Money: A Suicide Note (Penguin Ink)

In  The Vagrant Mood: Six essays , old W. Somerset Maugham, in an essay oddly praising detective novels, complains that modern "serious" novelists often have little or no story to tell, and they thus abandon something which appeals to our human nature, "for the desire to listen to stories is surely as old as the human race." Maugham further observes that modern novelists are "often intolerably long-winded," and that they take four hundred pages to tell what could be explained in a mere hundred.That's the problem with "Money." The first hundred pages of the novel depict the protagonist, John Self, getting drunk and being an oaf over and over. Maugham suggests that modern novels dispense with a plot so as to provide "psychological analysis," but Self getting trashed and being as offensive as imaginable, then doing the same thing again on the page after next provides no great insight into character. There's a running joke about pigs, but we already get it. He's a pig.The plot is about Self's efforts to get a movie made, a movie based on his life, but at about page ten, you just knowwww that movie's never gonna get made. The first hundred or so pages can easily be skipped without missing anything of significance. The characters are all stereotypes (phonies -- American phonies, the worst kind), and it's thus not necessary to keep track of the names. About halfway through the book, an odd thing happens. The protagonist changes from being an utterly disgusting drunk to a somewhat sympathetic drunk, but he still manages to offend everyone else. There are subplots of a mysterious death threat against him and even a hit contract taken out on him, but neither of those threads eventually amount to much. After progressing at a snail's pace (a drunken snail) with frequent descriptions of the sky, the denouement occurs in a sudden jumble, then the book drags on for too long. Will he kill himself or not? Enough already.As for psychological insight, who is this metaphorical "Self"? Is it Martin Amis depicting HIMself and his party-hearty life with pal  Christopher Hitchens ? Certainly not, because Amis performs the conceit of writing himself into the novel, and the depiction of himself is that of a paragon of sobriety, tolerance, and a Buddha-like composure. The fictional Amis also plays a masterful game of chess against the suddenly-sober protagonist, but this is about as plausible as the silly horse race previously described. Nor is "Self" the notorious (former) stoner and Amis imitator  Will Self .I would venture to say that "Self" represents . . . *you,* dear reader. YOURself, America. John Self lives in London, but he was raised in New Jersey. That must've warped him. The British characters are all disreputable (which, true, is typical of most of the novels of Amis), but they're nowhere near as loathsome as the Yanks. Hardly a nuanced view, but who am I to argue against Amis's (and the world's) perception of the USA as the heart of all greed, corruption and shallowness ?The dialogue and the interior monologues which make up most of the book are superb. There aren't many writers with an ear to equal that of Martin Amis, and some of it makes for great reading, but that's not enough to support 363 pages of threadbare plot. Reading the novel feels as if you've sold your Self short.

I feel a little sheepish not giving this book five stars. Perhaps it's because of all the critical acclaim. I don't know. It has real merit, but for me much of it comes from its being an example of literary farce, which was not necessarily the author's intention, I fear.Clearly, it's supposed to be funny, and it is! But the line between satire and farce is blurry. I found the narrator's hyperbole a bit of a stretch, and Amis leaned on it for most of the humor. As satire, it worked pretty well, but as farce it worked really well.There were great character descriptions, mostly of the actors hired to star in the film ostensibly being produced by the narrator. But I found Amis' introduction of himself as a character off-putting.Perhaps this review comes off as too finicky, but when an author is brazen enough to include himself as a character in what is nominally satirical fiction, his or her intention becomes decidedly more relevant. And I felt Amis intended this to be a satirical take-down of the film industry and a cultural moment in time. But some plot events were so implausible as to be only believable as farce.Anyway, I should probably get over my quibbles and give Money the acclaim so many folks do, but I just didn't take to this book in the same way I did to some of his others.

John Self, named such by Amis to represent all of humanity, is a man whose world is controlled by money and sex. Afraid of what life might bring him if he freed himself from his addictions, he succumbs instead to the mantra that just a little more money will fix your problems, that it seems to be working for everyone else so it will work for you too. Like all members of a capitalist system about which Amis seems to be prophesying, Self believes deep down that once he hits the money, his problems will disappear, his obesity, his loneliness, his addictions, and all the rest.The problem is he already has the money. He has had the money, spent the money, and still has the money. Money is not the issue. The mindset of the people in his world is that if he would "relax, . . . sink a couple of thou into [his] backhand, . . . quit smoking, drink less, eat right . . . go to high-priced health clubs and fancy massage studios . . . undergo a series of long, painful and expensive operations" then he (and you, the universal Mr. Self) will be ready for success in today's society. It is an alluring dream, is it not?Reviewed by Jonathan Stephens

Sure Martin drops the ball at the very, very end. But, until then, this is "in my opinion" the best, the funniest, the greatest celebration of pure loutishness every written. i lent it to a friend, he read it, and i asked him what he thought. his reply was simple and encapsulating; he responded, very matter-of-factly, "it's the Bible". i couldn't concur more. now, i'm not one to burst out laughing alone on the subway, but i couldn't help myself. if you have have never read Money, you're in for a treat. Like being a thirty-year-old virgin - lot to look forward to. i once described it as "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" with a bit less drugs and a lot more sex. That one also caused me to laugh out loud. but, if you happen not to like it, don't let it discourage you from reading "Money". it's more or less a totally different experience. it has everything: sexism, racism, alcoholism - what more could you ask for in a book! oh, as far as it being politically correct, it couldn't be further from it. - david

When about one-fifth through, I gave up. This book looks interesting but is one of the worst I have read. Gruesome descriptions of a hedonistic lifestyle with few real insights. No real plot.

マーチン・エイミスのマネー（Money）は日本語に訳された単行本がなく、必要箇所について自分で訳してみたかった商品です。アメリカのアマゾンを探したりしましたが、タイトルが"Money, money"だったり別の書籍を買いそうになったりして困ってました。日本からわずか１～２日で入手できてうれしかったです。

Una de las mejores novelas de fin de siglo. La prosa avanza al mismo ritmo al que el protagonista se entrega a un viaje interior frenético.

Oh, Martin. What happened? I used to love this book when I was younger. I remember reading and re-reading it with great pleasure, to such an extent that the copy I owned (complete with appropriately 1980s cover) was coming apart in my hands. I lost that book and the replacement somewhere along the line, and so when I saw it was available for Kindle I snapped it up unthinkingly, glad to have a copy that wasn't going to start shedding pages. And then I tried to reread it.Oh. Oh, dear. The book can't have changed. I suppose I must have done.Time has not been kind to John Self, or to the narrative he weaves. "You think women like me are attracted to men like you," a female character says (though perhaps not in those exact words) to Self, a man who is very much the archetypal eighties chauvinist pig. "We're not. I don't want men like you to exist". Twenty years older and wiser, I can't help but agree with her. Not because he's unthinkingly sexist, pornography-addicted and can't quite get his head round the idea that women are actually people: I didn't object to that the first time round, and I was considerably more humourless a feminist then than I am now. It's because he's a greedy, self-centred, fatuous bore. Greedy, self-centred and fatuous I can live with in a narrator, especially one as unreliable and unstable as this, but boring is fatal. Ignatius J. Reilly he is not.Perhaps more crucially still, though, I can no longer make myself believe that a man like John Self can exist. The narrative voice - which appears to find it difficult to commit to a tone and seems uncertain if it is supposed to be ignorant or erudite, vulgar or high-flown - simply doesn't ring true to me any more. I find it hard to believe that the same man whose first reaction to stumbling across a new concept is to express his confusion by means of the most obvious of expletives would then wax lyrical about the patterns that streets form, when viewed from the air at night. There's some lovely language in this book, but should it really be coming from a narrator like Self?For all the issues I now have with the book, the plot and the set-pieces still retain their charm and flair. Money is a vulgar, outlandish, bleakly comic rollercoaster of a tale which, if you can handle the narrator and some absolutely brazen self-insertion by Amis that even at the time struck me as self-indulgent, is worth the price of admission, if not worth paying for twice. If you have fond memories of this book, my advice would be to keep them that way. If, on the other hand, you simply want to read a good but not great tale of early-eighties excess, you could do worse than this.

If you aspire to be regarded as widely read sooner or later you must read Martin Amis. So finally I have read an Amis: Money. Do I now feel widely read? No. Money, it seems to me, is a stream of consciousness novel - a long flow of verbiage from the lower regions of an unconstrained grasping personality.There is a central thread to this book: the protagonist and narrator, John Self, demands, takes and consumes while at the same time setting up a movie, unaware all the time that things are not what they seem. His poly-gluttony consumes and demeans him even as he is increasingly aware that the sole support of his life, money, is all pervasive and all corrupting, and ultimately treacherous. This thread of a narrative is accompanied by a heavy overdose of Self's distracting, obsessive toilet-door and scattergun 'thought' concerning sex, self abuse (of many kinds), food, drunkenness, flimsy personal relationships.I was pretty fed up with him by half way, but persisted as this was, after all, an Amis. For me it continued to deteriorate and the last twenty percent was a real struggle. I got the point ( I think! ) about money - Amis features the word hundreds of times in Self's thoughts - and its specious qualities; and I put together subject and the decade and the illusion combined in them; I understood why Amis used the word money so frequently that it became a dead word, like money itself. To no avail; I could not care for Self as a character. He was so selfish, grasping and disloyal. There was no subtlety in his portrayal as a person or in his stream of consciousness.In a novel there should, to my mind, be a sympathetic character to engage the reader's attention and interest. John Self had nothing to retain my attention. The writing should be of good quality, not an outpouring of repetitive and obsessive self degradation. Money is an unpleasant substance but surely it could have been opened out for scrutiny with more art than this.I've read that this novel is reckoned by literary folk to be in the top hundred of English novels. Sorry, but it's not in mine.