MONEY: A Suicide Note. By Martin Amis.
Book review by John Gross
363 pages. Viking. $16.95.
BOOKS OF THE TIMES - March 15,
1985
W HEN John Self comes to
dinner, he is liable to begin by drunkenly dropping a few bottles of champagne,
so that the kitchen floor looks like a Jacuzzi. When he is out on the town, and
he is not gobbling down junk food or throwing it up, he tends to spend much of
his time sampling the pleasures of unspeakable clip joints and dismal sex
emporiums. Among his major cultural accomplishments, he lists an addiction to
video nasties - ''diabolism, carnage, soft core'' - and along with some
unwholesome personal habits his chief form of exercise is getting into fights.
One way and another he embodies - all 225 pounds of him - just about everything
your mother told you not to play with.
Self is both the hero and
the narrator of Martin Amis's new novel. When we first meet him he is rampaging
into Manhattan from the airport; a successful director of British television
commercials, he has been invited to New York in order to make a movie - his
first feature - called ''Good Money.'' In the course of the book, the name gets
changed to ''Bad Money,'' but money, good or bad, remains as constant a theme
of Mr. Amis's novel as its title suggests.
Through Fielding Goodney,
the wheeler-dealer who is putting the film together, Self is drawn into the
world of megabucks and smart operators, a world peopled by characters with
cash-laden names like Anna Mazuma and Ricardo Fisc. (''Mazuma'' and ''Fisc''
are obvious, ''Anna'' and ''Ricardo'' may take a moment's thought.) The dollars
flow; Fielding Goodney picks up some impressive tabs; as the golden thread
unwinds, Self is given every reason to brood over the seemingly magical power
that money can confer or take away. ''Without money you're one day old and one
inch tall. And you're nude, too.''
Poor Self. For all his
faults he is a man more schemed against than scheming, and he eventually finds
himself the victim of an elaborate set- up; he also has to cope with a series
of menacing and mysterious phone calls, a double-dealing girlfriend who
descends on him from London, a father with a brutally disconcerting surprise up
his sleeve. Few things in ''Money'' are what they seem, and the plot defies
easy summary - which may be just as well, since if you did manage to reduce it
to its bare outlines, the book would probably sound like trash. It is, in fact,
a book about trash, which is rather different.
Everything turns on detail
- on the intricate web of allusions that Mr. Amis spins, the boldness and
energy of his language, the stealth with which he stalks his prey. New York and
London as they appear in his pages are recognizable versions of the real thing,
but he enjoys improving on nature, heightening the color here, substituting a
comic invention there. The makes of cars his characters own, for instance.
Fielding Goodney glides through Manhattan in a long sleek Autocrat; Self's
Fiasco needs a major overhaul (poor Self); somebody else runs around London in
a little black Iago - and not by chance, either, since references to
''Othello'' bubble up throughout the novel.
Above all Mr. Amis has
endowed Self (realistically or not) with a witty and insinuating narrative
voice. Much of the wit is brisk and slangy, but it can also luxuriate into
virtuoso extended metaphors. ''My head is a city,'' Self laments, and he
proceeds to explain how various pains have taken up residence in various parts
of his face: ''A gum-and-bone ache has launched a cooperative on my upper west
side. Across the park, neuralgia has rented a duplex in my fashionable east
seventies. Downtown, my chin throbs with lofts of jaw-loss. As for my brain, my
hundreds, it's Harlem up there, expanding in the summer fires. It boils and
swells. One day soon it is going to burst.''
Like many recent novels,
but more lightly and deftly than most, ''Money'' also calls frequent attention
to its status as a work of fiction. Although Self hardly ever reads a book, he
gradually becomes intrigued by a writer who lives in his part of London, an
unnervingly polite character called Martin Amis. He arranges for Amis to revise
the script of the movie on which he is working, and from that point on the
writer - the fictional writer - threatens to usurp the novel - the real novel.
It is like the Escher drawing of a hand drawing itself.
A nagging question remains
- is it worth expending all this art and ingenuity on a character as trivial as
Self? He has his representative significance, no doubt; he could serve as an
Awful Warning in a homily on the consumer society or the Me Generation; but do
we really need nearly 400 pages of him?
Not if we regard ''Money''
as a conventional novel, a more or less realistic slice of life; and if we do,
it is easy enough to see the ways in which Self simply doesn't hang together as
a character. He is far too eloquent and well-informed to be as brutish as we
are asked to believe, and far too fastidious in his responses. But in practice
this kind of inconsistency doesn't seem to me to matter very much, since he has
only one foot in the real world anyway. He is also a walking bundle of
appetites, naked Ego (with a strong dash of Id), Self by name and self by
nature - as much a creature of fantasy, in some respects, as Gargantua or Ubu
Roi.
The comedy and horror of
the untrammeled self make a more powerful theme in Mr. Amis's hands than the
theme of money. But if the wider social message of his novel doesn't go very
deep, ''Money'' remains a highly original and often dazzling piece of work.
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