Once again in London, Self meets his father’s new mistress Veronica, who has just done a nude magazine shoot. His car, a Fiasco, gives him some mechanical trouble while he kills time waiting for the next phase in the movie’s production. After Selina accuses him of having real feelings for Martina, he invites Selina to move in with him. Her presence offers a temporary reprieve from his fears that he will end up in jail, as Alec has recently done. Finally, Self confesses that his father once sent him a detailed invoice for the expenses incurred raising him. He paid it; his father bet the money and won enough to buy the Shakespeare. Living in a perpetual hangover does not prevent him to notice a writer who makes him uncomfortable in the beginning (a forewarning, of course) but whose name, Martin Amis, he envies and borrows one time, in a parodic confusion not only of the author with the narrator, but also of the whole authorship concept. For the plot follows John, who wants to become the author of a movie so absurdly autobiographic that it transforms him in a character created by Martin Amis who is asked to write the script. A mise en abyme here, definitely, but which one is the frame and which one is within it – John’s film or John’s life or Martin’s script? From which point is the better look? For in the end, over a chess game (and in a parody of a detective story), Martin will explain to John why his film and his life collapsed, claiming the ironclad rule that states the character’s fate depends on its creator: 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. Tredell, Nicolas (2000). The Fiction of Martin Amis (Readers' Guides to Essential Criticism). Palgrave Macmillan. But for many, Amis’s legacy would lie not in his fiction, but in his non-fiction: the memoir Experience, the essays, reportage and interviews. None of the journalism was phoned-in or “written with the left hand”: you were just as likely to be stopped by a brilliant line there as you were in the novels. His review of Thomas Harris’s Hannibal (a “harpoon of unqualified kitsch”), his interview with a confused Truman Capote (“‘The name’s Tony, isn’t it?’ he croaked. ‘No, Martin,’ I said, trying to make Martin sound quite like Tony”) and his account of the death of his father (“two people go into that room and only one comes out”) may be read as long as the novels are.

Talking to BBC Radio 4, Amis said he wished he had put “greater distance” between himself and his father, with the “Amis franchise” becoming “something of a burden”. However, I don't see the comparisons to Nabokov's Lolita beyond the very basic sense that both books have abhorrent narrators. Humbert is far more dramatic and charming, a poet who chooses his words and seduces the reader; John Self has no such charm and his narrative is crude and ranty. I much preferred Nabokov's work. It has been a profound privilege and pleasure to be his publisher; first as Jonathan Cape in 1973, with his explosive debut, The Rachel Papers; then as part of Penguin Random House and Vintage, up to and including his most recent book, 2020’s Inside Story. Like many figures from the 80s, this ad-man narrator thinks he’s running the show – his life, loves, career, sleazy hedonism and all – but, actually, he’s a victim. Self, who is crisscrossing the Atlantic to make his first feature film, “Good Money” (later, “Bad Money”), becomes progressively mired in an accumulation of complex financial and sexual crises, linked to the corruptions of money, expressed through a series of hilarious set-pieces, which bring him to the edge of breakdown. Here, in a further provocation to English literary practice, the author steps into the narrative as “Martin Amis” and tries to prevent Self’s self-destruction. Thereafter, Money spirals towards its teasing, postmodern conclusion. Well, why shouldn’t it be? This isn’t a work to be disregarded. The writing may be despicable, the characters detestable, but it unveils the ugliness of a society doomed in the mire of lust and money. To render the effect of Money, when it becomes the only driving force of an individual or a society, how it blinds the senses, influences the mind and compels to stifle the conscience, seems the chief concern of the writer. And what better way to illustrate that other than writing it in an appalling language; making the ugliness still more evident. But the work isn’t only that. It is a struggle; a longing to find a meaning, a restlessness to make sense of the living amidst the chaos, while understanding too well that there is no solution to being born. Despair abounds.

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When I first moved to Cape in 1993 it still seemed, 20 years on from The Rachel Papers, that every young writer wanted to be on the list because Martin was on it. The fact that he was so overlooked for literary prizes only added to his allure. 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. The story is about John Self who is a director for advertisement companies and he goes to New York on the invitation of a movie director who is going to make a movie. Self is a lazy human who is indulged in a lot of vices like drinking and hiring prostitutes. He also is into porn and is a huge fan. The film that Self is working on is filled with characters Who do not feel very good about the parts they are given nor are they content with the people they are working in the film with. The actors in the film, which Self originally titles Good Money but which he eventually wants to rename Bad Money, all have emotional issues that cause them to clash with each other and with their roles. For example, the strict Christian Spunk Davis is asked to play a drugs pusher; the ageing hardman Lorne Guyland has to be physically assaulted; the motherly Caduta Massi, who is insecure about her body, is asked to appear in a sex scene with Lorne, whom she detests.

Hitchens retaliated via an article in the Atlantic, but the friendship was apparently unaffected. “We never needed to make up,” Amis told the Independent in 2007. “We had an adult exchange of views, mostly in print, and that was that (or, more exactly, that goes on being that). My friendship with the Hitch has always been perfectly cloudless.” When Hitchens died, in December 2011, Amis delivered his eulogy.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. Typical line “When is the world going to start making sense? Yet the answer is out there. It is rushing toward me over the uneven ground.” One of Time's 100 best novels in the English language--by the acclaimed author of Lionel Asbo: State of England and London Fields