Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry

Literary fiction · Absurdism · Dark comedy · Satire

First published: 1973
Print length: 180 pagesNew Directions, 1985

Description

Christie Malry is a disaffected young Londoner who takes a bank job to learn how money works. Once he masters double-entry bookkeeping, he begins keeping a private ledger of society’s offenses against him, balancing each debit with compensation of his own devising. Petty annoyances first produce small acts of vandalism, but Christie’s anger expands faster than any reasonable account can contain, and his reprisals escalate toward terrorism and mass violence. B. S. Johnson treats this grim progression with experimental humor, exposing the artificial machinery of plot even as Christie pursues his lethal arithmetic. The novel turns bookkeeping into a cold comic system for examining resentment, alienation, and the fantasy that every injury can be precisely repaid.

Reading profile

About this profile

Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).

Writing: How much attention the sentences and language require.
Ideas: How much interpretation or abstract reasoning the book asks of you.
Structure: How much you need to keep track of speakers, timelines and connections.
Background knowledge: Prior knowledge needed to follow the book, beyond what it explains.
Emotional intensity: Emotional pressure, from gentle (1) to intense (5). Separate from difficulty.

Writing style

Direct · Experimental · Fragmentary · Witty

Pace

Brisk

Tone

Absurdist · Dark · Irreverent · Satirical

Structure

Fragmented · Linear

Focus

Character · Ideas · Voice

Emotional intensity

4 / 5

Reading complexity

1–5 · higher means more demanding

Writing: 3 / 5
Ideas: 4 / 5
Structure: 4 / 5
Background knowledge: 1 / 5

Themes

ClassCrime and punishmentInequalityIsolationMoralityRevenge

About B. S. Johnson

B. S. Johnson was an English experimental novelist, poet, critic, filmmaker, and television producer whose fiction joined acute personal material to a persistent scrutiny of narrative form. He treated typography, shifting viewpoint, page design, and even a book’s physical construction as parts of storytelling. In The Unfortunates, a sportswriter’s routine assignment is repeatedly interrupted by memories of a dead friend, while unbound chapters allow recollection to arrive in varying sequences. House Mother Normal moves among eight residents of a nursing home, tightening its language and disrupting chronology as their degrees of dementia become more severe. Johnson’s dark comedy is equally exact about systems of authority and grievance. Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry converts a young man’s resentment into a private bookkeeping scheme, then exposes the machinery of plot as his calculated reprisals escalate from vandalism to mass violence. His prose can be direct, fragmentary, or densely inward, with abrupt transitions that keep observation, memory, and authorial intervention in active tension.

Book details

For the print edition listed above.

Publisher: New Directions
Language: English
ISBN: 9780811209533, 9780811209540

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