Money by Martin Amis
Money talks and
bullshit walks. We’ve all heard that saying. John Self, the lead
charcter in Martin Amis’ novel Money infuses
a new meaning into the saying. Self is a British version of the 1980s
nouveau riche and his money gets him everything he wants; he
literally is a walking pile of bullshit though.
As
a mixture of Ignatius J. Reilly, the Tasmanian Devil, John
Belushi, and GG Allin with
access to a seemingly unlimited line of credit, John Self tears like
a hurricane of filth through the lowest and highest ranks
of Manhattan. He is an obese, obscene, gluttonous yob on an
alcohol-fueled rampage, consuming cigarettes, junk food, liquor,
prostitutes, and pornography in colossal quantities. Unbelievably
shallow and infantile, he operates without intellect, motivated by
pure instinct and impulse but at times strangely charming despite
himself.
Ironically,
the big idiot has a way with words. The narrative of Money
is John Self’s own internal
monologue and the language is a big part of the its appeal. He
describes his misadventures in vivid and precise detail. The
descriptions are loaded with Cockney slang, British witticisms,
complex word play, ironies, alliteration,
double meanings, and inside
jokes. Amis plays the presence and absence game well by having John
Self wake up with hangovers after a
binge-drinking blackouts; the
odd injuries, strange objects found in his pockets and hair, lipstick
smears on his ear,
and what appears to be lubrication in his ass crack signify that Self
went through a memorable night but leaves the actual story untold so
the reader can piece the elements together for themselves.
While
the mind of John Self may not plunge to incredible depths, the
concepts of money and pornography work effectively as psychological
reference points for explaining how his mind works. Self has access
to vast amounts of cash but
money also figures allegorically in the narrative; it is his libido,
his life force, his psyche, the polluted energy that permeates his
brain,
blasting him through New York and London like a firehose filled with
poisonous sludge. Money is a tidal wave of sewage that carries John
Self as he surfs on it to the
fulfillment
all his delusional dreams.
Like
money, pornography acts as a frame of mental reference too.
The exchange of money for meaningless, explicit, transitory, and
unsatisfying sensation is a mode of consciousness for Self. It is his
method of interpreting the world, his
philosophical framework, and his primary motivating impulse. His mind
is so saturated with pornography that when he gazes up at a cloud in
the sky it looks like a giant pussy to him.
John
Self had an American mother but spent half his childhood in the
working class slums of London, raised by a man who runs a low-class
pub with cheap liquor, slot machines, and strippers in a hidden back
room. One of the strippers is his soon-to-be mother-in-law who shows
him a photo spread she did for a pornographic magazine while crying
tears of joy because she has so much pride in her accomplishments.
Self shows no sign of an emotional reaction as if he just shuts down
his mind to avoid the initial turmoil of the situation. There are
times when his humanity shows through the cracks in his character
armor and eventually we see
that he is a profoundly lonely person who is not equipped with the
traits or strengths he needs to find himself out of the nightmare of
his life.
John
Self finds some success as a director of commercials, flies off to
New York City to celebrate, and meets up with a film producer named
Fielding Goodney who hires him to direct a feature film with some
celebrities who may or may not be well-known. Goodney
supplies Self with tons of money as pre-payment and so the perverted
rampage around Manhattan begins. Fielding Goodney is John Self’s
entry into the lives of upper-class socialites. He
is also his nemesis.
Meanwhile, Self starts getting phone calls in his hotel room from a
man he names
Frank the Phone. Frank has an uncanny ability to know all the
intimate details of everything John Self does in public; he vows to
humiliate and destroy John Self. The phone calls continue all
throughout the book.
But
John Self goes through a change. When he reads the film’s script,
he realizes the neurotic actors who were hired by Fielding Goodney
were incompatible with it and ultimately incompatible with each
other. John Self, alert to the fact that the movie production is a
train wreck waiting to happen, returns to London and hires
a writer named Martin Amis to rewrite the
script. At the same time,
Self is reading Orwell’s Animal Farm because
an attractive female acquaintance named Martina lent it to him in
Manhattan. Self does not seem to get the deeper meaning of the
novelette and instead gets preoccupied with the talking pigs that run
the farm. It is not hard to understand why, but Self unconsciously
identifies with the pigs and has a bit of an awakening. He does not
take control of a farm but he, the
pig, does begin to take
control of his life. His infatuation with Martina motivates him to
refine his tastes, ease up on the drinking, make a pitiful attempt at
exercising, and polish up his manners. His better self starts to
emerge. Martina may not be in
love with him, she does start to have feelings of affection for him.
He
also takes control of the movie production by hiring Martin Amis.
They work together so that the plot makes more sense and the
characters align more closely to the personalities of the actors
meant to play them. John Self stops acting like an uncontrollable oaf
and starts behaving like a director. Contrary to Fielding Goodney’s
ulterior motives, Self takes charge of the movie and his own life as
well. He becomes a lay
psychologist by helping the actors to overcome their anxieties and
insecurities and then
they start to feel they can not continue. For a brief moment we see
that Self has the potential to at least be an ordinary human being
when given the chance.
Martin
Amis is not an overbearingly pedantic author; he does not try to
preach or make a moral lesson the center of a story. But one lesson
to be learned, expressed with subtlety, is that reading makes people
more complete as human beings. John
Self becomes more self aware and begins to grow up, first when he
reads the original script for his film and second when Martina gives
him books by George Orwell to read. As the novel progresses, Self
continues to read and finds comfort in books and libraries when he
later hits rock bottom. Reading
saves his life. While this
theme of the importance of books is not center stage in the plot,
Amis does show us how they begin to replace pornography as Self’s
intellectual frame of reference.
At
this point, the novel starts to take on all the cliches and trappings
of a romantic comedy or the zero-to-hero transformative plot
so abundantly common in Hollywood movies. But
Self has not really changed all that much yet and events take a turn
for the worse.
But
aren’t the names Martina and Martin A. (Amis) just a little too
similar to be coincidental? The two characters are like the axis
around which John Self’s changes revolve. Take a step outside the
narrative for a minute. While John Self is the center of the cyclone,
the film script has Oedipal parallels to his own family life. The
author Martin Amis makes himself a character in the novel, the one
who gets hired to rewrite the script as
the author Martin Amis writes the novel.
There is a metanarrative within a metanarrative. Money is
a frame within a frame within a frame within…well, you can just say
the number of frames are somewhere between four and infinity. By now
the metanarrative is a
postmodernist cliché and one
that is sadly accredited
to postmodernism itself, hence all the references to Shakespeare
throughout the story. Amis can get away with this now since Money
was written about forty years
ago before the literary convention
became a redundant
distraction for writers who
wanted to show how cool they were.
Money really stand out
though because he inserts so many frames into the narrative and still
makes the story a coherent whole; the shifting frames of reference
are handled effectively without causing any confusion or disruptions
in the narrative flow.
By
following the logic of the metanarrative, we get a passage where the
character Martin Amis is explaining to John Self how an author causes
a fictional character to feel pain in order to indicate that
something is wrong. Simultaneously John Self’s toothache begins to
hurt him, just as it does throughout the whole book. Therefore,
Martin Amis the character draws attention to Martin Amis the author
which draws attention to the novel as a work of fiction, a framework
inserted into reality but a framework that reveals truths about the
reality in which it exists. We
are also reminded that John Self is a fictional character but also a
fictional
character that came from Martin Amis’s mind, an externalization of
an idea the author feels he needs to address. The metanarrative not
only goes inwards, into the
novel, but expands outside
the framework of the novel itself and into the metanarratives that
exist beyond the covers of the book.
So
a lot can be said about John Self. Is he really the worst character
in the story? Fielding
Goodney may be more evil. He
arbitrarily creates the whole situation. He is the wannabe puppet
master, the wizard behind the curtain, the one who adds the most fuel
to John Self’s fire. He encourages and enables John Self to run
wild so he can shame and humiliate him. Het
sets him up to tear him down. John
Self is a rat, albeit a bloated and a buffoonish
one, in Goodney’s
maze. But if Goodney
is a puppet master he is one that can not control his puppet. John
Self at least makes a feeble
attempt to improve his life and become a better person; Fielding
Goodney makes no attempt at
redemption whatsoever. Is Fielding a metaphor for an author? If so,
what does that say about the characters an author creates?
But
what does Money mean
to us as readers? Many people say that John Self is so repulsive that
they do not understand why anybody would want to read this book. If
John Self were a run-of-the-mill man, so bland he would never need to
redeem himself, would there be any point in reading about him? Why
you would want to read Money is
a question you have to answer for yourself. The fact that you may
have asked that question to begin with shows that the novel has
forced you
to question the relationship between the reader and what they read.
Underneath all the layers of filth this book has to offer, may it is
not about money after all. Maybe your own money is not your money in
Amis’s
sense of the word; maybe your money is what you read. Maybe
you read for the same reason Self looks at pornography; maybe you
enjoy watching him degrade himself for money as a form of public
spectacle so you can feel superior to him. Maybe you get your
voyeuristic thrills by reading about characters who humiliate
themselves with their self-defeating behavior for your pleasure.
Maybe John Self is a reflection of a part of your Self and you are
not so much better than him after all.
Amis, Martin. Money. Penguin Books, New York: 2010.
