000, Michiko Kakutani praised it, predicting it would be best remembered for its “wonderfully vivid portrait of the author’s late father, the comic novelist and poet Kingsley Amis.” It’s a portrait “animated by cleareyed literary insight and enduring love and affection.”
In total, she said, “Experience” was Amis’s “most fully realized book yet — a book that fuses his humor, intellect and daring with a new gravitas and warmth, a book that stands, at once, as a loving tribute to his father and as a fulfillment of his own abundant talents as a writer.”
Amis brought the same ferocity and style to his criticism as he did to his novels. The reviews and essays in this collection are “consistently cogent, often illuminating and almost always entertaining,” Michiko Kakutani wrote. In them, Amis writes about Austen, Nabokov, Updike and many others. “Amis’s extraliterary interests, like chess and poker and nuclear weapons, are represented, but briefly,” Jenny Turner wrote in the Book Review. “This is a portrait of the artist as a reader of great books.”
Amis called his final novel “fairly strictly autobiographical.” It includes portraits of three writers who played crucial and cherished roles in his life: Philip Larkin, Saul Bellow and Christopher Hitchens. The book is “an unstable and charismatic compound of fact and fiction,” Parul Sehgal wrote in The Times. In the Book Review, Tom Bissell called it Amis’s “most beautiful book,” in part for its description of Hitchens’s long death, which will leave “only the most hardened” readers unmoved.
