Geordie Williamson

It is a book which is in love with its subjects, but nonetheless, you know, you kind of, you stay for the stray detail.

You stay for the moment where you find Mark Namer sitting and watching Pirates of the Caribbean with an elderly, ailing, dementia adult Saul Bellows.

you stay for the accounts of his girlfriend and we will get to Phoebe Phelps because that's another story entirely.

But there are moments where you think to yourself, you shouldn't be telling me that story.

That is an intimate tale.

And yet you can't drag your eyes away, especially if you have an interest in Amos and Hitchens and that particular historical moment and that group of incredibly talented writers.

Absolutely.

And some people have called it fan fiction.

And there are moments too, where you just think you're just giving us a kind of, you're dictating a lot of showing off.

Nonetheless, it is great showing off.

Yeah, no.

I don't know quite what to make of this either, except to read Phoebe Phelps back through Amos's body of work.

And so the fact is, Tegan's absolutely right.

There is a sense of the wattage dimming.

And Amos himself says about writers' late styles in this book, some just get watery and worked out.

And that is certainly true at certain points in this book, but not with those sections that deal with Phoebe Phelps, because what you've got there is a kind of auxiliary throb of male desire.

And it made me think that maybe I'd been reading Amos wrong all along, that even though he felt kind of chilly towards women and perhaps afraid of them and wrote with a degree of disdain, which I've never been kind of...

very at ease with and yet in this book his relationship with Phoebe is one of absolute erotic thrall and when they're together the prose picks up several notches and you sit up to attention.

Now the way it's framed seems absolutely extraordinary.

Phoebe is a woman that he picks up