Martin Amis

John Mullan analysing Money, [The Guardian, September and October 2003]

ISSUES

1. NAMES [https://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/sep/13/martinamis]
Signs of the times

In Money Martin Amis first delighted in a world of absurd, self-advertising names. The crass, bright
vulgarity of the 1980s is there in the names that his narrator, John Self, lists for us. There are the
emporia at which his girlfriend spends his money: Chez Zeus, Goliath's, Amaryllis, Romulus & Remus ("It
seems that the chick hangs out in Troy or Carthage"). He chooses whether to indulge his piggish
appetites at restaurants paradoxically called The Breadline, Assisi's, The Mahatma. He lingers in nasty
pubs nastily named The Blind Pig, The Fancy Rat, The Jack the Ripper. Every proclamation of individuality
is really the sign of a trend.

The times and the places (New York, Los Angeles and "Unlovely London") are represented also by the
names of the characters. In America, ad man and would-be film-maker Self meets movie people whose
names are the outcome of some linguistic cosmetic surgery. His producer is the smooth, tanned Fielding
Goodney, a name designed to sound expensive. His star is to be the superannuated Lorne Guyland - you
can hear the out-of-date attempt at allure. This is America, where you can make yourself a new name,
perfect and improbable. Here actors are called Christopher Meadowbrook or Day Lightbowne or Butch
Beausoleil (a woman).

These labels of self-manufacture are variants on a traditional habit of comic fiction, which often toys
with the idea that a character's name proclaims his or her nature. When Amis sarcastically calls the
über-yob in London Fields Keith Talent or the tabloid hack in his new novel Yellow Dog Clint Smoker you
can recall that Henry Fielding named his birch-wielding pedagogue in Tom Jones Thwackum and the
punitive magistrate in Amelia Jonathan Thrasher, JP. These are the kinds of names that we expect from
satire, where the fate of characters is to be not singular but representative. Amis's predecessor as a
novelist of urban disgust, Tobias Smollett, will call an oily politician Cringer and a ridiculous artist Pallet.
The name is a sign of typicality.

Such names are sometimes called "cratylic": they advertise a property that is fixed, whether terrible or
ludicrous. A character thus named must act out a characteristic, which is his inescapable identity. The
joke relies on the other characters in the novel not recognising what his or her name announces.

Since Money, Amis has hardly been able to coin a name that is not a joke. Perhaps it has become a
facetious tic, yet some great novelists have been just as preoccupied with the significant naming of their
characters. Henry James would record usable names in a notebook. Sometimes these were culled from
the Times, a store ("... Paraday, Hurter, Collop, Hyme, Popkiss...") for future application. His names are
not obviously cratylic, yet he relished their suggestiveness and oddness.

Even novelists who do not specialise in caricatures or representative types use names with
connotations. In Jane Austen novels, it is always likely that characters called Olivia or Maria are headed
for trouble. In George Eliot, women with names as flowery as Rosamund or Gwendolen are, you sense,
going to suffer for their attractions.
Another novelist who collected potential names was Charles Dickens. For him, to get the name was to
get the character. In the novelist's notes for David Copperfield, you can see David's intimidating
stepfather going from Mr Harden to Murdle to Murden before he becomes, unforgettably, Mr
Murdstone: hard and murderous. The simplification and hyperbole epitomised in the name are not
credible in themselves, but are made so by the novel's evocation of a child's fears. Dickens's names are
sometimes clearly cratylic (the frozen Lord Dedlock, the utilitarian Gradgrind) and sometimes more
poetically so (the lovably foolish Traddles or the vampiric lawyer Vholes).

Surely Dickens would have appreciated the name of John Self's dental hygienist, Roger Frift (suggestive
both of his high earnings and of breath whistling through teeth). In Money, characters brandish their
names like boasts. At Fielding Goodney's exclusive New York tennis club, Self spots leading players Chip
Fournaki and Nick Karebenkian, as well as women's world champion Sissy Skolimowsky. Even the names
are muscled. His business partners are Terry Linex and Keith Carburton: matey yet threatening; oikish
yet upwardly mobile.

And John Self? He of course has the name of the very era.

2. ADDRESSING THE READER [https://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/sep/20/martinamis]

The novel developed as a genre that reached out to each individual reader, and held him or her in its
embrace. A novel, being what Henry Fielding called "a private history", could draw the reader aside for
confession and self-justification, directly addressing an imagined confidant. Some novelists, such as
Fielding himself, have talked rather formally to someone called "the reader" (a convention rare after the
mid-19th century). Others, of whom Laurence Sterne was probably the first, have slipped into making
"you" a kind of character in the narrative, to be pleaded with, teased, flattered or hectored. And "you"
are certainly there in Money.

John Self's confidences make us complicit in all his bad, bad thoughts. Told that his old friend Alec
Llewellyn is in prison, he feels "a gulp of innocent, bright-eyed pleasure". He shares the schadenfreude
with the reader in full expectation of recognition. "Mm, it's so nice when one of your peers goes down.
You know the feeling? A real buzz, isn't it?" The reader is an antagonist as much as an intimate. Self
imagines the fastidious, educated reader recoiling from unrefined self-indulgence. "And you hate me,
don't you. Yes you do." Yet this reader is a hypocrite. When Self has sex with Butch Beausoleil, he is
fulfilling, he is sure, everyone else's fantasy. "You've thought about it, pal, take my word for it. You too,
angel, if you're at all that way inclined."

Self addresses those who are as grubby as himself. "You're in this too, brother, sister, among the
weather, the ageing and the money." The imagined reader is a descendant of the readers addressed by
other novelists with a satirical bent, such as Sterne and, perhaps especially, Thackeray. In Vanity Fair,
another dark comedy of the money-world, the "kind reader" is asked to accompany the narrator
through a place where everything is to be bought and sold. "This, dear friends and companions, is my
amiable object - to walk with you through the Fair, to examine the shops and the shows there."

Self talks to us as if we should know as well as he how money makes people do what you want. Musing
on his discovery that pornographic models are not really as they appear in pornography, he asks: "How
did I get to check out one or two of the chicks in the pornographic magazines?" Suddenly this is our
leering question. "Well how do you think? Money - that's right."

This narrator has different tones. He can joke with the reader about his obnoxious behaviour. He says
that after a civilised dinner with the cultured Martina Twain he rammed his hand up her skirt and...
"Relax. I didn't really. In fact I behaved doggedly well all evening." He bullies and boasts, but also looks
for reassurance. Given a copy of Animal Farm, he turns to us and asks: "Have you read it? Is it my kind of
thing?" In one of his many absurd new suits ("off-white with charcoal seaming") he feels uncertain: "I
wish you were here, I wish you were here to tell me it looked okay."

Yet, after all the kidding and boasting, he has to tell the reader everything. "I have a confession to make.
I might as well come clean. I can't fool you." Addressing the reader means truth-telling. Just as much as
Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, John Self tells the reader more than he can say to any of the other
characters. The 19th-century heroine let us know her unspoken passions. The 1980s anti-hero tells us all
the amoral, unspeakable truths of his heart and libido.

So the device draws us in. In Money it combines two implications. First it suggests that the reader is also
a citizen of the modern city: worldly, unsentimental, up-to-date - and qualified to get the satire. "You"
recognise what Self describes - all the ways in which urban humanity pursues its appetites in the late
20th century. And here is the other implication: that the reader too is variously voracious, faithless, self-
disgusted.

3. HIPERBOLE [https://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/sep/27/martinamis]

Much too much

Only a certain kind of fiction accommodates hyperbole - exaggeration for dramatic or descriptive effect.
For many novelists, their genre's best ambitions are exemplified by George Eliot's analogy for its duty of
verisimilitude. In Adam Bede she proposes as a model the "rare, precious truthfulness" of "many Dutch
paintings". The novel must be faithful to the ordinary proportions of life.

But it is not necessarily so. Money has little to do with moderation. It is all much too much. Just think of
the food and the booze. Sick and jet-lagged on his arrival in New York, John Self drops in at Pepper's
Burger World. "I had four Wallies, three Blastfurters, and an American Way, plus a nine-pack of beer."
He feels a little sleepy, but "ready for anything". It is horrible to imagine just what those dishes might be,
but we know they are surely more than a mortal could ingest.

The drinking is, literally, unbelievable. Before meeting Fielding Goodney at his club (the Pluto Room) he
consumes six glasses, "or vases", of Californian wine, "a quart" of Chablis, a pint of rum and "a drink or
two" of spirits. En route, "I bought a joint, a popper, a phial of cocaine and a plug of opium from a fat
spade in Times Square and snuffled it all up in a gogo bar toilet." The boasts are themselves a self-
indulgence. "I was in capital fettle." At the club he gets through a couple of bottles of champagne before
collapsing into narrative amnesia.
"I am a vitamin addict, I am a penicillin addict, I am a painkiller addict." Faced by a newspaper story of a
girl wasting away because she is "allergic to the 20th century", he responds, tastelessly: "I am addicted
to the 20th century." The addiction is there in the sour relish of his exaggerations. Can his local off-
licence really vend "tubs of Nigerian sherry, quarts of Alaskan port" or "a product called Alkohol, sold in
cauldrons of label-less plastic"? Reality is stretched to make us see it. Hyperbole is the appropriate
rhetorical ploy in a novel so gripped by excess.

There is a comic tradition of this in the English novel. Take these sentences, which a realist in Eliot's
mode could never have written: "Mr and Mrs Veneering were bran-new people in a bran-new house in a
bran-new quarter of London. Everything about the Veneerings was spick and span new." They come
from Dickens's Our Mutual Friend. The Veneerings, absurd worshippers of wealth, are brought to
grotesque life by the buzz of cliché and the insistence on the hyperbole. So mad for the polish of
affluence are these two that "everything" about them must be new. In Dickens, hyperbole is often a
fundamental impulse of the imagination. Parody and simile and caricature all become different kinds of
exaggeration.

Money lets Self's narrative voice follow the habits of colloquial hyperbole that we do not usually allow
into writing. Think of them: "I feel like death"; "I haven't seen her for ages"; "I've got millions of things to
do". Like Dickens, Amis enjoys exaggerations that are extensions of cliché. When he has to play tennis
with Goodney, Self faces a superior being, "tanned, tuned, a king's ransom of orthodonture having
passed through his mouth". Taking an economy flight from Heathrow, Self does justice to the ordinary
hell of air travel, and our ordinary apocalyptic diction. "Terminal Three was in terminal chaos, the air and
light suffused with last things, planet panic, money judgement."

This narrator has a figurative momentum that is itself excessive. He likes to take a thought and take it
too far. Musing xenophobically on the "foreigners" who fill his part of town, he wonders if "they even
speak Earthling?". "They speak stereo, radio crackle, interference. They speak sonar, bat-chirrup,
pterodactylese, fish-purr." The narrative habit is like the narrator himself: feverish, bloated, mostly very
funny. The brutish extravagance of Self's language, deliberately giving up its grasp on reality, is suited to
the novel's almost non-existent plot. Self eventually finds that he has been conned by Goodney. He was
living a self-delusion, tricked by his appetites - but carried along also by his own gift for hyperbole.

4. SKAZ [https://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/oct/04/martinamis]

The word on the street

In the first paragraph of Money, John Self is in the back of a taxi that bucks over a ridge in the road on its
mad charge into Manhattan, cracking his head against its roof.

"I really didn't need that, I tell you, with my head and face and back and heart hurting a lot all the time
anyway, and still drunk and crazed and ghosted from the plane."
Welcome to New York and the narrator's distinctive style, shaped from habits of contemporary speech.
From the idiomatic understatement ("I really didn't need that"), to the colloquial marker of emphasis ("I
tell you"), to the insistent listing ("my head and face and back and heart..."), to that blunt quantification
("a lot all the time") - the narration attaches itself to the spoken word. To read Money is to imagine one
is listening. John Self hates "people with degrees, O-levels, eleven-pluses, Iowa Tests, shorthand
diplomas..." and takes pride in being ill-read. Naturally his language is extravagantly non-literate.

Yet there is brutal expressiveness, too. His exaggerations are inventive as well as colloquial. "Drunk and
crazed and ghosted" takes us from the usual consequence of duty-free indulgence through the extreme
effects of economy-class confinement to an idiosyncratic word for the enervated strangeness of the
trans-Atlantic traveller. And what about his "heart" hurting like those other bits of his body? Is this
Weltschmerz, or fear of the grim reaper?

Self's little lists often combine incongruous elements like this (the device is called zeugma), as when he
meets the evidently violent father of a young film actor: "I was in no sort of nick for this encounter, I
admit, full of fear and afternoon scotch and the homeward tug." Something like melancholy emerges
from the clichés that tip into confession.

Academic critics sometimes use the term "skaz" to refer to a first-person narrative that seems to adopt
the characteristics of speech. It was employed by Russian formalist critics in the early 20th century to
designate a type of folk tale (derived from skazat, "to tell"). Originally it referred to an eyewitness
account of some episode of rural life. It was, above all, a story that preserved some of the qualities of
oral performance: the teller's embellishments or mistakes were part of the tale. Now it refers to
novelistic prose that consistently exploits the habits of colloquial language, especially those usually
excluded from "proper" written prose.

Skaz traditionally included slang, proverbs, dialect and telling errors of decorum or style. Self uses all
these, as well as expressions that are normally censored before they reach any page. He uses "bad
language" freely in narration as well as speech. "Broadway always contrives to be just that little bit
shittier than the zones through which it bends... I feel invaded, doped, fucked around." He also resorts
to the insults characteristic of demotic narration. He talks of fags and throwbacks, yobs and bitches (he
is one of the former, his girlfriend one of the latter).

Although Amis gives Self colloquial habits, the monologue is also artificial and brilliantly contrived. Like
the narrators of Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange and JD Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, he
"speaks" a language minted for the occasion. He has his bits of personal slang: his "rug" for his hair; his
"sock" for his expensive yet sordid bachelor flat. His very torments generate colloquial wit: "There's a
definite swelling in my jaw now, on my upper west side. It's a fucking abcess or something, maybe a
nerve deal or a gum gimmick."
The first classic of skaz in English is probably Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, in which Huck's uneducated
English magically shows up the hypocritical or vicious adults he encounters. For Twain, this was a
peculiarly American escape from literary English, and American writers have used skaz more readily than
British writers. John Self shuttles to New York and Los Angeles to chase money and flaunts the
Americanese of his diction. "Fear has really got the whammy on all of us down here. Oh it's true, man.
Sister, don't kid yourself." He brandishes phrases overheard from American television and cinema, as if
they qualify him as a citizen of the modern world. He also, naturally, has contempt for Americans and
the way they speak.