Money: A Suicide Note (Penguin Ink) [Paperback]

Martin Amis (Author), Bert Krak (Illustrator)

Book Description

Release date: June 29, 2010 | Series: Penguin Ink

One of Time’s 100 best novels in the English language—by the acclaimed author of Lionel Asbo: State of England and London Fields

 

Part of Martin Amis’s “London Trilogy,” along with the novel London Fields and The Information, Money was hailed as "a sprawling, fierce, vulgar display" (The New Republic) and "exhilarating, skillful, savvy" (The Times Literary Supplement) when it made its first appearance in the mid-1980s. Amis’s shocking, funny, and on-target portraits of life in the fast lane form a bold and frightening portrait of Ronald Reagan’s America and Margaret Thatcher’s England.

             Money is the hilarious story of John Self, one of London’s top commercial directors, who is given the opportunity to make his first feature film—alternately titled Good Money and Bad Money. He is also living money, talking money, and spending money in his relentless pursuit of pleasure and success. As he attempts to navigate his hedonistic world of drinking, sex, drugs, and excessive quantities of fast food, Self is sucked into a wretched spiral of degeneracy that is increasingly difficult to surface from.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Absolutely one of the funniest, smartest, meanest books I know. John Self, the Rabelaisian narrator of the novel, is an advertising man and director of TV commercials who lurches through London and Manhattan, eating, drinking, drugging and smoking too much, buying too much sex, and caring for little else besides getting the big movie deal that will make him lots of money. Hey, it was the '80s. Most importantly, however, Amis in Money musters more sheer entertainment power in any single sentence than most writers are lucky to produce in a career. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

 

“Martin Amis’s vibrantly dark 1985 novel, Money, gave us a rollicking, repulsive picture of London and New York in the late 20th century, awash in cash, corruption, pornography, junk food, junk art, self-promotion and wretched excess of every imaginable variety. More than two and a half decades later that novel’s scabrous vision of a crude, rude world reeling from narcissism and acquisitiveness seems as potent as ever. Its hilariously awful hero, John Self, is an uncanny harbinger of the willful vulgarians who would gain even more ascendancies in the reality-show, greed-is-great era of the 21st century.”

—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

 

“Savagely hilarious. It risks, it boils with energy . . . it even manages to shock.”

—Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post Book World

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 368 pages
• Publisher: Penguin Books; Reprint edition (June 29, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0143116959
• ISBN-13: 978-0143116950
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (87 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #17,356 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #70 in Books > Literature & Fiction > British > Humor & Satire

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

29 of 29 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Stellar comic novel October 11, 2006

By Sirin

Format:Paperback

Writing doesn't get any funnier than this. Readers who find deep vein humour in black, sexual comedy such as Portnoy's Complaint and (even blacker), Lolita, will revel in Money. The unreliable narrator, John Self is a brilliantly drawn character. Physically and emotionally repulsive, materialistic, a string of unwholesome vices - drugs, porn, fast food, dirty women and most of all money, and a stunning voice which is at one yobbish yet shamefully poetic.

In fact, Martin Amis has declared this to be a voice novel. When form goes out the window and the voice takes over. Like Saul Bellow finding his broad, socially and intellectually panoramic style in The Adventures of Augie March, Amis finds the voice to skewer the absurditites of Western Urban Capitalism, and the disorientated place of the modern male within the system. Money contains so many of the classic Amis riffs and set pieces - the tennis match, the dinner party, the brothel visits, the porn shows - as John Self is put through one humiliation after another in his pursuit of Mammon. The comic detail is stunning. There are so many exquisite phrases. Amis learns from another of his major literary heroes, Nabokov, and distorts the aesthetic, baroque high style into a low life screamer of a book. Marvellous.

35 of 37 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars "I have money but I can't control it." June 30, 2004

By D. Mikels

Format:Paperback

Money. It makes the world go 'round, and that's the problem. It seems the Earth's spinning on its axis has less to do with physics and more to do with those who don't have money chasing those who have it. And novelist/satirist Martin Amis cashes in on the corrupting influence of currency with his delightfully savage book, MONEY.

Director John Self is a self-admitted loser. There's not much to like about him: he smokes too much, drinks too much--he's an irresponsible buffoon with an addiction to porn and prostitutes. But he's got money, and as he waits for the financing of his next film to come together, he makes London and New York his sinful playgrounds. Leapfrogging back and forth across the pond, he leaves a shambled trail of self-destruction in his wake. Over the course of his bizarre journey, John shares his thoughts and philosophy on the intricacies of life: Life according to John Self, a drunken bugger with money. In fact, the story happily plays a second fiddle to John's reflections, and John's reflections carry the story from one zany mishap to the next.

Amis is sheer genius. He writes with a demented pomposity--a politically incorrect finger-in-your-eye--that has the reader laughing one moment, cringing the next. With a clever tongue-in-cheek device to show nothing is sacred, he even inserts himself into the story. It's fascinating reading, as Amis allows his protagonist's thoughts to wander all over the dysfunctional map of human corruption (often within the same paragraph). MONEY is a triumphant satire that blasts away at our consumer culture and reveals our fragile human foibles. It is the type of book I wish I had the backbone to write.
--D. Mikels, Author, WALK-ON

20 of 22 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars absolutely the best September 12, 1999

By Michael A. Smith

Format:Paperback

This is one of the most well-written and funny books you'll ever read. My copy has multiple dog ears because I keep going back to look up this or that hilarious passage: Lorne Guyland's rambling dissertations, John Self's drunken careen through a NY restaurant, the chess game near the end (an amazing metaphor-packed *action* scene that you'll read wide-eyed at the fact that anyone could write with such style). Some readers don't seem to understand that you're supposed to despise John Self while still marveling at his antics. I feel bad for those people; I feel pity for those people--oh yes. But for those who like densely written, wildly stylish fiction that also has a point, from a writer at the top of his game, you *must* read this book!