Inside Story is called, on the front cover, which boasts a very charming photograph of the author and Christopher Hitchens, a novel. It also has a good and comprehensive (14-page) index. I’ve been a book reviewer for 35 years and I’ve lost count of the number of times I have wished, professionally, for larger novels to have an index; but I’m not sure I can remember seeing one before. A non-facetious one, that is. This index is very much non-facetious.
Novel or not, then? I’ll try to get rid of this question as quickly as possible, but it has to be addressed (as I write these words, I have a feeling most of this review will be taken up with this, one way or another). There are characters called Martin Amis and Christopher Hitchens; there is Hitchens’s wife, Carol Blue; there is Amis’s wife, Isabel Fonseca (here called by her second name, Elena).
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