Re-reading Experience

Sometimes it's impressive how I always manage to match my reading material to what's going on in my life. During the move, I found my copy of Martin Amis' Experience. I used to love Amis. I accidentally elbowed him in the head at Cheltenham Literature Festival in 1996. Then I wrote my undergraduate thesis on him, in 2001*, the year I first read Experience. Writing it made me fall out of love with his words and it took me a decade to find my way back.

Experience is awful and brilliant; the story of his life told half in footnotes and wholly in the tone of the cleverest, sneeriest boy in sixth form. It's both gilded and repulsive, and it's well worth a read.

*I'm half proud and half embarrassed that it was entitled "All Hole: Women As Pornographic Ciphers in Martin Amis". None of the tutors in my department had read him before, and my very favourite tutor had to speed-read the whole lot especially to mark it.