The Information

"Yes. If The Summer Before the Dark is a classic feminist novel about a midlife crisis, Martin Amis’s The Information is the great non-feminist novel about a midlife crisis. It is a novel that some people find misogynistic, but it is an incredibly funny depiction of the midlife woes of an unsuccessful novelist whose friend is, so he thinks, unjustifiably famous. The protagonist, Richard, derides his friend Gwyn’s bestseller as vapid and sentimental: “ Amelior would only be remarkable if Gwyn had written it with his foot.” The novel is funny in part because its hero is so winningly loathsome. It veers from farce into terrifying violence, but has in its background another existential issue. The ‘information’ could be many things in the novel but one of its meanings is the information that we’re going to die . This is something we’re often absorbing around midlife. Right. The Information is a very effective evocation of that feeling. Part of the backstory of the novel was that Amis got this crazy advance after firing his agent, Pat Kavanagh, the wife of his friend Julian Barnes , and then spent a bundle of money on extensive dental reconstruction. This is one of those metonyms for denying one’s mortality, the idea that when the teeth decay, you can just replace them all and have them be brand new. “The novel is funny in part because its hero is so winningly loathsome” This reminds me that Julian Barnes also wrote a terrific book which is not exactly about midlife, but about death, called Nothing to be Frightened Of . In both cases, there’s something about the sustained meditation on death for three hundred pages which is a kind of Stoic mental exercise: think about death and do it while you’re reading The Information , chapter after chapter after chapter. It’s an intense experience. There’s a wonderful passage about this in The Information where – riffing on Orwell – the narrator says ‘looking in the mirror on the morning of his fortieth birthday, Richard felt that no one deserved the face he had’. Going back to the Patricia Cohen book, one of the things she traces is the shift in ideals, for instance, of female beauty from a late 19th century model in which the forty year old woman was the ideal to an increasing valorisation of youth as the model of beauty. I’m sure this contributes to the sense people have in their forties and fifties that they should aspire to be in the prime that they were in at thirty. I think you’re right, there is a simultaneous awareness and denial of the inevitability of physical decay and death. It’s funny. In talking to people about this topic over the last five or six years, I’ve learned that some embrace the label as soon as they can possibly can, while others steadfastly resist. When I hit thirty-five I was like, ‘yes, middle age; that seems about right.’ And then when the suggestion is made to friends that they might be in midlife at sixty, they will be like, ‘wow, I’m not so sure.’ So, there is a definite issue of self-labelling that people often feel strongly about. That’s a good question. The prose is astonishing and it brilliantly evokes a confrontation with mortality. Whether it contributes to our understanding of it is much harder to say. As well as being a meditation on death, a central theme of the novel is professional ambition. The core is Richard’s sense of aggrieved vanity that he’s not as successful as his friend. There is something cleansing about depicting the worst moments of people’s narcissism and vanity so frankly and so brutally, and pursuing them so single-mindedly and hilariously. There is a certain therapeutic value to simultaneously loathing and identifying with the central character of the novel. In the end, though, I feel like Amis isn’t so much interested in solving the problem as rubbing our faces in it. And he does that exceptionally well. I am interested in both. The choices are partly to do with which books are most fun to read and recommend. There’s a book called How Healthy Are We? which is edited by Orville Gilbert Brim and came out of the MacArthur Network research on midlife that I mentioned earlier. It contains a bunch of essays by medical sociologists and doctors and psychologists. If you wanted an introduction to what the state of the science was in about 2000 then that book is very good. But it’s academic; it’s not a popular exposition of social science results and while it’s accessible, it’s not a thrilling read. A more recent survey is Barbara Bradley Hagerty’s Life Reimagined: The Science, Art, and Opportunity of Midlife , which is well worth looking up."