Money: A Suicide Note

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Writers (to use one of the grand, dubious categoricals that Amis loved) generally have a golden decade, give or take: a stretch when the gears of their talent and imagination fall into alignment and they produce the work on which their reputations rest. Vladimir Nabokov reached his moment in late middle age, from the mid-nineteen-fifties to the mid-sixties (“ Lolita,” “ Pnin,” “ Nabokov’s Dozen,” “ Pale Fire”). Saul Bellow probably did around the same time, too (“ The Adventures of Augie March,” “ Herzog”). Amis’s reputation-making period extended from the mid-eighties into the nineties, when he produced, one after the other, “Money,” “ London Fields,” “Time’s Arrow,” and “ The Information.” Those novels not only showed his style in all its rhetorical range but followed the energy of a time when Britain, buoyed and buffeted by the Thatcherite push to enterprise and global commerce, found itself reaching toward crass New World ways.

Amis began a relationship with the American-Uruguayan writer Isabel Fonseca, and the pair married in 1996, going on to have two daughters. Fonseca later turned to fiction herself, publishing her debut novel Attachment in 2009. His shortest novel has Amis’s only female narrator, and is written as a police mystery about a young woman’s suicide. But it cuts deep, with an understated (for Amis) style and his most humane protagonist: he finally wrote, after all these years, a good person. This book is one of his greatest achievements. Don’t believe me? Seek out Janis Freedman Bellow’s essay Second Thoughts on Night Train. One of Time's 100 best novels in the English language--by the acclaimed author of Lionel Asbo: State of England and London Fields

Martin Amis is an English novelist, essayist, and short story writer. His works include the novels Money, London Fields and The Information. The world of the novel is seen through the eyes of its narrator, John Self, thirty-five, who, like all his generation (of the eighties, of all time) worships with his money (of which he has plenty) three gods, which are not only his reason of being but also his explanation for all zany situations he restores afterwards from, disparate clues and pains in the ass (literally!) that give an incomplete but funny idea of what must have happened:

As an aside, tho, if any Goodreads Developers happen to be reading this: they should consider developing and releasing into the wild another star, a discretionary sixth star -- specifically, the power to harness such a star (in extraordinary situations only) for the purpose of reviewing those rare few books that are just thermonuclearly great. But this power should be granted only to certain users: only those users who have demonstrated consistently exceptional dedication, taste, subtlety, restraint and eloquence in their Goodreadsing. Myself, for example. Possibly others, too. But I would be willing to beta test this new star. Here is why: But there is no escape from Money, its claws fastening more as one tries to escape. John cannot help it. He cannot hide from Money. And it is his greed, his inability to take control which brings his doom. When he sits there defeated, a part of me can sympathize with him, for the ruin he is faced with, is brought about by a being a part of the society where money is supreme and where ‘thinking’ spirals downwards as debauchery, greed and lust rise to unleash their power. Probably, almost definitely, but really, I gotta ask: was this point really one that needed to be made? I think not, yet close to a year after I read it, Money is still ruthlessly imprinted on my brain. I mean, there are passages and scenes in here that I remember more clearly than I do my own actions at work this morning. So it couldn't have been all bad -- no, it was bad, it was worse, but it was memorably so.Mi sedetti alla mia poltrona in platea, attentissimo e pronto per la visione di uno spettacolo che si preannunciava divertente. Typical line “Cilla and Lionel were known in the family as ‘the twins’, because they were the only children who had the same father.”