Books: One More Fat Englishman Money: a Suicide Note

The last time Martin Amis caused literary ripples on this side of the Atlantic, he was the offended party in a plagiarism scandal. That was in 1980 when a young American writer named Jacob Epstein confessed that he had not sufficiently “originalized” whole passages from Amis’ first novel, The Rachel Papers, before incorporating them into his own fictional debut, Wild Oats. Now the son of British Novelist Kingsley Amis (Lucky Jim, One Fat Englishman) is back with a splash. Money: A Suicide Note is one of those infrequent novels that should divide readers into admirers and detractors, with little room for neutrality. The book even comes with a bit of extraliterary irony. While his father’s novel Stanley and the Women has been shunned by U.S. publishers for being insensitive to females, Son Martin, 35, smuggles in a cast of stereotypical gold diggers and playgirls under the guise of a morality tale.

In fact, Amis is quite the scold. His Rabelaisian comic gift cuts savagely at the patchwork of relativism and materialism that passes for modern social fabric. The novel’s loutish hero, John Self, is a grotesque victim of life in the fast lane: “I hate people with degrees, O-levels, eleven-pluses, Iowa Tests, shorthand diplomas,” says Self. “And you hate me, don’t you. Yes you do. Because I’m the new kind, the kind who has money but can never use it for anything but ugliness.”

Self’s financial transactions make the phrase “filthy lucre” seem quaint. He spends in a slack-jawed trance usually associated with pornography. Wads of currency go for hogsheads of alcohol and composts of fast food. His car, an overpriced Fiasco, is nearly as costly to keep as Selina Street, a sexual acrobat and shakedown artist whose faked orgasms excite Self more than the real thing.

The source of this blubbery oaf’s X-rated capital is the London advertising business. But Self, first encountered drunk and disorderly in a New York City cab, is branching out into American moviemaking. This is a realm of invisible money, transparent friendship and deals as insubstantial as holograms. In Manhattan and Los Angeles, he is called Slick by people with names like Nub Forkner, Herrick Shnexnayder and Fielding Goodney, who communicates in the language of Upper Vulgaria: “Date-raped, Slick. Out on a date, you know? Remember. In fact it’s an interesting distinction. With a regular rape, lust plays no part in it. It’s all about power, self-assertion, violence . . . But with a date-rape, lust features.”

Self, son of a Pimlico barkeep, is always a step behind his Yank associates. He doesn’t have their slippery finish; he doesn’t live on the sharp end, which means always flying first class and riding in stretch limos known as Autocrats. Slick’s library consists of about 13 titles: Home Tax Guide, Treasure Island, The Usurers, Timon of Athens, Consortium, Our Mutual Friend, Buy Buy Buy, Silas Marner, Success!, The Pardoner’s Tale, Confessions of a Bailiff, The Diamond as Big as the Ritz and The Amethyst Inheritance. When a woman refuses him until he has read Animal Farm, he makes a surprising discovery: “The big thing about reading and all that is–you have to be in a fit state for it. Calm. Not picked on. You have to be able to hear your own thoughts, without interference.”

At such moments Self sounds the novel’s underlying theme: a culture geared to profit from the immediate gratification of egos and nerve endings is not a culture at all, but an addiction. As an addict, he discovers that bad habits and ignorance are the bars of self-imprisonment. “Look at my private culture,” he cries. “It really isn’t very nice in here. And that is why I long to burst out of the world of money and into–into what? Into the world of thought and fascination. How do I get there? Tell me, please. I’ll never make it by myself. I just don’t know the way.”

Self disapproves of his life, but as long as the cash rolls in he is powerless to change. Moreover, his swilling and wenching take place in societies where shame is archaic and judgmental a dirty word. Overdue for his flight, Fielding Goodney simply delays the plane with a phony bomb scare: “I always do it when I’m running late. They grill the latecomers but not if you’re first-class. It’s not economical.” A Los Angeles housewife interrupts Self and a prostitute in a parked car with “Hurry it up, pal. You’re in my drive!”

Amis introduces a contrasting character named Martin Amis, an English writer. He is everything that Self is not: disciplined, patient, and well read. He is also a modish literary distraction from technical problems inherent in plotless first-person narratives. Will Self ever direct a movie? Will he ever finish reading Animal Farm? Will the manna ever stop falling? The answers matter little, since Amis’ buffoon is at his best when he is doing his worst.

Though the names of the novel’s characters have the ring of Restoration comedy, Money owes much of its drive to contemporary American fiction. Unlike most British novelists, Amis projects a large and raucous vision. He seems to have learned his heightened personal voice from Saul Bellow, the humorous uses of inverted logic from Joseph Heller and his naughty bits from Philip Roth. In fact, Self can be just as shocking and funny as Alexander Portnoy, an accomplishment not likely to go unnoticed. Amis’ new novel should have feminists calling for blood and entertainment packagers trying to raise the ghost of John Belushi.