Martin Amis - The Information

Acclaimfor MARTIN AMIS

"One of the most gifted novelists of his generation." Time

"Amis is a force unto himself.... There is, quite simply, no one else like him." Washington Post Book World

"Martin Amis is a stone-solid genius ... a dazzling star of wit and insight." Wall Street Journal

"Amis is a born comic novelist, in the tradition that ranges from Dickens to Waugh.... [His] mercurial style can rise to

Joycean brilliance." Newsweek

"Amis is a clever, skillful writer." San Francisco Chronicle

"Amis throws off more provocative ideas and images in a single paragraph than most writers get into complete novels."

Seattle Times

"[Amis's] language is demonically alive." The New York Times Book Review

"Mr. Amis has reached such a level of superstardom that his author's bio can understate: 'Martin Amis lives in London.'"

Washington Times

MARTIN AMISTHE INFORMATION

Martin Amis's books include Money, Dead Babies, The Rachel Papers,

The Moronic Inferno, Einstein's Monsters, London Fields, Time's Arrow,

and Visiting Mrs. Nabokov. He lives in London.

THE

INFORMATIONby

MARTIN AMISVintage International

Vintage Books

A Division of Random House, Inc. New York To Louis and jacob

and to the memory of

lucy partington

(1952-1973)

PART ONE

Cities at night, I feel, contain men who cry in their sleep and then say Nothing. It's nothing. Just sad dreams. Or something like that... Swing low in your weep ship, with your tear scans and your sob probes, and you would mark them. Womenand they can be wives, lovers, gaunt muses, fat nurses, obsessions, devourers, exes, nemeseswill wake and turn to these men and ask, with female need-to-know, "What is it?" And the men say, "Nothing. No it isn't anything really. Just sad dreams."

Just sad dreams. Yeah: oh sure. Just sad dreams. Or something like that.

Richard Tull was crying in his sleep. The woman beside him, his wife, Gina, woke and turned. She moved up on him from behind and laid hands on his pale and straining shoulders. There was a profession alism in her blinks and frowns and whispers: like the person at the pool- side, trained in first aid; like the figure surging in on the blood-smeared macadam, a striding Christ of mouth-to-mouth. She was a woman. She knew so much more about tears than he did. She didn't know about Swift's juvenilia, or Wordsworth's senilia, or how Cressida had variously fared at the hands of Boccaccio, of Chaucer, of Robert Henryson, of Shakespeare; she didn't know Proust. But she knew tears. Gina had tears cold.

"What is it? "she said.

Richard raised a bent arm to his brow. The sniff he gave was compli cated, orchestral. And when he sighed you could hear the distant seagulls

falling through his lungs.

"Nothing. It isn't anything. Just sad dreams." Or something like that.

After a while she too sighed and turned over, away from him. There in the night their bed had the towelly smell of marriage.

He awoke at six, as usual. He needed no alarm clock. He was already comprehensively alarmed. Richard Tull felt tired, and not just under- slept. Local tiredness was up there above himthe kind of tiredness that sleep might lightenbut there was something else up there over and above it. And beneath it. That greater tiredness was not so local. It was the tiredness of time lived, with its days and days. It was the tired ness of gravitygravity, which wants you down there in the center of the earth. That greater tiredness was here to stay: and get heavier. No nap or cuppa would ever lighten it. Richard couldn't remember crying in the night. Now his eyes were dry and open. He was in a terrible statethat of consciousness. Some while ago in his life he had lost the knack of choosing what to think about. He slid out of bed in the mornings just to find some peace. He slid out of bed in the mornings just to get a little rest. He was forty tomorrow, and reviewed books.

In the small square kitchen, which stoically awaited him, Richard engaged the electric kettle. Then he went next door and looked in on the boys. Dawn visits to their room had been known to comfort him after nights such as the one he had just experienced, with all its unwelcome information. His twin sons in their twin beds. Marius and Marcus were not identical twins. And they weren't fraternal twins either, Richard often said (unfairly, perhaps), in the sense that they showed little brotherly feeling. But that's all they were, brothers, born at the same time. It was possible, theoretically (and, Richard surmised, their mother being Gina, also practically) that Marcus and Marius had different fathers. They didn't look alike, especially, and were strikingly dissimilar in all their talents and proclivities. Not even their birthdays were con tent to be identical: a sanguinary summer midnight had interposed itself between the two boys and their (again) very distinctive parturitional styles, Marius, the elder, subjecting the delivery room to a systematic and intelligent stare, its negative judgment suspended by decency and disgust, whereas Marcus just clucked and sighed to himself compla cently, and seemed to pat himself down, as if after a successful journey through freak weather. Now in the dawn, through the window and through the rain, the streets of London looked like the insides of an old plug. Richard contemplated his sons, their motive bodies reluctantly arrested in sleep, and reef-knotted to their bedware, and he thought, as an artist might: but the young sleep in another country, at once very dangerous and out of harm's way, perennially humid with innocuous libidothere are neutral eagles out on the windowsill, waiting, offering protection and threat.

Sometimes Richard did think and feel like an artist. He was an artist when he saw fire, even a match head (he was in his study now, lighting his first cigarette): an instinct in him acknowledged its elemental status. He was an artist when he saw society: it never crossed his mind that soci ety had to be like this, had any right, had any business being like this. A car in the street. Why? Why cars'? This is what an artist has to be: harassed to the point of insanity or stupefaction by first principles. The difficulty began when he sat down to write. The difficulty, really, began even earlier. Richard looked at his watch and thought: I can't call him yet. Or rather: Can't call him yet. For the interior monologue now waives the initial personal pronoun, in deference to Joyce. He'll still be in bed, not like the boys and their abandonment, but lying there person- ably, and smugly sleeping. For him, either there would be no informa tion, or the information, such as it was, would all be good.

For an hour (it was the new system) he worked on his latest novel, deliberately but provisionally entitled Untitled. Richard Tull wasn't much of a hero. Yet there was something heroic about this early hour of flinching, flickering labor, the pencil sharpener, the Wite-Out, the vines outside the open window sallowing not with autumn but with nicotine. In the drawers of his desk or interleaved by now with the bills and summonses on the lower shelves on his bookcases, and even on the floor of the car (the terrible red Maestro), swilling around among the Ribena cartons and the dead tennis balls, lay other novels, all of them firmly entitled Unpublished. And stacked against him in the future, he knew, were yet further novels, successively entitled Unfinished, Unwritten, Unattempted, and, eventually, Unconcerned.

Now came the boysin what you would call a flurry if it didn't go on so long and involve so much inanely grooved detail, with Richard like the venerable though tacitly alcoholic pilot in the cockpit of the frayed shuttle: his clipboard, his nine-page checklist, his revving hangoversocks, sums, cereal, reading book, shaved carrot, face wash, teeth brush. Gina appeared in the middle of this and drank a cup of tea standing by the sink... Though the children were of course partly