Book Review

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.