The Rachel Papers

I strode into this novel with a bit of bad press concerning its content. One of my professors from my just completed Masters program had apparently attempted to read Amis' novel (this on his first) and found she couldn't continue past 100 pages. With all due respect to my professor (and for her specifically I have quite a bit) I couldn't find what she didn't like about this novel. For me it was fantastic. A refreshingly unchaste, unlettered, yet very erudite and of course almost excessively British (some of these seem to be calling cards of the 'younger' Amis so go know) story of one compulsively horny and compulsively narcissistic boy nigh man coming into his own as both his father's son and his own man...both of them fairly deplorable show more by the ostensible standards of middle class morality.

Amis is funny, distinct, and relentlessly his own voice which, while abrasive, is authentic and unapologetic in its intelligence, bitterness, and wit. I recommend this book to anyone (my former professor excluded) who loves watching intelligent people make objectively bad decisions for subjectively good reasons show less

Charles Highway is approaching his twentieth birthday. All too soon his teenage years will come to a close. But there are yet things to be done: he must study for and write the entrance exams for Oxford, compose a bitingly cruel letter of rebuke to his philandering father, dissipate in London (though admittedly in the basement of his sister’s house), bring his sardonic wrath down upon the history of literature, and oh, sleep with an older woman. Rachel, two months his senior, is his choice. And just as his does with his exam prep, his letter to his father, his personal chronicle of his dissipation, Charles has a dossier on Rachel, a battle plan, if you will, that will ensure his conquest. Well, maybe.

Charles may be nineteen but his show more angst-ridden sexual single-mindedness makes him seem more like an emotionally stunted younger teen. As though the various medical conditions that delayed his education also retarded his psychological growth. But his scatter-gun disdain is telling, especially when he ends up being its target, which is often the case. He knows that he is ridiculous, but then so is the world around him and everyone in it. The irony is that when he isn’t self-consciously an ass, he is an attentive lover capable of real emotional connection. But only up to the point of realization. Then he seems determined to crush out any honest emotion like the dregs of a cigarette.

The writing here is deceptive. Charles is not sympathetic. And even when he lets his mask slip, it’s difficult to have any emotional investment in his plight. Amis’ writing absolutely delights in Charles’ self-loathing. As Charles writes in one of his exam papers, there is a “meretricious exaltation of verbal play over real feeling.” Amis knows precisely what he is doing and is completely willing to skewer himself in the process. It is a first novel that announces that more and greater things are bound to come from this writer (and they do). After a slow start, it entirely won me over at least to an appreciation of Amis’ much-touted skill.

Recommended. show less

I've been aware of Martin Amis for fifty years, but had never read any of his work until now. In fact, THE RACHEL PAPERS (1973) was his first novel. Its a "sort of" coming-of-age story and probably highly autobiographical. His narrator-protagonist, Charles Highway, is on the cusp of turning twenty, and looking back at his lengthy pursuit of and obsession with a lovely girl named Rachel. He is about to take his exams to get into Oxford, but he is also reviewing his encyclopedic notes and journals he has kept on this girl, as he flashes back on his childhood and teenage years and other friends and girls he has known. Oh, and he also "thinks" he hates his newly wealthy father, who is seldom home and has a mistress, and is composing, show more variously, a letter, or speech, to him.

This is not a very "deep" novel (although it is filled with literary allusions - Charles is very well read), and I felt a bit guilty about how very much I enjoyed it, often chuckling or lol-ing at what Charles had to say, or was thinking - about sex, girls, women, wanking, all manner of bodily functions and effluvia - often a combination of disgusting, fanciful and flat out hilarious. And it's a very seventies novel, reflecting the new sexual freedom that characterized those years.

I remembered reading Kingsley Amis's best-selling novel, LUCKY JIM, back in college (extracurricular), and not liking it all that much. Maybe the British humor went right over my head. Not so with his son's book. I laughed. A lot. There are hints of early Philip Roth here.

I enjoyed this book tremendously. Very highly recommended.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER show less

I've given up trying to defend Martin Amis books. I tend to agree with every criticism that people offer, but to me they've missed the point. He's so wonderful to read because he has more technical mastery than any writer of the last fifty years that I've read. He can make his prose, and consequently his characters, do absolutely anything he likes.

As this is his first novel the pyrotechnics are somewhat muted, making it probably one of his more accessible novels. He has focused a bit more on characterisation, creating Charles Highway, who can stand as the equal of any of the unpleasant young men of literature in my opinion. He's at once detestable and forgivable, and he's instantly recognisable to anyone who's ever anticipated the show more sexual act with equal measures of dread and excitement, or felt an odd pleasure at coughing up a livid green lump of mucus.

If you've never read Martin Amis, or ever wondered what goes on in the head of self-involved young men, this is a good place to start. show less

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 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 show more 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

It is hard not to compare The Rachel Papers, Martin Amis's debut novel, to Lucky Jim, the best and best-known work by his famous father, Kingsley Amis. Both, after all, are novels of disillusionment, with Jim Dixon finding that academia is rife with petty politics that take away from the fulfilling life of the mind he once envisioned, while Charles Highway, the protagonist of The Rachel Papers, seduces and then discards a slightly older woman by the name of Rachel, concluding that she is not a suitable match for him. That, however, is where the comparison should end, for The Rachel Papers is a critical parody not only of Lucky Jim, but of a whole subgenre of writing about youth and its illusions. This kind of novel is ripe for show more caricature precisely because its features have hardened into a recognizable set of clichés: the uncouth but lovable narrator, for instance, whose rough exterior is a defense mechanism in response to the perceived injustices of the world.

While there are numerous novels that fall into this subgenre, two in particular stand out in the period preceding The Rachel Papers: Lucky Jim, as I have already mentioned, and The Catcher in the Rye. Amis never mentions the latter directly, but Charles does say on several occasions that he has been "reading a lot of American fiction," and it is not a long shot to suggest that Rachel's on-again, off-again American boyfriend DeForest has echoes of Holden Caulfield. For Martin Amis, the disjunction between tough exterior and sympathetic core is ripe for critique. The implication is that we, as readers, see past these defense mechanisms in order to perceive that, beneath the angry countenance they present to the world, characters like Holden Caulfield and Jim Dixon are really romantics, misled into unhappiness by a mixture of cynicism and bad faith. Amis sees this gesture as encouraging a falsely sentimental view of youth, one that overlooks its stupidity and capacity for narcissism.

Charles Highway is the antidote to such mawkish sentimentality. Seeing the imminent arrival of his twentieth birthday as the entrance point into maturity, Charles sets out to make the most of his remaining time as a teenager. He moves from his family's home to live with his sister, Jenny, and her boorish husband, Norman, in order to attend a school designed to help him get into Oxford University. Central to his farewell to his youth is his desire to sleep with an Older Woman, and that is where Rachel comes into the picture. Not that Charles is desperate to lose his virginity - indeed, he already has a more-than-willing casual partner in Gloria, and the reader discovers that he has had sex with several other women, often followed by painful bouts of sexually transmitted diseases. But the seduction of Rachel is presented as a meaningful Goal, an encounter with an Older Woman, experienced and knowledgeable. Of course, the issue of Rachel's age turns out to be farcical, since she is barely older than Charles, turning twenty herself during the course of their brief affair.

The Rachel Papers is an unpleasant read (what book by Amis isn't?), but this horribleness is strategic. Amis takes aim at every sentimental preconception we might have about his youthful protagonist, emphasizing in particular the vulgarity of Charles's body as he spits ("hawks"), leaks, squeezes, and vomits his way through the story. Charles is apparently not squeamish about any taboos, revealing his incestuous feelings toward his sister, for example, sniffing Rachel's dirty underwear, and theorizing calmly that, based on his tastes and level of sensitivity, he "ought" to be homosexual, thus turning his enthusiasm for women itself into a kind of perversion. Amis shuts down any avenue for seeing his protagonist as a misunderstood romantic: from his sexual behavior to his intellectual pursuits, the reader has the sense that Charles knows exactly what he is doing and how revolting he really is.

The one remaining illusion for Charles seems to be that life will change once he becomes an adult, an assumption that seems to come true when, in his Oxford interview, the professor neatly pulls apart the contradictions and intellectual misappropriations in Charles's arguments about which no one had previously dared to challenge him. But even Prof. Knowd's incisive assessment of Charles's abilities and shortcomings does not represent real maturity, but instead a sort of advanced pissing contest that suggests adulthood is a complicated continuation of, rather than a genuine break from, the immaturity of youth. The Rachel Papers is at its best when its focus is on this intellectual context. In recent interviews, Amis himself has said that the main shortcoming he sees when reflecting back on his debut novel is how awkwardly the plot unfolds. The novel does meander along at times, and there were moments when I thought that this book would have made a better short story - tighter and more focused - than a full-length novel. I can't say that I loved The Rachel Papers, but my own experience has been that it has provided much food for thought, and that, rather than pure entertainment, is the sign of good fiction. show less

Amis is the son of English author Kingsley Amis (who, famously, never read any of his son’s books); this probably makes them the most talented father-son literary pair in history (Alexandre Dumas pere and fils perhaps running a distant second). Amis’ fiction tends to be dark and quirky; I’ve read London Fields and Night Train, both sort-of-mysteries and the short story collection Heavy Water, which includes the funny but sad “Career Move”, about an alternate universe where poets are big-name celebrities courted by international business while screenwriters are limited to self-publishing and sponging off their friends. In nonfiction, his autobiography Experience mostly discusses his troubled relationship with father and family, show more and Koba the Dread is a scathing indictment of intellectual fascination with Communism.


The current subject is The Rachel Papers, his first novel; sort of a The Catcher in the Rye if Holden Caulfield lived in 1970s London, did a lot of drugs and booze, and was breathtakingly pretentious. The protagonist, Charles Highway, is obviously Amis; they share terrible teeth and a promiscuous father. Nineteen-year-old Highway invents himself as a Byronic literary figure to the extent that he documents all his relationships, romantic or otherwise, in file folders – hence the title (Rachel gets not only a folder but a notebook to herself). Before each romantic encounter, Highway carefully scatters works of literature around his attic room (deliberately swapped with his younger brother so Charles can live in a garret) and documents the mental and physical seduction strategy he will use on Rachel and the various other women in his life. Amis manages to make Highway despicable and likeable at the same time, no mean trick; I suppose the most disconcerting thing was I recognized that I was doing exactly the same thing when I was 19 – with considerably less success and more poorly documented (although I did write diaries of teenage angst, hoping someone else would read them and realize how tragically misunderstood I was).


Which brings up a scifi cliché; suppose you could go back in time and talk to your 10 or 20 or 30 or 40 or 50 year old self; what would you tell them? Would the 61-year-old Setnahkt have anything meaningful to say to the 10-year-old Setnahkt? (“Buy Microsoft when it goes public” would seem obvious, except that Microsoft wouldn’t exist for another 14 years). I suppose I could tell the younger me to stop spending so much allowance money on model airplanes and study instead, but a 10-year-old who did that would be the dullest kid in the neighborhood. Come to think of it, though, I already was the dullest kid in the neighborhood, so it wouldn’t matter much.


At any rate, The Rachel Papers and the other Amis’ I’ve read are recommended, although it will help if you’re in sort of a wry mode when you read them. show less