Experience (Martin Amis) angry, journalistic reckoning with those journalists who have hunted Amis from tooth to tooth. But Experience is not quite a memoir, nor is it quite a portrait of his father, nor is it really an autobiography. It is an escape from memoir; indeed, an escape into privacy. In the very book which might, at first glance, seem most exhibitionist, most shamelessly metropolitan, Amis has softly retreated to the provinces of himself. His book often reads like a letter to his family and closest friends. It is sometimes embarrassing to read; the ordinary reader feels voyeuristic, at times almost uninvited, but
Kingsley Amis "What Became of Jane Austen? and Other Essays", in which Amis's wit and literary and social opinions were on display ranging over books such as Colin Wilson's "The Outsider" (panned), Iris Murdoch's début novel "Under the Net" (praised), or William Empson's "Milton's God" (inclined to agreement). Amis's opinions on books and people tended to appear (and often were) conservative, and yet, as the title essay of the collection shows, he was not merely reverent of "the classics" and of traditional morals, but more disposed to exercise his own rather independent judgement in all things. Amis became associated with Ian Fleming's