Martin Amis' Money

There is a certain kind of bloke — and, let’s face it, it’s always a bloke — who cites Martin Amis as his favourite author. Now in his thirties or forties, this bloke read The Rachel Papers and/or Money as a teenager and enjoyed it/them so much that he revisited Amis when he studied English at university. He continues to rate the author, even though he is too distracted by boxed sets of 24, 2.4 children and the tedious administration of middle age to have read any of Amis’s recent stuff.

I am this kind of bloke. I read Money: A Suicide Note as a teenager and found myself relating to the transatlantic travel, world-weariness and debauchery it described, even though I had been to the US only once, had only started living life and had not dabbled in anything stronger than dark rum. At university my dissertation explored “London in the modern novel”, mainly as an excuse to read lots of Amis; The Information (1995) is the only novel for which I have queued on the morning of publication and though I haven’t had time for Yellow Dog (2003), House of Meetings (2006) or The Pregnant Widow (2010), I cite Amis as one of my favourite authors.

This is why it feels so strange to reread Money, which was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 best English language novels since 1923, on the occasion of BBC Two’s adaptation of the book as part of its Eighties season. It is why it is even more strange to find myself on the phone to Amis, who asks me, as a way of avoiding telling me what he thinks of his fifth novel, which was published in 1984 (“I don’t reread myself much any more — I used to all the time, but, when I do, it’s sort of uneasy for me because it strikes me as incredibly uneven”), what I thought of it. I repeat the original question, as a way of buying time…

Read atTimes Online