Amis, Martin. Money, A Suicide Note. Vintage, London, 1984 (F;6/25) and Experience, a Memoir. Miramax, London, 2000. (Mem;6/25)

A dear friend who loves reading suggested Amis to me as a wonderful writer. I looked up general opinions of his fiction and most critics said Money was his best novel so I got and read it. I couldn’t believe somebody as discerning and usually agreeable as my friend could have recommended this story so I asked her what it was about Amis she was impressed with. She said she liked his writing in his memoir. All right, I downloaded and read Experience. The memoir brought my opinion of the author pretty much in line with my friend’s, but there were still echoes in my mind of the novel and the memoir didn’t quite straighten out a couple of my other twisted misappreciations of Martin Amis.

As a bit of background Martin (1949-2023) was the son of novelist Kingsley Amis (1922-1995) who had great success as a post-war comic storyteller. The father and son seem about equal in their publishing accomplishment and reputations, but were quite different in style. Martin’s memoir centers among other influences on his dad’s life and work and what emerges as a love-hate or at least camaraderie-competition relationship with the old man.

The novel Money is the story of John Self, a successful advertising and commercial producer who travels back and forth from England to New York developing his first feature-length film eventually called Bad Money. Self is an almost absurdly dissolute mess, heavily into prostitutes, nonstop drunkenness, and (of course) money, but he is also strangely perceptive and self-critical. He struggles with producer Fielding Goodney and various usually oddball actors in getting the film going and also with attractive girlfriends who contrast with one another, English Selina is greedy, promiscuous, and manipulative while American Martina is wealthy, artsy and intellectual. Martina’s husband turns out to be having an affair with Selina.

Self is harassed on the telephone by mysterious Frank who calls and berates him, threatening to predict if not provide his punishment for Self’s disgusting life. Back in London Self reveals and is involved with his humble beginnings including his father and several employees in the dad’s pub. Generally Self is in some ways interesting, good at his job, intelligent, rich, and sexually successful, but he’s also a terrifying drunk, self-confessedly soulless, fat, addicted to pornography, dishonest, misogynistic and homophobic:

Australia! All those pumpkin-faced hicks and tripledecker beach hugies – they’re all bumboys now. What’s happening, God damn it? Some people blame the women. I blame the men. The first sign of bother, after a carefree fifty million years, and we throw up our hands and go gay? Now is this any way to behave? I mean, how faggy can you get? Come on, you guys, don’t run out on me like this. Where’s the old cave spirit? Don’t surrender. Don’t desert. What’s the problem. They’re only women, after all.

Self intermittently shows realistic introspective insight and humour but we suspect there may lurk some dark trapdoor waiting to open underneath…

PLOT ALERT ALTHOUGH if you intend to read this book and haven’t I don’t think you should bother… The story takes a daring vertiginous twist when producer Goodney turns out not only to be swindling Self out of any money he ever had (and there is actually no film at all) but also is the phone nemesis Frank himself. Self discovers that one of the pub employees is his real father, and in what can only be an ironic ending winds up reasonably happy with a not-very-attractive wife in a very modest English home. END PLOT ALERT.

Martin Amis appears in person in Money several times conversing with Self which might appear to introduce something along lines that were popular in the 1980s: reality and illusion, art and life, that sort of thing. This relationship doesn’t appear to go anywhere.

What is redeeming about Money? As usual I worry that I have missed some double-ironic or otherwise significant real artistic truth in what felt to me just nasty and sarcastic. Of course all women reviewers execrate it. This is a story of a pig! What’s all the fuss about? I’m sorry I couldn’t see any partially-hidden magnificence either. I don’t think a novel like this could merely be a cautionary tale about dissolute behaviour, except ironically but even so… Nor is it a Charles Bukowski celebration of same. Amis (probably quite properly) denies there’s anything “autobiographical” about it (although maybe in some sneaky Freudian way who knows). I’ve read a lot of wonderful novels that I didn’t exactly enjoy (Blood Meridian for example) but when I found them lacking in entertainment the good ones were more than redeemed by fabulous writing or a sense of the author’s grasp of something wonderful and ineffable, and I found myself changed in a positive way. No such epiphany with Money.

Amis’s memoir Experience is a different kettle of fish. He presents himself, his work, and his family more or less chronologically and with style. But along the way I had to find a balance of his honest and very capably described life experiences against a certain type of entitled self-regard. Amis has a habit of name-dropping the impressive company he keeps which for some no doubt reprehensible reason rubbed me the wrong way:

Only a week earlier my mouth had soured a New Yorker dinner at the Caprice in London by indulging in this ‘exchange’ with Salman Rushdie: — So you like Beckett’s prose, do you? You like Beckett’s prose … Nobody spoke. Not even Christopher Hitchens. And I really do hate Beckett’s prose: every sentence is an assault on my ear.

I flew to Los Angeles and luridly mingled with Jessica, and with Sharon Stone and Sophia Loren, with Tom Hanks, with Quentin Tarantino, with John Travolta. John and I would share two intimate dinners at his rented home in Beverly Hills, north of Sunset, and then a farewell lunch in his trailer on the set of Get Shorty.

Some of his close friends and confidants are Christopher Hitchens (“Hitch”), Julian Barnes (“Jules”) and Andrew O’Hagan. These prominent characters, especially Hitchens, have felt in my reading of and about them associated with a sort of bad boy combination of being to the manner born but scorning authority, which type of attitude was popular near the end of the last century. It’s Oh well, I happen to have this damned talent and brains and all this upbringing and wealth but it gets in the way of what’s really important and clear: life is the SHITS when all’s said and done… In reviewing Barnes and O’Hagan I sense in that kind of thing a grasping for a common touch but never quite letting go of the protection and comfort of privilege.

Amis like Barnes likes to say “fuck off” which leaves the same impression of what naughty boys they are especially when they’re drunk. Still for me, set over against all that, I enjoy and envy his way with words, humility, and insight and I finally have no problem leaving the dated egotistical stuff aside.

The way with words. Whereas it’s been said that his dad rejoiced in ordinary people and humour, Martin uses his Oxford training, family experience, and just plain talent to dazzle in his enterprise of expressing himself:

(I reverse italicize a couple of places here to emphasize what I like)

He hasn’t got the words. Though he might do it on the page, if he gets back. This is strenuous moonshine. He wasn’t coming back.

(B)ut in all (poet Philip Larkin’s) remote and martyred imaginings it seemed that Kingsley had disappeared, past all recall, into a carwash of goods and sex.

Only in adolescence do we hear the first rumours of our own extinction, these rumours remaining vague until the irrefutable confirmation of the mid life, when it becomes a full-time job looking the other way.

(H)ow could this wizened, quivering relic — who once scythed his head open on the door jamb of his Morris 1000 without noticing — come by the epithet ‘Flash’?

For all his hobnobbing and high-class language Martin Amis still shows humility:

I still dream about this relatively brief period of my life: dreams imbued with feelings of disconnectedness, unattachedness — and of course unattractiveness. Profound unattractiveness. When you’re without a woman, it is astonishing how quickly you become loathsome to yourself.

I was unlucky thirteen, overweight and undersized: I had reached that clogged point in youth, where childhood (in my case happy, even idyllic) was obviously running out, and yet no alternative mode of existence seemed available or even possible. This is the time of the bathroom and the mirror, of eyes transfixed and then averted in the school showers, the time of odious comparisons, dire predictions. The little voice is still caught inside the body, which mutinously burgeons … ‘You’re too fat for that suit, Mart,’

We hear about almost unbelievable dental problems which cause him pain and a lot of embarrassment. And he understands and tells us about realities of his craft:

The great critic and utopian Northrop Frye improved on (T. S. Eliot), I think, when he said that literature was a disinterested use of words: you needed to have nothing riding on the outcome.

(T)he direct line to your own experience was the only thing you could trust. So the focus moved inward, with that slow zoom a writer feels when he switches from the third person to the first.

Someone complained that I put a ‘real’ restaurant into it. But once it’s in the novel, even if it’s a real place, it isn’t real any more. Not quite. I thought I understood him and I thought I agreed with him. Perhaps this is all that needs to be said on the subject.

Amis apparently fell into a disagreement with Eric Jacobs, one of the biographers of old Kingsley, and we hear about this in an “Appendix” at the end of the memoir. To have included this surly unpleasantness strikes me as willingness to be self-critical.

So what do I think of Martin Amis? He is a great and impressive writer. But while I agree with my good friend that the memoir presents his talent well, I think it’s a lot better than he looks in my one delve into his fiction.

For Money: 7.0/8.8

For Experience: 9.0/9.3