9780679735731
The Information share button
Martin Amis
Format Paperback
Dimensions 5.19 (w) x 8.00 (h) x 0.79 (d)
Pages 384
Publisher Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication Date March 1996
ISBN 9780679735731
Book ISBN 10 0679735739
About Book

Fame, envy, lust, violence, intrigues literary and criminal—they're all here in The Information. How does one writer hurt another writer? This is the question novelist Richard Tull mills over, for his friend Gwyn Barry has become a darling of book buyers, award committees, and TV interviewers, even as Tull himself sinks deeper into the sub-basement of literary failure. The only way out of this predicament, Tull believes, is the plot the demise of Barry.

"With The Information, Amis delivers a portrait of middle-age realignment with more verbal felicity and unbridled reach than [anyone] since Tom Wolfe forged Bonfire of the Vanities."—Houston Chronicle

From the acclaimed author of London Fields comes a totally mesmerizing and thoroughly entertaining novel. When his oldest friend, who's also an internationally bestselling novelist, announces that he will use his media access and popularity to launch a political career, critic Richard Royce plots to pull his friend's career down around his ears.

Reviews

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Amis's latest is a pitch-black comedy about literary envy and the declining state of literary culture. (Mar.)

Library Journal

Richard Tull, a fortyish book reviewer and failed novelist, is driven to distraction by the effortless and unmerited success of fellow Oxonian Gwyn Barry. While Barry's simpleminded novels become overnight best sellers, Tull's dense experimental manuscripts send a succession of literary agents to the hospital with migraine. Tull finally decides it's payback time, and this novel chronicles his slapstick attempts to annihilate his friend. Amis pads the narrative with irrelevant and sometimes erroneous scientific data, presumably to justify the book's title. (In one astronomical digression, he gives the speed of light as 186,000 miles per hour.) In general, however, this is a wonderfully cantankerous send-up of the British literary scene, similar to David Lodge's satire on academia, Small World (1984). Although the book has been greeted as a roman clef in Great Britain, no special knowledge is required to enjoy its comedy. Recommended for most fiction collections. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 12/94.]-Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch. Lib., Los Angeles

Michiko Kakutani

"Satrical and tender, funny and disturbing...wonderful." -- The New York Times