Talking Big

Martin Amis has died. He was 73. Have you read his novel Time’s Arrow (1991)? This is what it is like. To get at the feeling, I thought of describing events of my own life run backwards, and that’s a little disturbing. There’s the scene in the restaurant of yours truly removing the engagement ring from my (now) wife’s finger and putting it back in the box as the surprise flies from her face with uncommon swiftness. Or my children simultaneously and at a steady rate getting smaller and smaller until they are small enough for the doctor to put them back inside their mother who seems prepared for this but screams and screams nonetheless and then flees from the delivery room each time with a heavy belly. Where those children went from there is a mystery. Or my father’s ashes dumped by some man in a mask into a crematory fire, a magic fire that turns the ashes to a human body, and not only that but a body that comes back to life, thin at first then slowly gaining weight and living color and a new black beard until he looks like Bluto again and laughs his loud laugh, or that maniacal oral surgeon, cutting open my gums to put my wisdom teeth in. He sealed the gums up perfectly, you could never tell they were cut open, but the teeth bring a dull ache and troubled dreams about my front teeth falling out. Further on, there is the deer in Maine that jumped from the side of the road to repair the huge dent on my car’s hood and fix its own broken bones before bounding hind legs first back into the woods. Looking at these things from this angle makes them nightmarish. You get the idea of this book.