The Information

Literary fiction · Dark comedy · Satire

First published: 1995
Print length: 374 pagesVintage International, 1996

Description

At forty, British novelist Richard Tull watches the career he once expected disappear into rejected manuscripts, minor reviewing jobs, and depression. His university friend Gwyn Barry, meanwhile, has achieved enormous commercial success and may soon receive a prestigious literary prize. Friendship has hardened into an intimate rivalry in which every triumph for Gwyn confirms Richard’s sense of failure. Unable to master either his own work or his envy, Richard begins looking for ways to damage the man whose good fortune torments him. Their corrosive relationship drives a darkly comic literary satire that sets private humiliation and professional ambition against a vast, indifferent universe—and the mortality awaiting successful and unsuccessful writers alike.

Reading profile

About this profile

Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).

Writing: How much attention the sentences and language require.
Ideas: How much interpretation or abstract reasoning the book asks of you.
Structure: How much you need to keep track of speakers, timelines and connections.
Background knowledge: Prior knowledge needed to follow the book, beyond what it explains.
Emotional intensity: Emotional pressure, from gentle (1) to intense (5). Separate from difficulty.

Writing style

Dense · Essayistic · Ornate · Witty

Pace

Measured

Tone

Cerebral · Dark · Irreverent · Satirical

Structure

Linear

Focus

Character · Relationships · Voice

Emotional intensity

4 / 5

Reading complexity

1–5 · higher means more demanding

Writing: 4 / 5
Ideas: 4 / 5
Structure: 3 / 5
Background knowledge: 2 / 5

Themes

AmbitionArt and creativityFriendshipMortalityObsessionWork

About Martin Amis

Martin Amis was an English novelist, essayist, memoirist, screenwriter, and critic whose fiction made late-capitalist appetite, cultural decline, masculine vanity, and literary rivalry subjects of dark comedy. His prose is dense and verbally restless, driven by irony, coinages, elaborate sentences, and grotesque caricature. He often places compromised, self-dramatizing narrators inside plots that expose their efforts to control other people and their own stories. In Money, advertising director John Self’s compulsive spending and chaotic film project become a hectic study of consumerism and self-invention. London Fields turns an anticipated murder into material for a blocked writer, making narration itself part of the moral disorder. The Information uses one of Amis’s characteristic pairings, setting two novelist friends against each other as unequal success converts intimacy into sabotage. Such doubles give his large social satires a close personal pressure, while metafictional interruptions and borrowed genre structures keep their plots visibly unstable. His comedy repeatedly moves between verbal display and the damage done by appetite, envy, and self-deception.

Book details

For the print edition listed above.

Publisher: Vintage International
Language: English
ISBN: 9780679735731

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