Their dazzlingly reconstructed conversations brim with insight on everything from radical Islam to the origins of World War I to Hitchens’s confrontation with stage IV esophageal cancer. Amis’s intellectual soul mate throughout is his best friend, Christopher Hitchens, the late Vanity Fair polymath and sage. Most of all, Inside Story is Amis’s homage to his literary mentors (Saul Bellow, Papa Kingsley Amis, and Philip Larkin, who turns out be-spoiler alert!-the young Amis’s possible biological papa) with occasional shout-outs to those in Amis’s literary orbit, whom he usually refers to by their first names: Salman, James, Julian, Ian, Zadie, and Elena, the pseudonym he assigns to his wife. (The chapters on the sexually tangled Phoebe Phelps are as gripping, in parts, as The Undoing.) It’s a series of meditations on geopolitics, war, the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, aging, suicide, mortality, “the erotic life,” and the full-on life of the writer-the reader gets a contact high from Amis’s wink-wink toggling between the first and third person. It’s a rogues’ gallery of keen psychological studies. It’s a memoir tucked inside an endearingly discursive novel, one peppered with references to Tolstoy, Blake, Conrad, Joyce, Waugh, Arendt, Auden, Burgess, Tuchman, the ever-present Nabokov, Iris Murdoch, Vonnegut, ad infinitum. Inside Story is a five-course meal of a book-with frequent palate cleansers of Amis-bouches.
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