Money: A Suicide Note

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The narrator - John Self - is literally one of the most repugnant characters you will ever meet. He's that despicable misogynistic alcoholic over there in the suit, drowning in his own excess. Alcohol, pornography, hedonism and, of course, money are his life, and he is a cringy embarrassment even to the reader. As he wrote his way through his 20s, Amis seemed happy to turn out more of these scabrous slices of comic fiction with a taste for the gruesome, where bad things happen to worse people – Dead Babies, Success – though he argued that complaining about “nastiness” in novels was an “extra-literary response”. The prose was all. Because its plot hinged upon the rivalry between two writers – the vacuously successful Gwyn Barry and the failed novelist Richard Tull – The Information was often assumed to be a crude roman a clef about Amis’s falling out with Barnes. In fact, it is more accurately understood as a troubled exploration of the professional writer’s soul: the endless war that is waged within every author, between Barry and Tull, between hunger for recognition and literary integrity. Nemmeno voglio parlare di " valore letterario" o cose del genere; lascio queste riflessioni ad altri più titolati di me. In the sharpest imaginable contrast, Amis ran towards gunfire: towards the dangerous terrain of class, sex, genocide, violence, and the twisted depravities of fundamentalist religion. His novels were unsafe spaces. His non-fiction was untroubled by the fear of causing offense. “I don’t want to tread carefully and be editing myself,” he told the Guardian in 2010.

As ever, the personal and the cosmic were intertwined. The Information is as much about mortality as it is about the shabby promptings of envy. It is also a novel about sunderings, especially powerful in its exploration of the cost to children of divorce: a subject that was much on Amis’s mind (“There was something terribly wrong with Marco: there was nobody at his side. And yet the child’s solitude, his isolation, unlike his father’s was due to an unforgivable error not his own.”) But even the more ambitious fourth novel Other People (1981) didn’t prepare us for the exceptional run through the rest of the 1980s and 90s – the period on which Amis’s legacy as a novelist rests – starting with 1984’s Money. Amis’s supreme confidence delighted fans as much as it rubbed others up the wrong way Tredell, Nicolas (2000). The Fiction of Martin Amis (Readers' Guides to Essential Criticism). Palgrave Macmillan. This is a hard book to review. 'Money'. I'll probably have to let the whole thing soak. It was brilliant, nimble, sharp, hard, completely balls-out-nuts and pornographic (not really in the PORNporn way, but in the MONEYporn way--yeah, folks, listen to the book you won't understand till you listen to it).

It’s true, Amis accepted, that “however bad” his first novel had been, “it probably would have been published out of mercenary curiosity”. But his debut, The Rachel Papers, published in 1973 when Amis was 24 years old, showed that Amis had the talent to support the promise, and its sales and acclaim (it won the Somerset Maugham prize, the first and last major prize Amis would win for his novels) proved he had the ear of a generation. Amis was born in 1949 in Oxford, and educated at schools in Britain, Spain and the US, before going to Exeter College, Oxford, where he graduated with first-class honours in English. I would like to begin this review with a statement: I am not a rich man. The highest amount of capital I have ever accrued amounts to approximately two thousand British pounds, and after reading Money: A Suicide Note from Martin Amis, I can also state in all conviction – that will do quite nicely for me. Amis began a relationship with the American-Uruguayan writer Isabel Fonseca, and the pair married in 1996, going on to have two daughters. Fonseca later turned to fiction herself, publishing her debut novel Attachment in 2009. Lipsky, David (5 July 2010). "What to Read This Summer". Time. Archived from the original on 26 July 2010 . Retrieved 28 February 2011.

We live in an age of stultified self-censorship and politeness, monstrously enforced by social media; of bullet points, blandness and writing that is simply the carbon-based version of ChatGPT. Amis writes himself into the novel as a kind of overseer and confidant in Self's final breakdown. He is an arrogant character, and Self is not afraid to express his rather low opinion of Amis, such as the fact that he earns so much yet "lives like a student". Amis, among others, tries to warn Self that he is heading for destruction, but to no avail. Felix becomes Self's only real friend in America and finally makes Self realise how much trouble he has: "Man, you are out for a whole lot of money." Sometimes I think of Amis’s fiction as akin to opera. And, as with the best operas, the story can sometimes seem beside the point. You’re there not for the plot but for the music and, of course, the voice. I will miss that voice. Oh, Martin, it was such a deep, recurring pleasure to hear it. —Bill Buford Lots of literary allusions are peppered through the text, including an increasing number to the author himself, the ultimate hero of the piece, who proposes the redemptive force of literature as an antidote to the Reagan/Thatcherite legacy. Right, that’ll do it. I’ll write to Trump and Weinstein to clue them in.

L’ironia, il sarcasmo che non risparmia nessuno (neppure se stesso) e niente dato che anche i nomi ironizzano sulle caratteristiche (negative) dei personaggi (persino la macchina si chiama “Fiasco”!!!) This sort of robust behaviour is much less common in today’s world of polarisation and brittle spirits. Which is why the sense of loss is especially pointed: in 2023, we need Amis’s writing more than ever. He was always unfailingly warm, kind and generous to those fortunate enough to work closely with him. His death is an enormous loss to all of us at Penguin Random House and to the UK’s cultural landscape.” It has been a profound privilege and pleasure to be his publisher; first as Jonathan Cape in 1973, with his explosive debut, The Rachel Papers; then as part of Penguin Random House and Vintage, up to and including his most recent book, 2020’s Inside Story. Writers (to use one of the grand, dubious categoricals that Amis loved) generally have a golden decade, give or take: a stretch when the gears of their talent and imagination fall into alignment and they produce the work on which their reputations rest. Vladimir Nabokov reached his moment in late middle age, from the mid-nineteen-fifties to the mid-sixties (“ Lolita,” “ Pnin,” “ Nabokov’s Dozen,” “ Pale Fire”). Saul Bellow probably did around the same time, too (“ The Adventures of Augie March,” “ Herzog”). Amis’s reputation-making period extended from the mid-eighties into the nineties, when he produced, one after the other, “Money,” “ London Fields,” “Time’s Arrow,” and “ The Information.” Those novels not only showed his style in all its rhetorical range but followed the energy of a time when Britain, buoyed and buffeted by the Thatcherite push to enterprise and global commerce, found itself reaching toward crass New World ways.

In Britain, the Spectator, not always an Amis fan, said of Money that it was “an epitaph to that decade (the 1980s) much more authentic and searching than The Bonfire of the Vanities or Less Than Zero.” Three more from Martin Amis Talking to BBC Radio 4, Amis said he wished he had put “greater distance” between himself and his father, with the “Amis franchise” becoming “something of a burden”. So, to say that I loved it....no, can't say that I did. To say that I hated it, absolutely not.....

This is precisely the response his own writing evoked in so many others. I can remember exactly that sensation when, aged 13, I read Other People in 1981. Almost four decades on, it is hard to convey how much of a haymaker he delivered to literary culture in 1984, in his first longer novel, Money. Just savour its first paragraph: Another big book about London (“the streets looked like the insides of an old plug”), centred on a struggling writer whose only friend has become the thing he fears most: a bestselling novelist. The comedy is unsparing but affectionate and the existential angst more acute than ever, even if the connected plot featuring minor criminals (Amis’s usual obsession) is less successful. Typical line “Something strange was happening in the Soviet Union, after the war against fascism: fascism.” Literally, forced to move. It means that whoever has to move has to lose. If it were my turn now, you’d win. But it’s yours. And you lose.’ I first read the novels of Martin Amis in the mid-two-thousands. He existed for me at the other end of a long pair of mental barbecue tongs. My friends and I missed school to protest the U.K.’s declaration of war on Iraq in 2003. Amis, along with Christopher Hitchens, was among the loudest of the many adults who discussed Islam in public, in ways that made it seem that they did not know what they were talking about.

All those forces are on the rise today. One of his collections of non-fiction was entitled The Moronic Inferno (1986), a phrase he borrowed from Bellow (who had taken it from Wyndham Lewis). Alas, the inferno is blazing ever more fiercely in 2023. Typical line “I want to shout with pain and pull the world apart, but I just vaguely peek in the direction of the girl’s breasts.”One of the books that are hard to read but once you're done, you just would like to read them again. It is just too beautiful that the fulfillment that you get from it is indescribable. My first time to read a Martin Amis book and definitely will not be the last. As an aside, tho, if any Goodreads Developers happen to be reading this: they should consider developing and releasing into the wild another star, a discretionary sixth star -- specifically, the power to harness such a star (in extraordinary situations only) for the purpose of reviewing those rare few books that are just thermonuclearly great. But this power should be granted only to certain users: only those users who have demonstrated consistently exceptional dedication, taste, subtlety, restraint and eloquence in their Goodreadsing. Myself, for example. Possibly others, too. But I would be willing to beta test this new star. Here is why: