Martin Amis (1949–2023)

If Philip Roth is correct and life is misunderstanding people, then I remain awed by the riddle which is Martin Amis. His first novel The Rachel Papers injects self-awareness into satire, leaking a fecund foam which changes everything about how we regard the way we live now. The insecurity of adolescence is illustrated by our protagonist, one Charles Highway, who diagrams said angst and provides cross-references from the literary canon. One can imagine the reader or protagonsit saying bugger show more Holden Caulfield, then recognizing that Highway has likely compiled a list of ten reasons as to his superiority over Mr. Caulfield.

During a lazy gap year Charles writes, drinks and woos the titular Rachel. Life doesn't meet his precis. Plans have to change. Matters become a little Meta and we are left a little uncertain about what is actual and what is fictive. This is one of the most hilarious novels I've read. Numerous passages left me almost convulsing with laughter. show less

Is this great literature? No. But I did really like it. It should sit next to Rabbit, Run and Portnoy's Complaint, but with the benefit of being much, much better written than the first, and more interesting than the second. Also, compared to 'Dead Babies,' which was my first M. Amis read, this is much less datedly 'shocking.' Reading DB was a bit like listening to a teenager with green-dyed hair talking about how much she's subverting Them. Kind of cute, but also more than a bit tragic. I show more didn't get that feeling here, thank the lord.

Aside from being hilarious, the book's strength is the distance between the character, the reader, the 'implied author' (sorry for the jargon, but it's a useful one) and Amis himself. That distance separates the book from Roth. Roth always makes me think that, not only does the protagonist = the implied author = Roth, but also that the reader is being morally bullied into identifying with Roth; there is nobody I less want to identify with. Here, Amis is distant from Charles Highway; he starts off letting the reader be distant, then eventually forces you to be - the conclusion is the only truly shocking part of the book, but it's perfectly right. But Charles Highway is himself distant from Charles Highway, thanks to the narrative structure. Nice.

All that said, this is clearly a love it or loathe it kind of deal. I wonder how funny it would be to someone who was never a teenage boy? Or perhaps more importantly, to men or women who like to think that being a teenager is all wide-eyed joy and openness to the world and lack of responsibility and stress. Probably not funny at all. And you'll hate it if you can only like books when you like the protagonist. But if you're one of those people, I mean, come on, really? You're missing a lot of great books. show less

John Self: an alcoholic, misogynistic, violent director of commercials in the mid-1980s. To him everything is porn: food, drink, any female. There hasn't been a more hateful protagonist in a novel that I have read in a long, long while. But . . . Oh my god, Martin Amis is a brilliant writer and so freakishly funny that I could not put it down or turn away. And I'm glad.

A short, strange, provocative, and deeply disturbing novel. We follow a man, a doctor, called Tod Friendly (not, we will be unsurprised to eventually learn, his real or original name) through the perceptions of a sort of disembodied presence that accompanies him throughout his life. But this presence experiences that life, and everything in it, backwards. Effects precede causes, doctors harm and violence heals, and the dark, horrible secret that lies in Tod Friendly's past moves ever closer show more to the present.

It's a conceit that seems like it shouldn't really work, not for 165 pages, but it really does. At least, it did for me. It's clever and sometimes dryly funny, and coming at life backwards makes for a fascinating and often insightful change of perspective. And a darkly unsettling one, too, as we watch historical atrocities unspooling in reverse.

I feel like this book is doing a lot of things, thematically, not all of which are easy to put my finger on, but which are certainly churning away in the back of my brain right now in some very interesting ways. Above all, perhaps, it raises the question: can there be true redemption from great evil and great guilt? Maybe only if you can turn back time. show less