Martin Amis and the art of having a literary opinion

Martin Amis, The Rachel Papers and the lost pleasure of writers telling us exactly what they think

I've just reread The Rachel Papers, Martin Amis's first novel, and somewhere in the middle of enjoying it, being irritated by it and occasionally wondering how on earth a 23-year-old got away with some of it, I found myself thinking about criticism. Not criticism of Amis, but Amis as critic.

That might seem an odd response to The Rachel Papers, a novel published in 1973 about Charles Highway, an extraordinarily self-absorbed, arrogant character pursuing a place at Oxford and Rachel Noyes with the sort of strategic planning normally associated with a minor military campaign. 

Joan Didion — What if the person the writer is selling out is herself?

Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking and what happens when the writer turns the camera on herself

We've been here before. In fact, Joan Didion is where much of this journey began.

In Slouching Towards Bethlehem, she gave us the sentence that has followed us through almost every writer we've encountered since: “Writers are always selling somebody out.”

Can you write about someone you cannot understand?

Emmanuel Carrère, The Adversary and what happens when a writer cannot find the explanation

Writers explain things. Even when they don't announce it, it is one of the basic pleasures they offer us. It's why we love to read. They take the mess of experience and give it shape. They decide where a story begins, which details matter, and how one event relates to another. 

In nonfiction especially, we tend to assume that if a writer has spent years researching a person, interviewing people who knew them, and examining the evidence of their life, they will eventually be able to tell us who that person really was. But what happens if they can't? 

What if you trusted a writer with your story?

Janet Malcolm, The Journalist and the Murderer and the betrayal at the heart of nonfiction

Imagine spending months talking to a writer. You tell them things you wouldn't normally tell people. They meet your family. They read your letters. They listen sympathetically while you explain the worst thing that has ever happened to you. Eventually, perhaps inevitably, you begin to think this person understands you.

Then the book comes out, and you discover that the writer you thought understood you has turned you into a character you barely recognise.

That is the nightmare sitting at the centre of Janet Malcolm's The Journalist and the Murderer. And after everything we've been reading about writers, truth and the people who become material, I suspect Malcolm is the writer we've been heading towards all along.

Can you tell the truth by making things up?

Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and the strange truth of Gonzo journalism

Here's a question. Can you tell the truth by making things up? Norman Mailer walked into the story and announced himself. Joan Didion sat quietly at the edge of it and watched.

Hunter S. Thompson drove into Las Vegas with a boot full of drugs. At which point the idea of journalistic objectivity was probably in some difficulty.