Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Raw, Rude, and Fun with a Capital "F", July 7, 2002
"Twenty may not be the start of maturity" asserts first-person narrator Charles Highway at the bottom of page one as he's about to leave his teens, "but, in all conscience, it's the end of youth." I discovered this book last year as I was about to leave my twenties, and I imagine it would have had a much more powerful impact on me had I read it ten years ago. That's not to say this book doesn't pack a punch for those already come of age. Part of that punch's force, I presume, is in semi-fruitless imagining of how I would have reacted back then.Highway is hilarious in his cynical, pustule-ridden loathsomeness, and many a brooding young American or British intellectual with find aspects of him to identify with. He's blunt, he's crass, but he knows beauty when he sees it. He's also a schemer who manages to have enough sex to warrant several trips to the VD clinic--it's 1973, after all--but not to let that stop him. His pursuit of, attainment of and parting with the lovely Rachel of the title comprises an extraordinary pre-University summertime journey replete with references to famous English poets and sweaty bodily functions. The character he most reminds me of in another book is Philip Roth's Alexander Portnoy. Amis does such an amusing job of drawing together the lofty and the base in this, his first novel, that I look much forward to his more widely-known works. "The Rachel Papers" will not appeal to everyone, but will achieve a special place in the libraries of angst-filled teens and their older selves.
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13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Autobiographical with peaks of linguistic brilliance, April 5, 2000
Martin Amis went to Exeter College, Oxford and lived before that with his father in a village in Oxfordshire. Sound familiar, of course it's just like the plot in the book!. Martin Amis' first novel shows hints of true genius. The characterisation of the books sort-of-hero, Charles Highway is fascinating, and he dissects the typical foibles of an adolescent with skill and integrity. Other high points include the amazing vocabulary that the book is written with. The outstanding prose makes me (excuse me) laugh out loud every time I read it and almost makes up for some of the unconvincing aspects of the plot. Autobiographical? Yes. Self-Obsessed? Yes. Extremely funny? Definately. Worth Buying? Without a doubt. Some have said that to start reading Martin Amis, other books like Money or Success would be better. I disagree. The Rachel Papers is a brilliantly funny introduction to the writings of one of the strangest and most talented British Novelists.
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14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A dazzling display, November 30, 2001
This is an astonishing novel to be written by someone in their early twenties---the more so when you realise it was first published in 1973, at the height of English hippie-dom's prog-rock flowering. For this is essentially a punk novel written ahead of its time. It tells the story of Charles Highway's run-up to his twentieth birthday, as he falls for, then plans the seduction of, then abandons, the lovely, eponymous, Rachel. But the first-person description of CH himself is really the core of the novel. Every twisted, nasty thought that any teenager has ever had is there in Charles, while he masquarades to himself and us as a polite, bookish, intellectual. In fact we are quietly led to believe what Charles believes of himself: that he is a cut-above the rest of the world---nasty but moral, calculating yet capable of love. It is only at the end that Amis lets us see the truth: that Charles is really just an intellectual fraud with no redeeeming features at all. He abandons the possibly pregnant Rachel with a callousness that even his much-hated father would have been incapable of. By contrast, Rachel ends up a far more noble charachter than we had any reason to believe when seen through Charles' overly self-regarding eyes. In a sense this should be regarded as an early feminist novel. The male characters are so odious that it is hard to say a good word for them. (Though why, one wonders, have no female novelists plunged this far into the dark side of women's psyches?) But the question that must really be at the top of everyone's mind when they read this novel is: to what extent is this a portrait of the teenage Amis himself? The answer that most readers will probably come away with is, surely quite a lot. But that makes this novel a colossally brave affair, not just the clever, excoriatingly funny satire, that it seems on first read. A terrific book.
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