Deciding What To Read Next

Today I finished Martin Amis' book London Fields and looked at other books of his I have checked out from the public library. The first one I considered is Yellow Dog. I was not sure if I wanted to read it or not and decided to look at a review. I looked at what Michiko Kakutani wrote in the Times. It is not positive:

Martin Amis's new novel reads like a sendup of a Martin Amis novel written by someone intent on sabotaging his reputation. It bears as much resemblance to Mr. Amis's best fiction as a bad karaoke singer does to Frank Sinatra, as a kitchen magnet of Munch's ''Scream'' does to the real painting.

It is a novel that takes every theme, narrative technique and preoccupation of the author and turns it inside out, revealing how qualities that have established Mr. Amis as one of the foremost stylists of his generation can easily devolve into self-indulgence and mannerism; how daring choices in subject matter and form can mutate into mere grossness and hollow pretension.

In ''Yellow Dog'' his propensity for dwelling on the seamy underside of modern life, for satirizing the squalor, terror and corruption of urban existence, degenerates into a Bret Easton Ellis-like penchant for willful and cheap sensationalism. At the same time Mr. Amis's celebrated love of language wilts in these pages into silly and mindless wordplay, while his mastery of postmodern pyrotechnics withers into an excuse for lazy craftsmanship and a messy, improvised story that is neither provocative nor compelling.

After reading those words, I decided I might try Inside Story. I do not think that reviews are always the best way to pick a book, but Tom Bissell was. As he says:

Twenty years ago, in a review, I called Richard Powers “America’s greatest living novelist.” I used to think it was important, or worth it, to say things like that, to make those judgments. “America’s greatest living novelist”? We’re not cops, zapping passing novelists with a radar talent gun. Writing like that — thinking like that — all you do, ultimately, is embarrass people and yourself. (Sorry, Rick. I still love your work very much.) It’s not worth it, because literature, as Jim Harrison often said, is not a sack race. So how about: Martin Amis is my favorite living writer and “Inside Story” is his most beautiful book. That’s eminently more worth it because it’s human, and that’s all literature is: Human A, dragging his or her mind up a mountain, so Human B can follow the trail. We soar through time at terminal velocity, toward a destination that, on the best of days, terrifies. Books like this one slow us down. The rest is marketing.