Martin Amis' 1995 novel. Gwyn Barry turns 40; and a day later, so does his "
best friend", Richard Tully. The
difference between them is that Richard's a
failure, while Gwyn's
rich,
handsome,
charming, married into the
aristocracy, and most inexplicably of all (in his friend's opinion), a
famous and
successful author. Once upon a time, Richard himself was a promising writer, but since then
nobody's been remotely interested in publishing any of his books. Could be he's not really a novelist anymore. And if
he's not a
novelist, he's
damned if he can understand how anybody could believe that that
charlatan Gwyn Barry is one. Gwyn's written a couple of bland
utopian tomes which somehow have gotten on the bestseller list, so he does an interview tour of the USA throughout which he's feted like a
visionary thinker, and some nutters even want to give him a sort of
genius grant called the Profundity Requital, by which he'll be showered with free money for the term of his natural
life. Richard's eaten through with
hate and professional
jealousy. He sets out to destroy Gwyn's life.
Hatred of Gwyn has permeated every corner of Richard's existence that he seems permanently shrouded in angst. He's so oblivious to everything outside his war of nerves with his unsuspecting rival that he can't see it's poisoning the only meaningful thing he's got left: his relationship with his wife and children. Being angst-ridden means agonizing over mortality and neglect and marriage and sunsets and literary criticism and sad dreams, and you do this in a sub-Scott Fitzgeraldian way but more elegiac and verbose. It's what happens when you're an artist and depressed and 40 years old.
That's how old Richard is, but the way his various aches and pains and hair loss are described, you'd suppose he's twice that age. Then you guess that Richard's decrepitude is due to his smoking and drinking like there's no tomorrow. But maybe it's just Martin Amis projecting his own worries about physical deterioration: practically the first thing he did with that several-hundred-thousand-pounds payout he got for this book from his new publisher (he almost simultaneously traded in his wife, agent and publisher for fresher versions) was to get his teeth fixed by some state-of-the-art process involving titanium. (Smooth-faced condescending shit Gwyn on the other hand has a full head of silvery yet boyish hair, is tanned and healthy, and seems half his age.)
This book is packed with a ton of ideas about life and the way we live now. It also samples in passing the thoughts, words and deeds of just who it is who's living in today's world--including vanity publishers, newspaper columnists, black and white working- and lower-middle-class types, cartoon characters, children, readers and reviewers. This mass of detail may be intended to enhance the Richard-Gwyn conflict and give it extra dimension, but it just means that reading The Information is, at times, like trudging through thick mud in a heavy fog and hoping that solid ground and a well-defined path turn up soon. Instead, one suddenly trips over clumsy sections of prose musing on the universe, the age of the sun, the speed of sound; and Amis himself even enters the story as a character and self-consciously discusses distancing devices--the kind of stuff that turns up in first novels by university undergraduates with literary pretensions.
Worse, the abrupt ending--after Richard plans a truly demented and shortsighted way to discredit Gwyn--is so unsatisfactory that it's almost as if somebody held Amis hostage and forced him to finish this 500-page opus as quickly as possible.
But then, perhaps all of this is meant to be that way because all of it is itself part of a larger, cleverer and deeply ironic device. The whole point of The Information may be that the way we live now, our capacity for intelligent discernment has deteriorated to such an extent that we're ready to claim almost any piece of rubbish as a dramatically exciting breakthrough that sets new standards in the field of excellence.