From these disparate parts, the contours of a single idea emerge. Roughly, this is it: “VN’s happiness is a singular way of seeing, marveling, and grasping, in other words, of netting the light ...

In Experience , the memoir he published last year, Martin Amis confessed to a sad truth: “A writer’s life is all anxiety and ambition.” The memoir was more concerned with other matters-his father, the ...