Fiction finalist …

… This Year’s NBCC Award Finalists: Inside Story: A Novel by Martin Amis. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

If he were American, we’d say he’s lost nothing off his fastball. Despite the fantastic array of liberties he takes in his 17th work of fiction—abundant, whispery, hilarious footnotes; flamboyant mixing of historical detail and roman-a-clefdeception; recreated “verbatim” conversation from decades before—Amis, in his familiar swaggering style, fulfills what he calls here the novelist’s fundamental duty: to “answer the door and let you in.” And he does it with that alchemic translation of Bellow and Nabokov into his own high-flying British idiolect.