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Rating:  -
'Money' is a curious and often wickedly funny tale of a British/American 35 y.o. slob who gets "his money for nothing and chicks for free" (..well, usually for free). The humour is crude, along the lines of what is found in the 'Men Behaving Badly' sitcom. And while the story gets a bit repetitive, with scenes constantly switching between London and New York, Martin Amis wraps it up with a clever and unexpected ending.
My only complaint with this generally well-written novel is its sporadic lapse into rather offensive material as a guise for humour. There is one scene where the main character repeatedly attempts (and fails) to rape his girlfriend. Funny? ...er, no.
But overall 'Money' is a fun read. It will probably appeal to men, more the Brits than Americans. I can imagine most women will find it offensive. And parents, don't let kids under 16 get near this book.
Rating:  -
Money is a helter-skelter ride through a seedy world that both feeds and is fed by a desire for money.
Greed kills, but only when it is feeling kind.
The rest of the time, greed plays with you like a puppet on a string, making the victim dance to an intoxicating rhythm.
John Self is a despicable character, but is very easy to love. He represents the ignorant, arrogant, selfish hedonist that is inside all of us to some degree.
His narrative is a drug fuelled tirade against anyone and anything that doesnt suit his own needs. A mockery of his own greed - Self knows he is immoral, but just doesnt care right now.
To read Money is to be a voyeur into a life that is both attractive and repulsive...
and very entertaining!
Rating:  -
I loved London Fields, thought it was absolutely brilliant, so based on the ratings here picked up Money. It was entertaining for the first quarter of the book then really fell apart. I must admit I never finished it, I couldn't stand it anymore. I ran out of any empathy for the main character (in fact I began to hate him) and when M.A. inserts himself into the storyline it was too corny to handle. Pass on this one.
Rating: -
This is the first Amis I have read, although I know of as many people who love him as who hate him. There seems to be little middle ground with regard to Amis, and after reading this dense, maddening, brilliant, depressing little book, I can see why.
The writing is breathtaking, simply breathtaking. Over and over I was brought up sharp by incredible descriptions, especially the startling juxtapositions that can only be described as poetry. Consider: "I strode through the meat eating genies of subway breath....I felt all the contention, the democracy, all the italics, in the air." Ah, this is New York.
The prose is snappy and tough, the dialogue crisp and true, like Chandler rippling through self-deprecating angst by way of John Coover. And Amis's observations of the morally demented side of human nature are hysterical, wry, biting, and too damn close for comfort.
By placing you inside the weak, repugnant, rapacious mind of John Self as the whining narrator, Amis manages to bury you in Self's self-pity while you try to recoil and distance yourself from his debauchment. You have to identify with Self if only because he is the narrator, but you hate the sound of Self in yourself.
The book is more literary than it appears at first blush--note the more and more obvious allusions and references to Othello, although Self is no where near as noble in spirit as the betrayed Moor. No one sets up John Self but John Self--there is no Iago, other than his own greed, callowness, and inability to take charge of his own humanity.
If I have any gripe with the story, it is that there are some things that are not well explored or fleshed out. There is a hint of unresolved sexual identity at the end--is Georgina really just a large woman, or a transsexual? Did Self give in to some nascent homosexual urges sprinkled throughout the story? Does Self exist at the end, or is this all merely a figment of Martin Amis's imagination--the Martin Amis who appears as a character in the novel, and who actually becomes a major player in this drama near the end. Amis teases us, especially with the frontpiece, but does not give enough to really go on. And he sets up Self as such a weak character with no insight that it is almost unfair.
All in all, a tour de force of writing in service of a thoroughly depressing and disturbing story of moral and psychological dissolution. There is no character in this book to like, no one to identify with, and if you need to have a positive resolution or a character to make you feel good, avoid this like the plague. However, if you like great writing, nasty humor, standoffish irony, and dark nihilism, Money is for you.
Rating: -
"Money" is above all a book of scintillating intelligence. I've never read anything as clever as this, sentence for sentence. I don't mean that it's "deep" or "philosophical" - though I suppose it is - just that the use of language is astonishing and the wit of the words will keep you entranced through the rather unpleasant adventures of the narrator, John Self (subtle, huh?). It has the best jokes, the best insults, the best made-up names for automobiles, and the best descriptions of alcohol and cigarretes in contemporary fiction. Best line: "Unless I explicitly tell you otherwise, I am _always_ lighting another cigarette." Even if you loathe the central character - though how you can fail to love him is beyond me - read it for the prose.
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