Martin Amis

Life and work

a major writer of our time
A stylist and a satirist - you can write with a Nabokovian writerly relish and at
the same time keep up the indignation usually expected of the satirist
The objections
Amis is a middle-class white European male
his fiction lacks awareness of the limits that condition may impose on his
literary imagination
his representations of women are sexist (Sara Mills on London Fields, 1995
"Working with sexism: What can Feminist Text Analysis Do?"), the Booker
Prize controversy
Amis is a star
Complicating literary evaluation
‘[t]he Amis interview has become, over the years, a little genre of its own’
Private life in the media spotlight, the publicity affected the reception of his
novel The Information
He is the son of a novelist who was himself famous and controversial -
Kingsley Amis
 Between 1994 and 1995, he was often in the headlines:
he was said to be seeking a half-million pound advance
for his next novel;

The nature of
he changed his literary agent, Pat Kavanagh, for the
reputedly shark-like American Andrew Wylie; as a
result of this, his friendship with fellow writer Julian
Barnes, Pat Kavanagh’s husband, came to an end;
his marriage to Antonia Philips broke up as a result of

the media
his relationship with a beautiful American heiress and
writer, Isabel Fonseca;
he sought costly dental treatment for badly decaying
teeth and gum disease;

attention
it was revealed that he had an illegitimate daughter,
Delilah Seale, born to Lamorna Heath in 1975 and now
an Oxford undergraduate;
a police report confirmed that his cousin, Lucy
Partington, had been one of the victims of the serial
killer Frederick West;
in October 1995, his father, Kingsley Amis, died.
War against Cliches
Style – what is important in fiction
Flaubert, Nabokov
• The subject may be crude and repulsive. Its expression is artistically modulated and
balanced. This is style. This is art. This is the only thing that really matters in books.
(WAC 262)
The plots
Amis is an "imposer"
A writer who contrives a plot in which the reader is expected not to
sympathize with the characters but to appreciate the aims of the author
The plots are self-consciously analogous to games of chess, driven by
defensive moves and offensive strategies, by the protagonists' manouverings
and manipulations.
The contexts
The contexts, the great forms of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
sagas, have been exhausted; realism and experimentation have come and
gone without seeming to point to a way ahead. The contemporary writer,
therefore, must combine these veins calling on the strengths of the Victorian
novel together with the alienations of post-modernism. (WAC 95-96)
The characters
Alienated and socially marginalized
Metafictional aspect – characters have a relationship with their author (John
Self, the narrator in London Fields thinks he lives in a book written by
someone else)
Novels
•The Rachel Papers (1973)
•Dead Babies (1975)
•Success (1978)
•Other People (1981)
•Money (1984)
•London Fields (1989)
•Time's Arrow: Or the Nature of the
Offence (1991)
•The Information (1995)
•Night Train (1997)
•Yellow Dog (2003)
•House of Meetings (2006)
•The Pregnant Widow (2010)
•Lionel Asbo: State of
England (2012)
•The Zone of Interest (2014)
•Inside Story (2020)
Collections Non-fiction
•Einstein's •Invasion of the Space
Monsters (1987) Invaders (1982)
•Two Stories (1994) •The Moronic Inferno: And Other
•God's Dice (1995) Visits to America (1986)
•Heavy Water and Other •Visiting Mrs Nabokov: And
Stories (1998) Other Excursions (1993)
•Amis •Experience (2000)
Omnibus (omnibus) •The War Against Cliché: Essays
(1999) and Reviews 1971–2000 (2001)
•The Fiction of Martin •Koba the Dread: Laughter and the
Amis (2000) Twenty Million (2002,
•Vintage Amis (2004) about Joseph
Screenplays Stalin and Russian history)
•Saturn 3 (1980) •The Second Plane (2008)
•London Fields (2018) • The Rub of Time: Bellow,
Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta,
Trump. Essays and Reportage,
1986–2016 (2017)
Themes
Masculinity – male characters addicted to excess
TV, pornography, nuclear threat, child abuse
'We inhabit the postmodern age, an age of mass suggestibility, in which image and reality strangely interact'
(WAC, 16)
Television stands in for culture – darts for heritage (London Fields)
Pornography substitutes art (Vron in Money, 154), becomes sexual norm
The times of his works are addicted to personal and global forms of destruction all of which appear on TV
(1984)

Money: A
Suicide Note
interest in three main
respects
vibrant narrative voice;
portrayal, through that voice, of a narrator-protagonist, John Self, an
embodiment of the acquisitiveness of the 1980s in the era of Thatcher and
Reagan, the desire, above all, for money;
its use of ‘the intrusive author', the author who appears as a voice, perhaps
even as a character, in his own text, as one ‘Martin Amis’ does in Money
the astonishing narrative
voice
Self is an unreliable narrator, whose prose has already spilled over the
cramping confines of his dialect.
Would an illiterate describe the experience of ‘[being] bopped by a mad guy’
as ‘qualitatively different, full of an atrocious, a limitless rectitude’
summary
Money is an obscene orphan delirium, that of the guttersnipe filmmaker John Self,
who shuttles in continuous escape between London and New York, and is ripped off
by a tempter, a money-man. The movie they are making is a family romance in which
Self’s own orphan-oedipal predicament is mirrored. One of the most brilliant strokes
in the annals of the genre is delivered when the narrator, Self, takes up with a
serious-minded, not to say disapproving writer by the name of Martin Amis, who
rewrites his movie, and narrowly beats him at chess...After his victory, ‘Martin Amis’
offers poor Self what comes across as an authorial apology for making him up and
putting him through this turmoil.
the Plot
Money is exhilarating, skilful, savvy.
It manipulates the plot… as painlessly, as inexorably as it manipulates the
reader
the plot is almost a distraction in this book
Fielding Goodney - There is a type of person who is a handsome liar, a golden
mythomaniac, who lies for no reason, without motivation.
 Narrator-protagonist John Self is the victim of an elaborate money
conspiracy perpetrated by Fielding Goodney, a financier-cum-confidence
man, involving regular surveillance of Self, innumerable anonymous
telephone calls, and several actors posing as potential investors. Weakened
by his dependence on sex and booze, Self walks straight into the trap set by
Goodney, the very fellow Self believes he’s soaking for millions of dollars.
Self collaborates with Goodney, a self-described good capitalist (p. 30) and

Everyman ‘old money’ American, because Goodney promises to secure financial

backing for a movie Self wants to direct, variously entitled ‘Good Money’
and ‘Bad Money’. The epitome of the sexist, racist homophobe, Self is a
and greed self-made man who has risen from a working-class background - his family
runs a seedy strip joint - through his work as a director of crass
commercials. Recklessly spending what he thinks is Goodney’s money, Self
actually shrinks his own bank account; in the end, his newfound wealth is
lost. Destitute, Self returns to his former position as a scrounger from the
working-class. His egocentric surname aptly conjures up a char[a]cter
whose obsessive self-indulgence leads to his financial ruin and, by
extension, invests the narrative with the sense of a cautionary tale for
‘everyman’ who might find himself in Self’s place.
The setting
Moronic Inferno, grotesques of America
American scene: a New York in which Self seeks Goodney to set up the first
deal through a minefield of junk food and pornography.
characterization
Amis creates for Self a brilliantly fast-paced new idiom packed with brand
names (his car is a Fiasco; he takes a sleeping pill called Serafim), and terms
like ‘rug-rethink’ (pp.83, 273), ‘handjob’ (passim), ‘sack talent’ (p. 57) and the
word ‘pornography’ used as a positive term (which are types of usage that the
British reader will probably register as ‘Americanisms’).
Money, p. 222-23
'Is there a moral philosophy of fiction? When I create a character and put him or her through certain ordeals,
what am I up to -- morally? Am I accountable. I sometimes feel that -
…
And the characters have a double innocence. They don't know why they're living through what they're living
through.
They don't even know they're alive. For instance, if -'
…
Yes, you see, readers are natural believers. They too have something of the authorial power to create life and -
The character study
The novel, Amis explains, is in essence an intense character study of John
Self, but the text is in many ways less concerned with Self - and his quest for
financial gain - than with the encoding of the life-controlling power systems
in discourse that determine the possibilities and constraints of ‘Self-control’…
Constructing John Self
I do mean him to be a consumer, and he is consumed by consumerism, as all mere
consumers are. I also mean him to be stupefied by having watched too much
television - his life is without sustenance of any kind - and that is why he is so fooled
by everyone; he never knows what is going on. He has this lazy non-effort response
which is wished on you by television - and by reading a shitty newspaper. Those are
his two sources of information about the planet. On four or five occasions his mind
stretches to thinking about Poland, and he always sees it as a sort of soap opera: he
wonders about Danuta Walesa, for example, and hopes she’s had her kid OK
Money, p. 220
London is full of short stories walking round hand in hand. In the shuffle of
the street you see countless odd pairings, all colours, all ages, all sexes, queens
and knaves, jacks and tens, in clubs and diamonds, swords and coins, walking
round hand in hand...
And what am I starring in? It feels like slapstick to me.
dichotomies
Anglo-American cultural mixedness prevents the polarities from stabilizing. Self’s
‘American, but English-raised’ girlfriend Martina Twain ‘a real boss chick … with a
terrific education on her’, who teaches him to read George Orwell and Othello, helps
both to identify England as a place of culture in the novel’s Anglo-American
dichotomies and also to subvert such identifications. Selina [S]treet, his London
girlfriend, whose ‘brothelly knowhow and top-dollar underwear’ call up American
currency, similarly serves to destabilise stereotypes.
The historical context
1981 UK, rather than USA
the Royal Wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana (224), and the riots in
Brixton, Liverpool and other English cities (133, 135, 209), IRA, Bobby Sands
(40)…

Poland, Lech Walesa, Solidarity (80, 135)

Themes and motifs
Is it about money?
Money doesn’t mind if we say it’s evil, it goes from strength to strength.
It’s a fiction, an addiction, and a tacit conspiracy that we have all agreed to go
along with.
Bank-note/ suicide note
Money transcending...
Oh, money, I love you. You’re so democratic: you’ve got no favorites. You even things out for me and my kind’
(p. 238).
However, the financial success promised and facilitated by new Conservative ideology embodies an implicit
threat to the class system
Consequently, Self’s absolute and dangerous faith in money as the great equalizer between the social classes
leaves him vulnerable, as he himself dimly recognizes:’ [w]ithout money, you’re one day old and one inch tall.
And you’re nude too’ (p. 383). Self thinks that money will help him transcend his class, that the ruling class will
now treat him as one of their own, and because he wants so much to believe that the empowered will play by
the rules of the game, he becomes an easy target for a scam.
Money, p. 283
There are even a couple of moneywomen by now. We have Lira Cruzeiros
from Buenos Aires, we have Anna Mazuma from Zurich, we have Valuta
Groschen from Frankfurt.
Pornography
Many women take pornography as an organized attack but it isn’t that: it’s
just a nasty way of making money for all the people who are in it……There are
certainly one or two pornographic scenes in Money, and they’re there for the
effect they have on the narrator: he has no resistance to pornography, or to
any other bad thing.
Television
Television is cretinizing me — I can feel it. Soon I'll be like the TV artists. You
know the people I mean. Girls who subliminally model themselves on kid-
show presenters, full of faulty melody and joy, Melody and Joy. Men whose
manners show newscaster interference, soap stains, film smears. Or the
cretinized, those who talk on buses and streets as if TV were real, who call up
networks with strange questions, stranger demands (Money, 24-25)
Misogyny
PMT (pre-menstrual tension)
Martina Twain
Selina Street
For Amis, to be authentically working-class means to be sexist, and so he imbues Self with the prejudices
associated with the working-class stereotype. As a result, Amis’s protagonist resides within,..., ‘a completely
falsified world in which sex is artificially separated from life’. Thus the first thing Self asks himself when he
meets a woman is ‘will I fuck it?’ (p.238). By substituting ‘it’ for ‘her’, Self, like the pornography he devours,
denies woman personhood, placing her in the ultimate state of disempowerment and disembodiment. In fact,
Self’s dependence on pornography suggests the crucial nexus between the woman as pornographic image and
his own objectification of women.
social identity
and political power
John Self fails to recognize his own state of disempowerment within the social structure, but he understands
that there are others on the outside who desire inclusion and who want to broaden the parameters of power.
He names them in a kind of litany of the marginalized:

• Everyone is determined to be what they are: it’s the coming thing. Women want out from under us men. Faggots and diesels
won’t be humped by the hets. Blacks have had it with all this white power … Now even the paedophile … dares show his
shadowed face: he wants a little respect around here (p. 324).
Here the writer Martin Amis betrays his own bourgeois liberal bias through the words he places in the
hero’s mouth. Self says ‘women’ and ‘blacks’ as opposed to ‘cunts’ and ‘wogs’, but calls gays and lesbians
‘faggots and diesels’, instead of using the terms they have chosen to identify and empower themselves. Is this
the linguistic slip of the hero or his author? If it is supposed to be Self’s slip, it seems inconsistent: he uses
negative labels for women elsewhere, and does not show the slightly heightened consciousness that the
switch to women in this context would entail.
The moral of the story
‘[w]hat is this state seeing the difference between good and bad and choosing
bad … okaying bad?’ (p.26)
It’s a state of corruption. A certain sort of perverse laxity about oneself, moral
unease without moral energy.
John Self’s victimization is brought about by that which he can control - his
own greed - and by that over which he has no control, the class system.
Does John Self die?
He does end up dead in a way - outside the novel, outside money and Money,
in endless and ordinary life. To describe him as a nihilist is stretching it. What
he lives through may be a sort of nihilism, but he has no informing ideology of
the way he lives.
Enterpreneurship
challenged – a "Self made"
man?
"The discourse of Amis’s novel ostensibly exposes the false tenets of the new
Toryism and impugns the greed of Thatcherite England in order to call for the
transformation of the existing capitalist system. However, by casting his
protagonist as a member of the working class, Amis endangers this purpose
and instead devises a telos [end] that valorizes [upholds the value of] the
class and gender systems."
Money, p. 51
I hate people with degrees, O-levels, eleven-pluses, Iowa Tests, shorthand
diplomas ... And you hate me, don't you. Yes you do. Because I'm the new
kind, the kind who has money but can never use it for anything but ugliness.
To which I say: You never let us in, not really. You might have thought you let
us in, but you never did. You just gave us some money.