[1] The book revolves around a fictionalized account of Amis' relationship with three central figures who have died: Philip Larkin, Saul Bellow and Christopher Hitchens.

Another central figure, Phoebe Phelps, is entirely fictional, and characterized by a mixture of hyper-sexuality and vulnerability reminiscent of previous female characters written by Amis (e.g. Nicola Six in London Fields, Gloria Prettyman in The Pregnant Widow).

The final part of the novel describes the death of each of the three principal figures (Larkin, Bellow, Hitchens), followed by Amis himself bidding farewell to the reader.

He also visits the fictional character Phoebe Phelps in her crippled old age, and comments in a postscript on the death of his stepmother, Elizabeth Jane Howard.

[2][7] As in other Amis novels, critics praised his singular style: "The great lines come flying at you, as always, volleyed out of the cleft of the book and into the magic space beneath your raised eyebrows.

Recalling a line from Saul Bellow's Herzog - "Each man has his own batch of poems", Power summarizes the conundrum of the book's genre thus: "What is Inside Story?