'The Emotion Is Starting to Come Out' : In his new book, Martin Amis explores the chaos in one man's life. The dark comic tale he weaves could be his--and our--own.

By FRANCESCA RIVIERE

July 17, 1995 12 AM PT

SPECIAL TO THE TIMES

Reading Martin Amis and then meeting Martin Amis is like experiencing a Mobius strip--where extremes meet, with a twist.

In person, Amis is unlike the insatiable low-life and contrasting upper-class characters he writes about in several of his nine novels. He is neither slob nor snob.

He is a polite, sympathetic, modestly soft-spoken Englishman, with an Oxford-educated inflection. He speaks with quick, precise wit, honesty and intelligence. His youthful appearance contradicts his 45 years. If anything, his physical presence embodies the character and tone of the omniscient narrator of his latest book, “The Information” (Harmony, 1995), identified in the story as being Martin Amis himself.

A Mobius strip with a twist.

Recently, in a smoking area of West Hollywood’s Bel Age Hotel restaurant-bar, Amis recalled an earlier voyage to America, in 1958-1959, when his father--author Sir Kingsley Amis--was teaching at Princeton.

“We came over on the Queen Mary, in third class. We came back in second class, and I was just certain we had really arrived . . . the impossible glamour of second class. It reminded me of Evelyn Waugh when he was on the Queen Elizabeth, in first class, and a journalist in second class sent a note saying he was a great admirer, wondered if he could have a drink with him and chat, and Waugh said yes. He said, ‘I’ll come to yours,’ to the second-class dining room. He walked in, looked around and said to the journalist, ‘You can just smell the poverty, can’t you?’ ”

Like his famous father, Amis draws from a rich vein of British satire, specializing in protagonists at odds with the codes and values of their environment who lead intense emotional lives.

Both authors have had films made of their first novels: The elder Kingsley’s “Lucky Jim” in 1954 aligned him with the Angry Young Men--writers and playwrights protesting modern English life; Martin’s “The Rachel Papers” in 1973 won the Somerset Maugham writing award when the author was 24. Both are coming-of-age novels, comic in style and situation, expressing the mood of youth in each era.

Both authors also write nonfiction books and articles: Sir Kingsley on politics, education, language, film, television, restaurants and drink; Martin on nuclear power, tennis, literary heroes, Hollywood films and celebrities. Both share an interest in science fiction. Martin enjoys anagrams, wordplay and, as a novelist, having a Martian point of view--that of being a stranger in a strange land.

If in some future eon beings from this or some far distant planet want to probe the consciousness of earthling man in the 20th Century (Just what was he thinking? How did he really feel? ), they will have only to read “The Information” to comprehend the devastating repressed scream of pain in our daily existence. For all its comic and cosmic dark humor, “The Information” is a very emotional book.

“I’ve always felt like Kurt Vonnegut, who said, ‘There’s an intolerable sentimentality waiting to consume everything I write.’ . . . And I always felt that there was a great deal of sentiment, of feeling, kept at bay by a fierce comedy. And I feel the emotion is starting to come out. You do try to keep it at bay with irony, you know.”

Amis didn’t set out to write the definitive tragic comedy of the ‘90s. But in taking on the universe, he captures the universal, through the voice of planet-bound man contemplating the cosmos amid the debris of chaos in his earthly life.

“It was more a kind of pulling back, sort of reverse zoom, from these little concerns to a huge picture . . . these little human operations are kind of useless in the vast perspective. . . .

“Your two big subjects nowadays, I think, are your travel through time, your particular span, set against the planet’s travel through time. The planet’s evolution wouldn’t have been much of a subject at any other time in human history. It was creeping along, having not that much difference in human consciousness between one century and another up until the Renaissance. But now it seems to be changing every week. . . .

“This species is what we belong to--not your family, not your race, but your species. But the idea of killing each other over some border dispute seems preposterous in this big picture.”

Set in London, “The Information” tracks the revenge of failed writer Richard Tull on his friend Gwyn Barry. Tull doesn’t understand why Barry’s novel, “Amelior,” is so popular:

“When he first read ‘Amelior’ Richard kept . . . turning abstractedly to the back flap and the biographical note, expecting to see something like ‘Despite mutism and blindness,’ or ‘Although diagnosed with Down’s syndrome,’ or ‘Shrugging off the effects of a full lobotomy.’ . . . ‘Amelior’ would only be remarkable if Gwyn had written it with his left foot. Why was ‘Amelior’ so popular? Who knew? Gwyn didn’t do it. The world did it.”

There are plot novelists and there are voice novelists. By his own description, Martin Amis is a voice novelist. In the author’s construct, Amis’ voice is encoded into “The Information” like a microchip of pain permeating the novel yet never becoming interactive with its characters.

“It’s I, and it’s not a trick,” he says. “I’ve been hovering around my books. I was a minor character in ‘Money,’ an initial confusion between Mark Asprey and Martin Amis in ‘London Fields.’ But it’s me, it’s honestly, truthfully me.

“It’s because I feel I don’t know anything. And yet I’m supposed to be the omniscient narrator. It’s the early middle age, you know, turning 40. All that felt to me like the onset of atrocious ignorance. Milan Kundera said that we’re all children all our lives because every 10 years we have to learn a new set of rules.

“So I guess I felt I had to tell the readers this, that they had to know where I was coming from, at this stage of my life.”

In the five years he spent writing “The Information,” Amis’ personal life somewhat paralleled that of the book’s main character, Richard Tull, in that he was experiencing a midlife crisis and the breakup of his marriage to Antonia Phillips, the mother of his sons, Louis and Jacob. The British press covered this breakup in the same style it covered the royal breakup. The fact that Amis’ girlfriend, novelist Isabel Fonseca, was American contributed to the accusation in the press that Amis had “gone American.”

When Amis left agent Pat Kavanagh and his publisher of many years, Cape, to sign with New York agent Andrew Wiley and Rupert Murdoch-owned Harper & Row--gaining $800,000 for the English rights and $400,000 for the American rights--it created a scandal in the British press. As a result of leaving Kavanagh, a rupture occurred in Amis’ friendship with novelist Julian Barnes, who is married to the agent.

Added to the personal pain of public divorce was the physical pain of Amis’ extensive and necessary dental work, done in New York, which provoked the odd contempt of English writer A.S. Byatt (“Possession”), who charged that Amis had sold out to pay for his divorce and dental work.

Says Amis: “It’s not just the money, because other people have got near equivalent to that. It’s not for me to say that envy causes this, because it’s for others to say. But envy never comes to the ball dressed as envy, it comes dressed as high moral standards or distaste for materialism. I think they think I was born with a complete set of writer’s genes and that I lie around on a hammock, drawling into a tape recorder, you know, that all this work is just done for me by my genes.”

Amis has no illusions as to the consequences of his personal life and book negotiations being played out in the press.

“I suppose what I feel about it is this: If you do make an impact as a writer there’s only the wrong kind of impact one can make now. No one’s going to say, isn’t it great to have this writer around? That’s not going to sell any papers. So the only kind of impact you can make is a sort of tawdry one, these days, in England.”