The Moronic Inferno: And Other Visits to America by Martin Amis Read Free Book Online Page A

employer), Lawrence Grobel is disciplined, persistent, thorough, and stupid. He is not quite as stupid as James A. Michener, who contributes a wonderfully galumphing foreword, but he is not nearly as smart as Truman Capote. Thus Grobel is thoroughly insensitive to Capote's standard interviewing persona, which is that of the Tease. Frowning now at his tape-recorder, now at his list of questions, Grobel unsmilingly processes the wanton bitchiness and boastfulness that Capote tosses out at him.
    There is hidden comedy here, in the narrative links. Grobel is always telephoning, pestering, suddenly flying in from Los Angeles; with some awe and cautious affection, yet quite without self-consciousness or pudeur, he repeatedly nags Capote into yet another session with the Sony. And there is pathos too, for by now Capote often has to drag himself from the sickbed to cope with the Californian wretch.
    Actually the whole book glows with the pale fire of illness, and one suspects that not a day of Capote's life was uncoloured by it. 'This small brilliant man', as Grobel dubs him, had everything in the American package — everything except brutish good health. His medical chart is dotted with seizures, addictions, dryouts; and yet the malaise sounds habitual and pervasive, as if Capote drank and drugged chiefly to assuage pain. Towards the end, his life appeared to be a bleak alternation between major surgery and Lawrence Grobel. One admires Capote the more for giving such a spirited account of himself.
    Serious literary questions are raised, by Capote, and left hanging there by Grobel. This isn't surprising, because the Playboy interviewer shows no differentiation of interest, whether the subject is John Updike or Jackie Kennedy. Presumably a fuller treatment of the life and work is on the way. Let us leave Capote, for now, in one of his more triumphant moments, displaying a characteristic mix of fearlessness, spite, and, no doubt, self-flattering embellishment:
    I was sitting there with Tennessee. And this woman came over to [our] table ... and she pulled up her shirt and handed me an eyebrow pencil. And she said, 'I want you to autograph my navel' ... So I wrote my name: T-R-U-M-A-N C-A-P-O-T-E. Right round her navel, like a clock ... Her husband was in a rage. He was drunk as all get-out ... He looked at me with this infinite hatred, handed me the eyebrow pencil, unzipped his fly, and hauled out his equipment ... Everybody was looking. And he said, 'Since you're autographing everything, how'd you like to autograph this? There was a pause ... and I said, 'Well, I don't know if I can autograph it, but perhaps I could initial it.’
    Taller 1978 and Observer 1985

Philip Roth: No Satisfaction
    Philip Roth has just completed a trilogy — the Zuckerman books — and we will come to that in due course. Looking back, though, we see that Roth's previous nine novels arrange themselves in trilogies too — or they do if you nudge them. To begin with we have the three apprentice works: Goodbye, Columbus and Letting Go, which survey the waking novelist's immediate experience, and When She Was Good, which steps self-consciously outside it. Next we have that lip-smacking threesome of frisky Menippean satires, Our Gang, The Breast and The Great American Novel, where Roth took a manic holiday from his normally sober preoccupations — namely Jewish family life, heartbreak in the Humanities, and the impossibility of getting on with women. Flanking the satires are Portnoy's Complaint (1969) and My Life as a Man (1974), obsessively personal accounts of emotional failure and collapse, followed by The Professor of Desire, which rounds off the trio. Like its weepy, ball-broken hero, David Kepesh, Desire is an oddly helpless, melancholy and apathetic continuation of Roth's protracted self-scrutiny; having long been adept at turning his life into literature, Roth here lets life just wash all over him. The new persona is the prostrate man, limping from