An “informal biography” of Christopher

couldn’t, and no one else has taken their place. Significantly, Amis’ best recent writing has been his most escapist, such as The Anti-Death League. Significantly again, Ending Up, which starts realistically and degenerates into farce, features life among the very old.

TO economize and create the semblance of a home, five ill-matched septuagenarian pensioners share a country cottage. Irascible Bernard, bitter with piles and the knowledge of approaching dissolution, shirks his responsibilities and continually tries to foment discontent among the other members of the household. His kindly spinster sister Adela holds the household together. Predictably, lower class Shorty works hard in the morning but usually falls into a drunken stupor by late afternoon. George and Marigold are merely comic turns, included in the cast because of their linguistic eccentricities. George, after a stroke that has left him half- paralyzed, is a “nominal aphasic”; unable to find the nouns he needs in his partially frozen mind, he is forced to resort to tortuous circumlocutions: “There was hardly any money in where they keep the money, so they hit him with a tightening-up affair and the iron business for the fire and so on, and took the money in what he was wearing and how you tell the time and even his smoking stuff.” Marigold, having as a young woman thought baby talk a charming addition to her personality, now resorts to it continually so that everyone must suffer through her idiocies, such as “chummy-wummies,” “checkle-peckle,” and “tunka-lunks.” Since these two characters are so one-dimensional, they are allowed to develop, or at least change, during the course of the narrative: George recovers from his aphasia and begins to talk everyone’s ear off, while Marigold begins to show signs of senility.

About the Author

Linda Bridges

Ms. Bridges is the former editor-at-large of National Review.

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couldn’t, and no one else has taken their place. Significantly, Amis’ best recent writing has been his most escapist, such as The Anti-Death League. Significantly again, Ending Up, which starts realistically and degenerates into farce, features life among the very old.

TO economize and create the semblance of a home, five ill-matched septuagenarian pensioners share a country cottage. Irascible Bernard, bitter with piles and the knowledge of approaching dissolution, shirks his responsibilities and continually tries to foment discontent among the other members of the household. His kindly spinster sister Adela holds the household together. Predictably, lower class Shorty works hard in the morning but usually falls into a drunken stupor by late afternoon. George and Marigold are merely comic turns, included in the cast because of their linguistic eccentricities. George, after a stroke that has left him half- paralyzed, is a “nominal aphasic”; unable to find the nouns he needs in his partially frozen mind, he is forced to resort to tortuous circumlocutions: “There was hardly any money in where they keep the money, so they hit him with a tightening-up affair and the iron business for the fire and so on, and took the money in what he was wearing and how you tell the time and even his smoking stuff.” Marigold, having as a young woman thought baby talk a charming addition to her personality, now resorts to it continually so that everyone must suffer through her idiocies, such as “chummy-wummies,” “checkle-peckle,” and “tunka-lunks.” Since these two characters are so one-dimensional, they are allowed to develop, or at least change, during the course of the narrative: George recovers from his aphasia and begins to talk everyone’s ear off, while Marigold begins to show signs of senility.