My Exchange with Money

The intelligence and cleverness of Martin Amis’s Money snuck up on me and left me feeling as oafish as the main character, John Self.  Well, that’s not entirely fair to me, since I could see that it was being intelligent and doing some clever things, but the weight of its story didn’t fully sink in until I was sliding through the last thirty pages of the novel.  Since then, I have been making connections and notes on one of my 4x6 cards as everything started coming together in my mind.

Like so many other novels on this wonderful reading list, Money makes fantastic use of the first person narrative viewpoint.  John Self is a thirty-five year old Englishman who has raised himself from poverty to become a wealthy advertising man and maker of commercials.  He is rough and boorish, uneducated but street-smart.  At the beginning of the novel, he has quit his lucrative advertising job to work full-time on making a movie from an autobiographical storyline.  Fielding Gooding, a young, attractive producer has gathered a cast of actors, and Self runs between London and New York while the script is created and finalized, trying to make all the actors happy and keep his life in order.  Self is an alcoholic, a womanizer, a porn-enthusiast, and a man who has a very complicated relationship with money.

And of course, Money is about money.  Tapping into the zeitgeist of the 1980s (the book was published in 1984), Amis uses Self to contemplate the plight of a society with money at its heart.  On the one hand, money is everything.  If you don’t have it, you are an outcast.  Frank the Phone, the mystery caller who vaguely threatens Self throughout the novel, talks about the time Frank was destitute:

Listen.  I’ve stolen food, out of hunger, just to stay alive.  You can do it for a week.  After a month you get the look.  You look like the sort of guy who has to steal to stay alive.  And that’s it.  All over.  You can’t steal food any more.  Why?  Because they can tell, the second you walk in the store.  They can see no money in you.  Not even the memory of money.  Imagine.

And when Self visits his old friend Alec in prison, Self looks around and notes: “Everyone in here, they had all transgressed, they had all sinned against money.  And now money was making them pay.”  The sins are not sins against other people or against humanity, but against money.  And money has an unprecedented prominent place in society, Self notes, who grew up in the 1960’s: 

In my day, if you wanted, you could just drop out.  You can’t drop out any more.  Money has seen to that.  There’s nowhere to go.  You cannot hide out from money.  You just cannot hide out from money any more.

Money is at the center of western society, and to say money’s nothing without your health is to miss the point that being sick without money is way worse; in fact, when you don’t have your health is exactly when you can use some more money.

So Self pursues money and secures money and worries about money, but he wants something more.  What he wants is 

to burst out of the world of money and into—into what?  Into the world of thought and fascination.  How do I get there?  Tell me, please.  I’ll never make it by myself.  I just don’t know the way.

He attempts to move from money to thought through the tutelage of his old friend and new love, Martina Twain, who appears to be a New Yorker of old money.  She surrounds herself with paintings and culture and seems to escape the crassness of money.  She is, I believe, the only character who does not seem broken and fragile and desperate in some way.  On the other hand, there is something frigid and sterile about her.  Self is introduced to a lot of culture while with her, but he most certainly doesn’t seem to be enjoying himself.  And neither does she.  Through her money, he can escape from money, but only because she has so much money.

Money is always a means to an end, but the end is never reached.  The film actors are always looking for some way to satisfy their vanities.  Self wants money to satisfy his own vanity as an intelligent man of the world whose impoverished background never gave him the chance to be cultured.  Frank the Phone is looking for vengeance, and money is his vehicle to do so.  But money never satisfies and the ends are never actually met, so there is only dissatisfaction, disappointment, and the chase for more money.  Amis is able to communicate all this not through a philosophical treatise, but through the biting satire of his novel and a funny adventure told by an oaf who is, in the end, wrong about everything he ever thought he knew.  He cannot interpret real life or real motives any more than he can understand the plots of Animal Farm and Othello.  It is a playful romp through this thoroughly modern world with great moments of power and insight.

So that’s the review.  

Here are a couple of thoughts for those who have read the novel already.  There are spoilers ahead like the bills lining John Self’s wallet.  Proceed at your own risk!

What’s the role of the royal wedding in the novel?  Princess Di’s wedding is something of a temporal landmark in the novel, and while it has nothing to do with the plot, it clearly has something to do with the themes in the novel.  These are my half-baked thoughts to which you are invited to add your own.  It seems to me that the wedding is distinctly British and that it is supposed to contrast directly with the activities taking place in New York.  Amis and Self watch the ceremony on the television and both are in tears over it.  Is this bit of theater supposed to be compared with the movie being constructed in America?  Is it in opposition to the strip clubs and porn shops in New York?  Or is it about money, about the way that money and class are both the same thing and different?  Princess Di is already a noblewoman, but moving up to Princess is certainly a social step up, and she gains not only money but national respect and awe.  This division between money and class seems much cleaner in the U.K. than in the U.S., where there is no nobility and everyone appears to be member of the nouveau riche.

The other point that I find intriguing is the presence of Martin Amis the writer in Martin Amis’s book.  At first I thought this was just cleverness and a fun dose of meta-writing, but I think there’s something much fuller going on.  After the chess game, Self takes many swings at Martin, which he describes like this: 

 I didn’t see the first swing coming—but he did.  He ducked or shied or stood swiftly aloof and my fist slammed into the light bracket above his head.  I wheeled sideways with a wide backhander, fell against the low chair and caught its shoulder-spike deep in the ribs.  I came up flailing.  I hurled myself round that room like a big ape in a small cage.  I could never connect.  Oh Christ, he just isn’t here, he just isn’t there.  My last shot upended me by the rhino-hide sofa, which kicked me full in the face with its square steel boot.  The room tipped and tunneled and fled screaming into the night. 

When I awoke, Martin was still in the room, and still talking. 

When I awoke, Martin was gone and there was no sound anywhere.

When I read this it seemed to me that Martin was a figment of Self’s imagination; “he just isn’t here.”  He bested Self at chess, even though he didn’t seem to know about Chess.  Self was playing himself, and his punches landed, insofar as he threw the punches and Self ended up bruised and injured.  By this reading, Martin is some externalization of Self’s intellect, something existing outside of money (remember that he criticizes Martin for never spending any money).  This reading also creates a funhouse of mirrors in which Martin Amis writes a first person novel as John Self, who is the “real” Martin Amis truly telling a first-person narrative.  This reading falters when in the final letter, Self notes that he and Martin aren’t friends anymore and seldom see each other, and it falters when it becomes clear that the thing Martin claims for beating Self in chess is Self’s story, his experiences, which the writer Martin Amis can turn into a bestselling novel.

And finally, is there some importance between the names Martin and Martina being so similar?  Martina’s last name is Twain, not only an author’s name, but a mere nom de plume, made up.  In the final chess scene, Martin observes that he and Martina are the “two jokers” in the pack that upset Goodney’s plans for revenge, the two things in addition to Self’s inner strength that Goodney never counted on.  And isn’t Martina a little like Peter Pan in the way that she keeps losing her “Shadow”?  She is mythical and made up in all these kinds of ways, and exceptionally literary, like Martin.  There’s an excellent essay in this idea, so if you write that essay, please let me know.  I’d very much like to read it.