Experience
Martin Amis
(Vintage, £7.99)
Buy it at a discount at BOL

One hesitates to give this book more publicity, after this newspaper's decision to reproduce its cover on the front page (my children find it particularly compelling, staring in disbelief at the fag, half the size of his face, in the young Amis's gob), and after Amis's recent calumnies against my profession (again, in this paper); but affecting not to notice it would be signally perverse. It is possibly Amis's best book; it is also necessary.

There are times when it appears gloriously ill-advised. Five years ago, his vicissitudes were the stuff of that degrading kind of public debate the press in this country specialise in: the teeth, the mistress, the money, the agent. But mainly the money. We were beginning to forget about all that (the national stupidity has its compensatory benefits), and here he comes raking it all up again, an almost aggressive defence of what hardly needed, if we all thought about it, to be defended. The part of the book I find the most fascinating, yet also the one that I want to read through half-closed fingers, hiding behind the sofa, as it were, from the spectacle of my own prurience, is where he deals with the end of his friendship with Julian Barnes. He quotes the entire text of his reply to Barnes's letter to him, the one which ended with the words "fuck off". He then writes:

"For the first time in these pages I sense the twist of rancour in me, and my hands, as I write, feel loath and cold. But I had to assert it, to my readers, and also to my friends. It was said that I turned away - and I don't do that. I won't be the one to turn away."

A few things might strike you on reading this, once you recover from the hot flush of embarrassment at having read something so private (and which, moreover, will eventually be read by who knows how many thousands of others). I suggest: a kind of awe at the risky showmanship of his very prose style; the feeling that he and Julian probably aren't going to make it up now; and the great lengths to which he will go in order to satisfy his readers, who here are given priority over his friends. You should consider yourselves honoured.

But that isn't the heart, or even the sinews of Experience . That would be two things, the most directly stimulating, for Amis, being the discovery that his cousin, Lucy Partington, had been one of the victims of Frederick West. That this emerged at around the time of all the other rubbish about his private life - during the period when everyone was being told to hate him - can't have made matters any more bearable.

Then there is the strange fact that he is, on top of everything else, Kingsley Amis's son. Or, more accurately, everything else is on top of that. As a memoir of the man, it is poignant, honest (a word to Kingsley, on hearing his judgment on Mandela: "your views would get you chucked out of a bar called the Kaffir-Flogger"), and, it should hardly need to be said, painfully funny. This kinship has placed him at the centre of this country's literary vortex for the last quarter of a century; the extraordinary thing is that, at the same time, he has the talent and the ability to be the best possible candidate for such a position. In one sense, this isn't even a book: it's an event. What a relief that it's as well-written as it is.