Martin Amis on Other People

Then I read Other People, Martin Amis's weird Nabokovian misogynist metafictional mystery novel. It was supposed to be helpful because it's about a woman who loses her memory, and has to find out who she is. (Turns out she's the thrice-reincarnated Amy Hide, who's been murdered by the same detective twice—when the novel ends, she's just gone back to being a young teenager again. Unfortunately for anyone who wants to read it as a detective novel, there's no way to guess the metempsychosis plot ahead of time—those sorts of things aren't supposed to HAPPEN in realism.) The narration is mostly third person, a close third, who observes Mary Lamb (which is the name the amnesiac Amy gives herself) going around London and not quite knowing what she's doing. Then there are paragraphs of a first person narrator who talks just about Mary/Amy. The point is mostly to be mysterious, I think, but it's hard to get why it's necessary to play all these games in the first place—I don't CARE about Amy Hide, I don't find any of the characters appealing, and I don't really enjoy the jokes Amis wants to make about his characters, which seem to be that they're all insane deluded perverts. Ugh. It was a slightly awful novel.