Money: A Suicide Note

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As he wrote his way through his 20s, Amis seemed happy to turn out more of these scabrous slices of comic fiction with a taste for the gruesome, where bad things happen to worse people – Dead Babies, Success – though he argued that complaining about “nastiness” in novels was an “extra-literary response”. The prose was all. I still cry and babble and holler a lot, but then I always did. I drink and have fights, and gangway through the streets. I am still inner city.

Typical line “Something strange was happening in the Soviet Union, after the war against fascism: fascism.” Typical line “Cilla and Lionel were known in the family as ‘the twins’, because they were the only children who had the same father.” Money: A Suicide Note is a 1984 novel by British essayist and screenwriter Martin Amis. Cinematic in style and content, it is loosely based on Amis’s experience writing for the British-American sci-fi film Saturn 3. The novel delves into the competitive politics of the film industry and is told from the point of view of an advertising executive named John Self who makes a foray into filmmaking in New York City. Self, a stereotypical failed creative who is lazy and overindulgent, is further enabled by the producer who hires him, Fielding Goodney. He falls into a life in which he squanders most of his money on sex and drug use. As Self repeatedly fails in this foreign, fast-moving culture, he slowly learns to navigate it and recognize his faults. For its rich characterization of American urban life, the novel is often considered one of the best works of American literature of the twentieth century.

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It’s true, Amis accepted, that “however bad” his first novel had been, “it probably would have been published out of mercenary curiosity”. But his debut, The Rachel Papers, published in 1973 when Amis was 24 years old, showed that Amis had the talent to support the promise, and its sales and acclaim (it won the Somerset Maugham prize, the first and last major prize Amis would win for his novels) proved he had the ear of a generation. 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. Money: A Suicide Note is a 1984 novel by Martin Amis. In 2005, Time included the novel in its "100 best English-language novels from 1923 to the present". [1] The novel is based on Amis's experience as a script writer on the feature film Saturn 3, a Kirk Douglas vehicle. The novel was dramatised by the BBC in 2010.

Mi ripeto perchè è strano a dirsi ma io non l’ho odiato piuttosto ho provato gran pena per lui ( ”consumato dal consumismo”) e quello che rappresenta. The thing about Martina is — the thing about Martina is that I can't find a voice to summon her with. The voices of money, weather and pornography (all that uncontrollable stuff), they just aren't up to the job when it comes to Martina. I think of her and there is speechless upheaval in me — I feel this way when I'm in Zurich, Frankfurt or Paris and the locals can't speak the lingo. My tongue moves in search of patterns and grids that simply are not there. Then I shout ...His own literary mountains (other than his father) were Saul Bellow and Vladimir Nabokov, masters, respectively of the so-called “higher autobiography” and of high style. It was, naturally, Hitchens who introduced him to the writings of the former. “Look at Humboldt’s Gift,” he said on the staircase of the New Statesman in 1977, or thereabouts. In the same interview, Amis concedes that: “ Money was a much more difficult book to write than London Fields because it is essentially a plotless novel. It is what I would call a voice novel. If the voice doesn’t work you’re screwed. Money was only one voice, whereas London Fields was four voices.” In an interview with the Paris Review, Amis said that “plots really matter only in thrillers”, and that Money was a “voice novel”. “If the voice doesn’t work you’re screwed,” he added.