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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.914
EAN num: 9780679735731
ISBN number: 0679735739
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 384
Printing Date: March 19, 1996
Publishing house: Vintage
Release Date: March 19, 1996
Sale Popularity Level: 109611
Studio: Vintage
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Product Description:
From the author of London Fields and Time's Arrow comes the story of Richard Tull, a novelist whose literary criticism is the only work to actually see publication. His life is not going well. Now, he has dedicated his life to screwing up the political aspirations of his best friend and bestselling novelist, Gwyn Barry.
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Rated by buyers 
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Years ago, when Amis was on a book tour for Experience I went to the reading with some of his books to sign, including a dog-earred copy of The Information. I'd read it forwards and backwards and backwards and forwards. It had been ripped to shreds by the press when it very first came out. At the signing I had the hardback version of Experience but began to feel embarrassed about the condition of The Information. Just before it was my turn, I said to his minder, Do you think he will be annoyed with this? Meaning the book. Ah...no, she said.
I gave him Experience, which he signed. Then I passed him The Information. He picked it up, rifled through the pages and said, "You read the s*** out of this." Then I got a full frontal view of his new teeth.
I did read the s*** out of it because it seemed to me that he broke new ground--it is different than Money, it takes more risks than Money, it's funnier, crueler and more frightening than Money.
Richard Tull is a fully realized character within a fully realized world as created in the novel. We don't know his wife as well because Richard doesn't know her and is less interested in knowing her than he is in literary success. He has gaping blind spots--brilliantly portrayed by his overthinking and competitiveness with everyone and everything. The amount of alcohol consumed -- the hangover damage that drives him to drink more--and yet still always on point in getting his novel Untitled published and recognized for its greatness.
This novel could be read just for the laughs but it's a richer experience than that -- but the laughs are enough. Perhaps because it is a book about writers people may not appreciate some of the jokes and some of its sensibility but there is a lot there for anyone.
Rated by buyers -
...and he is on killer form doing it. Hauling out all the neuroses, anxieties, uncertainties and jealousies of middle age - the 'information', alluded to in the cosmic sense - the nagging feeling, always with us, that our time in the cosmos is brief and insignificant.
Amis finds a superb vessel to hold such themes - a high farce, low morality comedy of errors rivalry between two novelists. One, a hillarious failure, Richard Tull has fallen badly on mid life - an impoverished writer of huge, impenetrable novels (which gives each reader migranes, or psychosis) which fail to find a publisher, a toiler of small time reviews of biographies on obscure figures: 'The Mercutio of Lincoln's Inn Fields: A Life of Thomas Betterton'. Richard is a neurotic smoking, drinking intolerable individual who finds the rare fortune of a Martin Amis character to have a wife who is both beautiful, patient and long suffering (in reality, I think it unlikely that such a woman would remain married to such a man).
If this wasn't bad enough, over in stucco-fronted Holland Park, Gwynn Barry, Richard's stupidest univeristy friend has hit upon huge sucess as a bestselling novleist of bland, anodyne, utopian trex-lit (Amelior, Amelior Regained). In the Black Swan era in which we live, sucess of course breeds more sucess - spiraling out like a flower into every area of his life - sexually, professionally, and financially. The crunch comes when Gwynn is nominated for the Profundity Requital, a sort of Nobel Prize pastiche with a huge, lifetime financial stipend.
How to get even? By hitting a novelist's reputation - a bad review? No, not nearly enough. Where it hurts - his body. Cue the regular characters of Amisville: Scozzy, 13, Terryterry. The cartoonesque London lowlifes who are brought on to the scene in murky and comic ways to cause serious damage to Gwynn. As the novel proceeds, Richard is drawn into a murky web of envy, violence and middle aged breakdown, tracing Gwynn across the London and American literary scenes. How will the man get through it?
Amis's themes and style really hit the heights here. Amis aspires to be a Bellow of the modern age - someone who encapsulates the modern consciousness, the ultimate challenge for any male writer prepared to put his balls on the slab and bring home the big one (for it is nearly always men who speak of the novel in such terms, is it not?). Amis is a writer of huge ambition, which of course rubs the literary world up the wrong way - his valourising of the canon, his universal metaphors, the wild and modern volatility of his sentences, his view of life and literature as a harsh cosmic pecking order with himself somewhere near the top. It takes courage, cosmic courage if you will, to write like this. It is like staring at the sun. Other writers look away, and nestle in the shady areas around (the essayists, the historical fictionists, the crime merchants, the romance writers). But Amis is out in the open, facing the modern beserk armed with only his typewriter. That's why his novels make uncomfortable reading. And he doesn't succeed evey time (Money, London Fields - yes, orange Dog - no). But when he is on form, as he is here, he is Britain's most compelling novelist. And other aspiring writers can only slump in their chair and read on, wracked with envy and awe.
Rated by buyers 
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In all my years of reading books this is the very first time that I have felt compelled to destroy a book once I have read it to avoid inflicting the torment of its pages upon another family member or friend.
This is one of those book that at every page turn you expect the book to come alive and at the end you question why anyone would have spent so long on a piece of work in which nothing actually happens. Then you question your own sanity for persevering for so long.
I have never read another Martin Amis book but still urge everyone to read 'Lucky Jim' written by the clearly more gifted father of Martin Amis.
Rated by buyers 
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I'm sorry I ever started reading this book. The writing is so good that I couldn't stop -- but man . . .
Somewhat like the fictional author's fictional readers, my nose started to bleed and most of my goldfish died. You need to be really hard up for a book to read to knowingly choose this one.
After much cursing and gnashing of teeth, I finally finished it.
Somebody owes me money.
Rated by buyers 
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Richard Tull is a failed intellectual novelist deep in the trenches of middle-aged disillusionment. His friend, Gwyn Barry, is a mediocre novelist rising in the marketplace. Richard has decided, that the only way to mitigate his pain is to f*ck Gwyn up.
Martin Amis has concocted a wickedly funny satire; it's a satire of capitalism in the 1990's, of the fakery of the artistic sphere and of narcissism.
The book is kind of pitiful at times, and Richards broodings become rather tedious, and Amis has included far too much description of the character Scozzy (I wish there was more between Richard and his wife, those parts were good) but, never the less, `The Information' is a fairly successful novel. And ironically, it sent Amis into the world of literary celebrity (the world which he clearly despises) upon its publication and changed his career forever. Not great, but probably more interesting than Kingsley's fiction.
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