Money

Literary fiction · Dark comedy · Satire

First published: 1984
Print length: 363 pagesPenguin Books, 1986

Description

John Self, a successful advertising director fueled by alcohol, appetite, and compulsive spending, travels to New York to make his first film. The production soon becomes another arena for excess: its actors resist the parts assigned to them, personal feuds disrupt the work, and Self ricochets between professional crises and expensive distractions. Threatening phone calls from a stranger add menace to the confusion, while trips back to London expose the family wounds and divided romantic life beneath his swagger. As money passes through Self’s hands faster than he can understand its power, the novel turns his transatlantic collapse into a caustic satire of 1980s consumerism, entertainment, masculine vanity, and self-invention.

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

Conversational · Dense · Witty

Pace

Variable

Tone

Dark · Humorous · Irreverent · Satirical

Structure

Linear

Focus

Character · Ideas · Voice

Emotional intensity

4 / 5

Reading complexity

1–5 · higher means more demanding

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

Themes

AddictionFamilyGenderIdentityWealthWork

About Martin Amis

Martin Amis was an English novelist, essayist, memoirist, screenwriter, and critic whose fiction made late-capitalist appetite, cultural decline, masculine vanity, and literary rivalry subjects of dark comedy. His prose is dense and verbally restless, driven by irony, coinages, elaborate sentences, and grotesque caricature. He often places compromised, self-dramatizing narrators inside plots that expose their efforts to control other people and their own stories. In Money, advertising director John Self’s compulsive spending and chaotic film project become a hectic study of consumerism and self-invention. London Fields turns an anticipated murder into material for a blocked writer, making narration itself part of the moral disorder. The Information uses one of Amis’s characteristic pairings, setting two novelist friends against each other as unequal success converts intimacy into sabotage. Such doubles give his large social satires a close personal pressure, while metafictional interruptions and borrowed genre structures keep their plots visibly unstable. His comedy repeatedly moves between verbal display and the damage done by appetite, envy, and self-deception.

Book details

For the print edition listed above.

Publisher: Penguin Books
Language: English
ISBN: 9780140077155, 9780140088915

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