SOUR GRAPES, BAD TEETH

By R.Z. Sheppard

"WHENEVER A FRIEND SUCCEEDS, a little something in me dies," Gore Vidal once said, pretty much covering the subject of envy in a single line. Now Martin Amis has milked the topic for an entire novel. The Information (Harmony; 374 pages; $24) is just appearing in the U.S., two months after its publication in Britain. With it trails a controversy that has kept the London book world jawing for months.

The flap is less about the novel--a boisterous tale that Evelyn Waugh might have written were he resurrected as a Monty Python--than about Amis, 45, a best-selling writer undergoing some serious midlife changes. First, he left his well-bred, moneyed American wife of nine years, Antonia Phillips, 43 (with whom he has two sons, ages 8 and 10), for a younger American girlfriend. She is Isabel Fonseca, the financially robust, thirtyish daughter of Uruguayan sculptor Gonzalo Fonseca and granddaughter of the late New York philanthropist Jacob Kaplan.

Next, the novelist who gleefully mocked ambition and avarice in Success, Money and London Fields displayed his own ambition and avarice. He demanded and eventually got from the English publisher HarperCollins, U.K., an advance of nearly -L-500,000 (almost $800,000) for his latest novel. In the process, he tossed over his longtime British agent and friend, Pat Kavanagh, for a more aggressive U.S. representative, Andrew Wylie, called "the Jackal" by publishers and rivals because of his opportunistic business style.

Most American writers would applaud a talented colleague's fat advances, if only out of self-interest: big, highly publicized deals raise the negotiating floor for everyone. But Amis' grab offended the sensibilities of some of his English literary colleagues. One was novelist Julian Barnes, who had a good reason: he's the husband of Kavanagh, Amis' former agent. Another was A.S. Byatt, whose novel Possession was published by Jonathan Cape, who also brought out Amis' previous novels. "I don't see why I should subsidize his greed," said Byatt, "simply because he has a divorce to pay for and has just had all his teeth redone." The dental work in question was done in the U.S. at a cost of $30,000, an expense that did little to endear Amis to a nation where a stiff upper lip is often an involuntary reaction to periodontal pain and government-issue dentists.

Amis sees the squabble as a peculiarly homegrown phenomenon. "There is very much a feeling in England that if you get a huge amount of money, then you can damn well put up with anything else that happens to you," he said in an interview with Time. The outcry against him, Amis added, "contained a strong element of old-fashioned anti-Americanism. I had an American agent, an American dentist, an American girlfriend. All those anti-American feelings that you thought had evaporated years ago re-emerged."

That The Information is about literary envy complicates the story. Amis denies that the book is a roman e clef, and indeed, the characters are too over the top for positive identification. Martin Amis, the son of novelist Kingsley Amis, has always been eager to show that he can juggle words better and push satire further than his competition, including Dad. But there are limits, and they are beginning to show.

His new novel opens with the promise of another of Amis' feats of controlled chaos. The plot develops with the right balance of malice and merriment. At the age of 40, struggling novelist Richard Tull understands that he will never make it as a writer. His cerebral fiction no longer gets points for degree of difficulty. He reviews books for pittances, his wife earns more than he does, his children distract him, and he is impotent.

In contrast, Tull's friend Gwyn Barry, duller and less gifted, makes millions with two politically correct, feel-good novels. Tull, feeling only jealousy and hatred, attempts to wreck Barry's career and his posh life. The attempts backfire, however, providing a source for Amis' sardonic humor-his elaborate facade for intellectual disdain and largely unearned cynicism.

Illusion, of course, is art's essence. But by the time he gets halfway through his new novel, Amis is providing mostly distraction. The comedy becomes shtiky, with a few exceptions--like the drunken theater critic who nearly completes the first word of his review before falling unconscious onto his keyboard. The word is "Chehko." But the setups grow progressively slacker, and Amis relies too heavily on old tricks: low comedy courtesy of London's petty-criminal class, Postmodern interjections from the author, and profundity cast as scientific metaphors. By now the literary uses of entropy are threadbare even for Amis.

Perhaps this letdown might have been avoided had Amis included more than one of the seven deadly sins. Pride has possibilities. Then again, envy is not an insignificant emotion-not even in a book review. If not as envious as the caricatured Tull, a critic is still the sort who thinks faster when standing on someone else's feet than when standing on his own.

--With reporting by Elizabeth Bland/New York

With reporting by ELIZABETH BLAND/NEW YORK