Tuesdays are new release shelving day at McNally. Our most exciting arrival of the day: Martin Amis’s new novel LIONEL ASBO, autographed by the author himself. That’s right—Martin Amis’s actual, physical, RL, flesh and blood hand touched these books. In limited supply.
He talked to Capital New York about writing the book!
“The voice is your guide. And you develop a kind of idiolect, which is an individual way of speaking.” But in the writing of the new novel, the guiding voice became especially pronounced: “With Lionel, it was quite extreme, his idiolect.” (Sample, representative Lionel-ism: “I despair of you sometimes, Des …. Why aren’t you out smashing windows? It’s not healthy.” Meanwhile, Lionel’s pronunciation—he renders his own name “Loyonel, or even Loyonoo”—makes his pronouncements even more distinctly his.)
But it was not merely a matter of speech that made the experience of writing Lionel something new for Amis:
“What I found was different with him was that he’s very unpredictable,” he said. “And, now, in a way, that’s liberating. It’s nice to have an unpredictable character. When he jumps into a scene, I wasn’t really sure what he was going to do.”
He also talked about immortality, his father, Brooklyn, and what’s next. Read more here.
