Summary

Preludial and Part One

In the opening of the story, entitled “Preludial,” Martin Amis speaks to an unseen listener whose identity is supposed to be that of an individual who is a houseguest wanting to know Martin’s life story. Martin describes the members of his family, as well as some of his personal feelings about being a writer and the difficult relationship he has with time, now that he is in his sixties. Martin explains that the narrative the houseguest is about to read has been written before only under a different title, Life, but Martin had considered it a dead draft. In its rewritten form, the story, Martin explains, is about “a very perverse mental period [he] went through in early middle age” (xvi) during which he experienced suicidal ideation. Amis confesses that one of the reasons he had an easier...