When Martin Amis published his fifth novel, Money, in 1984, ambition was written all over it. (Amis’s previous novels were clever but generally undistinguished.) Money’s large cast of characters and crowded plot broadcast the author’s determination to outdistance England’s other youngish front-running novelists, perhaps the most visible of whom are A. N. Wilson and Julian Barnes. According to American critics, who prize ambition above all other qualities, Amis accomplished his goal. Money was hailed as a novel full of “comic verve” (James Atlas); as “brilliant and frightening” (Anthony Burgess); as “engaging and hilarious” (Jay Mclnerney). Amis was called an artist of Rabelaisian gifts for his feverish portrait of a modern society deformed by greed.
The hero of the novel, a grotesquely obese, alcoholic Englishman named John Self, is a director of trashy commercials who is putting together his first feature film. He lurches through a perpetually dark and tarted-up New York and a damp, limp London, making deals with such unsavory characters as Lome Guyland (an aging movie star), Fielding Goodney (a young executive on the make), Butch Beausoleil (a not-so-innocent ingenue), and—surprise—a novelist called Martin Amis, who pops up now and again in a quiet, ineffectual way. (“Yes, he’s clever,” admits John Self, “and I wish I had his articulation, but I sussed him for a wimp, right from the start.”)
Amis’s subdued personality in Money is, of course, a sly joke.
Amis’s subdued personality in Moneyis, of course, a sly joke:
