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Rating:  -
From MONEY by Martin Amis: "With a premonitory rustle of shopping Selina hurried in through the front door."
From BRANDO by Peter Manso: "Cornfield had envisioned the film as a premonitional dream about the kidnapping of the heiress."
MONEY also contains a joke about unprovoked contradictionism: "When Vron had sobbed it all out after showing her prospective stepson photographs of herself having a handjob with no clothes on for money, she explained to me--at throaty length and with hot tears still foiling the points of her lashes--that she had *always* been creative. 'I was *always* creative John!' she said again and again, as if I kept impiously insisting that she was creative only sometimes or not until recently."
Compare that bit of characterological comedy with the following quote from an Amis atrocity called YELLOW DOG: "'*Perfectly* decent little place', said the King as he strode through the mountain tunnel of the Abbey archway--saying it as if Brendan and Victoria, and everyone else, kept maintaining otherwise, in tireless error."
Rating:  -
The strangest thing about this novel is that it rips off Brian De Palma's awful film 'Dressed to Kill'--a film which Amis himself mocked in an early 80s magazine article. Amis can write a sentence with the very best of them, but can't construct a plot to save his life. Certainly worth reading, however.
Rating: -
Is this all about money? Money, so they say, is the root of all evil today?
Rating:  -
Marin Amis has said that writing comes easily to him, and he is undoubtedly a wordsmith. One who likes a wonderfully spun phrase, metaphor, or description (and probably already an Amis fan) is going to love this book. One who is more of a tradtional reader, who is interested in a unique insight, an engaging story, and affecting characters will be left shrugging their shoulders. I am the latter.
The plot follows film producer John Self on his travels between NY and London; and we get to watch all of the room service, hangovers, women, and money that make up those travels. Like all tales of 80's greed; money, alcohol, drugs, and sex are unfulfilling; but it is those things that the charcters continue to turn to. Self narrates the novel and it is he that reflects on this lifestyle. Thus, the novel is quite literally filled with "Self" loathing. Self says, "Money, I must put money round me, more money, soon. I must be safe." But the strip clubs and hangovers are more boring than seedy (the shortcoming about which I was most surprised), and Self is more pathetic than anything.
I don't think that there is any pretence of this being a plot driven novel, so I won't waste any criticism here. The novel relies on Amis' pen, but it can be surprisingly dull. Even the passages I enjoyed, and there were many, were more clever than insightful. But his cleverness is overextendedand thus, he has moments where he is reduced to describing Self's moral make-up in a way that a teen-angst rock band might. "I am made of - junk, I'm just junk" would fit nicely into any Korn song.
By the end of the novel, his moral weakness has not been overcome. Rather, Self is exhausted. He predictable ruins an opportunity of having a real relationship and settles for another with no enthusiasm. An so, too, the novel ends with no energy, despite a few bits of ecstatic prose.
Maybe the this book is a victim of a theme that has been exploited and exhausted in a number of books and films; namely, the excess of the 1980s. But if this was a great book, it would stand apart from the others, it would sound unique. It does not, and I will forget it. About midway through the novel, Self, as the narrator, states, "Points of a journey do not matter when the journey has no destination, only and end." An ironic insight, indeed. There is no change, no destination, only exhaustion as an end. Thus, "Money" doesn't matter.
Rating: -
this is a great book, immensely well written. but trust me, that after you read enough of martin amis, you should get sick of martin amis---of the personality style and construction of his writing: the man comes through. and that man is excessively showy, deluded, and obsessed with matters of little consequence. or it least it so appears. i'd like to read depressing writing, at least, with more consequence.
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