Id like to dispense straightaway with what I like about Martin Amis and move on to the meatier stuff. His secondary life’s project—his primary one being himself—can be seen as an attempt to write out how harassing the daily details of life can be. I like his characters’ endless confrontation with the banal gone crazy. That’s why, in The Information (1995), Richard-the-not-well-known-novelist’s paisley pajamas are soaked in sweat, that’s why he fears his mail, that’s the whole thing about lugging the Hoover. His wife says: “Could you nip round to the electrician and pop the Hoover in?” And it is torture, not only because “Richard’s nipping and popping days were definitely over” but also because the Hoover becomes the luggable metaphor for all that he has failed to achieve. He is convinced that Beckett never had to nip around the corner and get his vacuum cleaner fixed. (Which I’ve always thought of as a lost opportunity, for Amis, considering that it’s a modern-world problem, and Beckett probably never did have to do that, because he would have had a maid, not a vacuum.)

This is the same thing Amis was trying in Time’s Arrow. The world moves backwards, so there’s lots of hassle at the market, where you put things back on the shelves, and in the toilet.

The little things add up to the big thing. In The Information, Richard is having a crisis, a midlife crisis: But “it wasn’t his fault—it was death’s fault.”