Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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30 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Smart-ass brilliance, 15 Feb 2000
By A Customer
Amis gets a bad press, and you can see why. Why is a middle class novelist from London writing in this smart-ass cool American jargon? Why is he so clearly in love with this disposable cynical money grabbing pornographic transatlantic culture that this book is rubbishing? I started the book in this mode of thought, ready to hate it. But the language and the rhythm and the wit are so brilliant, and so energetic, that I was completely won over after 50 pages or so. This is a Hogarthian world of exploitation and indulgence. John Self tries to get on the gravy train but ends up being shafted himself.The book is also very, very funny. The scenes when John explains to the young Hollywood brat pack movie actor Spunk Davis that it might be helpful for the British market if he changed his first name, and when a prostitute asks him if he is very excited at the impending Diana and Charles wedding had me laughing out loud. I even forgive his having John meet a dull British novelist, one Martin Amis, in a café and signing him up as screenwriter. Sure it is self consciously clever. But I would rather have the brilliance that is here than not at all. And it is good to read a serious book that is actually dealing directly with our times rather than some time in the past (like most of the contemporary novels I read).
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12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Grubby stuff, 11 Aug 2006
Amis's punchy narrative, infused with colloquial wordplay and urban street talk, complements his hero's (the intriguingly named John Self) socially schizophrenic lifestyle. Self is launched into the money rich pseudo reality of the film industry bumping backwards and forwards between the pub based childhood memories of his London origins and a New York fantasy world of strip joints and intoxication. I found the author's style highly engaging, packed with comic material (fruit machine rage, junk food diets, Martin Amis) and themes of a dark cynical nature. I enjoyed the historical backdrop: allusions to the wedding of Prince Charles and Diana in contrast to news of serious rioting in London. The characters inhabiting both urban settings are hilarious, scheming, self-indulgent egotists and caricatures of attention seeking celebrity, society's misfits and money obsessed grifters. And how I laughed! I had to put the book down on several occasions due to passages such as the one describing Self's driving paranoia. This was the first Amis I had read and it took me a few pages to get on the right `wavelength' and enjoy the rhythm of Amis's literary style. For Self the status and prestige bought by money and the blinkered desire to have money are shown to be a destructive cycle of self inflicted physical and mental abuse, sexploitation and violence. I don't think Self is a nice person but his story is deeply funny.
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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
the greatest British novel of the last century, 7 Mar 2000
By A Customer
Quite simply the Greatest British novel of the twentieth-century, which is saying something about what kind of century that was. Money takes on big themes; Britain being dwarfed by but loving America,hating her,yet desiring her even more the more it gets shafted; .the gorging on capitalism we are all involved with which is even more relevant now we have this excess of information on computer which of course isn`t free and costs...The British Empire and how it leeched off other countries but not realising it`s turning itself over at the same time...and love--as usual--can`t get it,can`t get enough of it,don`t want it,it`s the wrong kind...the infantilism of the 20th century adult; a baby stuck to the teets of a gimme gimme culture...the further we are away from this book the better it gets. Sad and hilarious by turns,using the English language in a way it is seldom used in novels..to describe excess...it actually works as parody too,of Jackie Collins and that trash beach novel,of Don Quixote and the picaresque novel; of Dickens and the 19th Century novel; of the epistolary novel of the 18th century and--believe it--Jane Austen; Saul Bellow is the presiding influence here but Amis storms through with pumping,greasy,excessive language which perfectly matches the theme (s). Of course it may just be about a bloke on a very long bender/nervous breakdown. Nowadays it would end with him checking into the Priory. But I`ll stick with his avowed intention of getting to grip with big themes,which let`s face it British novelists rarely do. . I agree with another reviewer who said that in Money the plot is cohesive; elsewhere his plotting is woeful despite the occassional brilliance of the writing. This is the novel whose influence you can see in all the young male writers who write for the glossies. The guy`s a genius.
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