Monday, June 29, 2015

The 100 best novels / No 93 / Money: A Suicide Note by Martin Amis (1984)






The 100 best novels

writtein English 

No 93

Money: A Suicide Note 

by Martin Amis

(1984)



Martin Amis’s era-defining ode to excess unleashed one of literature’s greatest modern monsters in self-destructive antihero John Self



Robert McCrum
Monday 29 June 2015 05.45 BST


P
erhaps more than any other novelist in this series, Martin Amis, who is also an outstanding essayist and critic, has punctuated his career with stern and candid reflections about the fates of writers and the afterlives of books. The only measure of success a writer should worry about, says Amis, is whether you’re still being read in 50 years. There is, he insists, “only one value judgment in literature: time”.

Money, a neo-Rabelaisian comedy, is probably Amis’s best bid for posterity, a zeitgeist book that remains one of the dominant novels of the 1980s. The hero ofMoney, according to its author, is “a semi-literate alcoholic”, John Self, whose appetite for pornography, drugs and fast food marks him out as an Amis favourite. Self’s self-loathing is compulsive: “My clothes are made of monosodium glutamate and hexachlorophene. My food is made of polyester, rayon and lurex. My rug lotions contain vitamins. Do my vitamins feature cleaning agents? I hope so. My brain is gimmicked by a microprocessor the size of a quark, and costing ten pee and running the whole deal. I am made of – junk, I’m just junk.” At the same time, Self glories in his supremacy, especially at the table: “There have been rich meat and bloody wine. There have been brandies, and thick puddings. There has already been some dirty talk. Selina is in high spirits, and as for me, I’m a gurgling wizard of calorific excess.”
Like many figures from the 80s, this ad-man narrator thinks he’s running the show – his life, loves, career, sleazy hedonism and all – but, actually, he’s a victim. Self, who is crisscrossing the Atlantic to make his first feature film, “Good Money” (later, “Bad Money”), becomes progressively mired in an accumulation of complex financial and sexual crises, linked to the corruptions of money, expressed through a series of hilarious set-pieces, which bring him to the edge of breakdown. Here, in a further provocation to English literary practice, the author steps into the narrative as “Martin Amis” and tries to prevent Self’s self-destruction. Thereafter, Money spirals towards its teasing, postmodern conclusion.
Martin Amis
Poster by T.A.


It’s probably wrong to interrogate Self’s brilliant monologue for the satisfactions of traditional English fiction. The narrator is all: “I’ve got to get this stuff out of my system. No, more than that, much more. I’ve got to get my system out of my system. That’s what I’ve got to do.” Money, according to Amis, is a novel of voice, not plot. The meaning of the “suicide note” subtitle emerges as part of the denouement, in a narrative resolution that’s more Nabokov than Dickens, to cite two of the influences presiding over the novel.

The thrill of Money, which is turbo-charged with savage humour from first to last page, is Amis’s prodigal delight in contemporary Anglo-American vernacular. In this novel, and London Fields, and finally The Information, he developed a voice that mesmerised a generation. The loquacious monsters of his fiction remain vivid and indispensable voices in the raucous polyphony of a new age, an essential precursor to the breakthroughs of the imminent new century. These are voices that are never less than wonderfully quotable: “The future could go this way, that way. The future’s futures have never looked so rocky. Don’t put money on it. Take my advice and stick to the present. It’s the real stuff, the only stuff, it’s all there is, the present, the panting present.” Amis has always been the novelist of the here and now.



A note on the text 


Amis has said that Money is “a novel of voice”, and has described writing it, long-hand, in a notebook before translating that voice into typescript. In his Paris Review interview, he said: “The common conception of how novels get written seems to me to be an exact description of writer’s block. In the common view, the writer is at this stage so desperate that he’s sitting around with a list of characters, a list of themes, and a framework for his plot, and ostensibly trying to mesh the three elements. In fact, it’s never like that. What happens is what Nabokov described as a throb. A throb or a glimmer, an act of recognition on the writer’s part. At this stage the writer thinks, here is something I can write a novel about. In the absence of that recognition I don’t know what one would do. It may be that nothing about this idea – or glimmer, or throb – appeals to you other than the fact that it’s your destiny, that it’s your next book. You may even be secretly appalled or awed or turned off by the idea, but it goes beyond that. You’re just reassured that there is another novel for you to write. The idea can be incredibly thin – a situation, a character in a certain place at a certain time. With Money, for example, I had an idea of a big fat guy in New York, trying to make a film. That was all.”
In the same interview, Amis concedes that: “Money was a much more difficult book to write than London Fields because it is essentially a plotless novel. It is what I would call a voice novel. If the voice doesn’t work you’re screwed. Moneywas only one voice, whereas London Fields was four voices.”




When Money was published, the reviews generally recognised a landmark novel, founded on, but engaged in an argument with, the English literary canon partly prefigured in this series. The New York Times wrote: “The plot of Money is in a basic, grand tradition. A guy gets totalled. Maybe he survives in comedy but he’s spectacularly brought down. What makes this book special and important is that it revitalises its tradition. Its transatlantic urban showbiz patter and smart literary patterns could have been just a jaded fast-lane bummer, a depleting ride in John Self’s purple Fiasco – ‘a vintage-style coupe with oodles of dash and heft and twang’. But instead the book’s dash and heft and twang serve a deeper energy, a reimagined naivete that urgently asks a basic, grand question: what on earth are the rest of us supposed to make of the spectacle of a fellow human getting totalled?”
In Britain, the Spectator, not always an Amis fan, said of Money that it was “an epitaph to that decade (the 1980s) much more authentic and searching than The Bonfire of the Vanities or Less Than Zero.”



Three more from Martin Amis

The Rachel Papers (1973); London Fields (1989); Experience (2000).




007 Emma by Jane Austen (1816)
014 Fair by William Thackeray (1848)  
035 The Call of the Wild by Jack London (1903)
036 The Golden Bowl by Henry James (1904)
039 The History of Mr Polly by HG Wells (1910)
040 Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm (1915)

041 The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford (1915)

042 The Thirty-Nine Steps by John Buchan (1915)
043 The Rainbow by DH Lawrence (1915)
044 Of Human Bondage by W Somerset Waugham (1915)
045 The Age of Innocence by Edith Warthon (1920)
046 Ulysses by James Joyce (1922)
047 Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis (1922)
048 A Pasage to India by EM Forster (1922)
049 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loss ( 1925)
050 Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (1925)

051 The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald (1925)

052 Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner (1926)

James Salter / Lost in Air



Lost in Air
By 


MARCH 18, 2014


I’ve known the anxiety of being completely lost, flying, at night. It can be extreme. You’re travelling at close to five hundred miles an hour, and every minute that goes by takes you further into being lost unless you get help from ground radar somewhere or somehow figure out the error. If you maintain altitude, is it a safe altitude or should you climb? How long have you been lost? It doesn’t happen suddenly. It’s just suddenly recognized.

Sunday, June 28, 2015

James Salter / Peter Matthiessen

Peter Matthiessen
Postscript: Peter Matthiessen (1927-2014)

BY JAMES SALTER
APRIL 14, 2014

I met Peter Matthiessen sometime in the late nineteen-seventies. I had moved east from Colorado, or intended to, and we were introduced by a mutual friend. I had been at several Paris Review parties at George Plimpton’s in the years before that, but had never happened to meet Peter there. He was famous, not only as a founding editor of the Paris Review but as a writer. He wrote for The New Yorker and had won a National Book Award for “The Snow Leopard.” An earlier book, “Wildlife in America,” had established his reputation years before.

Saturday, June 27, 2015

James Salter / Bangkok

Illustration by Simon Birch

Bangkok

By James Salter

Hollis was in the back at a table piled with books and a space among them where he was writing when Carol came in.
Hello, she said.
Well, look who's here, he said coolly. Hello.
She was wearing a gray jersey sweater and a narrow skirt as always, dressed well.
Didn't you get my message? she asked.
Yes.

My hero / James Salter by Rupert Thomson


James Salter

My hero: 

James Salter by Rupert Thomson

Salter’s gift as a writer was his way of conveying the ecstasy and transience of life in language that was simple and crystalline

Rupert Thomson
The Guardian, Saturday 27 June 2015 11.00 BST


When I met James Salter in London in the spring of 2013 I was struck by the way he walked. Though he was 87, there was the ghost of a swagger as he crossed the hotel lobby, and I had an immediate and vivid sense of him as a younger man – the pilot he once famously was, strolling across the runway to his F-86 fighter jet.

Friday, June 26, 2015

James Salter / Am Strande von Tanger

Mujeres en la playa, 1920
Pablo Picasso

Am Strande von Tanger

by James Salter

Barcelona at dawn. The hotels are dark. All the great avenues are pointing to the sea.
The city is empty. Nico is asleep. She is bound by twisted sheets, by her long hair, by a naked arm which falls from beneath her pillow. She lies still, she does not even breathe.
In a cage outlined beneath a square of silk that is indigo blue and black, her bird sleeps, Kalil. The cage is in an empty fireplace which has been scrubbed clean. There are flowers beside it and a bowl of fruit. Kalil is asleep, his head beneath the softness of a wing.

Thursday, June 25, 2015

James Salter / Last Night



Last Night

BY 

BIOGRAPHY

NOVEMBER 18, 2002 ISSUE

Walter Such was a translator. He liked to write with a green fountain pen that he had a habit of raising in the air slightly after each sentence, almost as if his hand were a mechanical device. He could recite lines of Blok in Russian and then give Rilke’s translation of them in German, pointing out their beauty. He was a sociable but also sometimes prickly man, who stuttered a little at first and who lived with his wife in a manner they liked. But Marit, his wife, was ill.

He was sitting with Susanna, a family friend. Finally, they heard Marit on the stairs, and she came into the room. She was wearing a red silk dress in which she had always been seductive, with her loose breasts and sleek, dark hair. In the white wire baskets in her closet were stacks of folded clothes, underwear, sport things, nightgowns, the shoes jumbled beneath on the floor. Things she would never again need. Also jewelry, bracelets and necklaces, and a lacquer box with all her rings. She had looked through the lacquer box at length and picked several. She didn’t want her fingers, bony now, to be naked.

Wednesday, June 24, 2015

Abby Aguirre / Remembering James Salter

James Salter with Sumo_Sagaponack, New York, 1984
Photo by Nancy Crampton

Remembering James Salter

JUNE 20, 2015 9:26 PM
by ABBY AGUIRRE


The first James Salter story that got me was “Twenty Minutes.” I don’t know how to describe its effect for those who haven’t read it except to say that it works on the reader much like Salter himself wrote, “slowly, exactingly and, by almost every critic’s estimation, beautifully,” as today’s Times obituary put it.
The story is about a divorced woman who gets thrown from her horse. It is set in Carbondale, Colorado, a small town 30 miles downvalley from Aspen, “downvalley” and “upvalley” being the directions that matter most in the land of 14,000-foot peaks.

James Salter, Writer of Beautiful American Sentences, Has Died


James Salter photographed by Jill Krementz on September 12, 1993—
precisely the era described by this author
—at a Paris Review Celebration in East Hampton. 
Front row: George Plimpton; Second Row, left to right: John Ashbery, 
Ed Doctorow, Bill Styron; 
back row: Willie Morris, Peter Matthiessen, Rose Styron, John Train, James Salter

James Salter, Writer of Beautiful American Sentences, Has Died

Another great writer I adored from the Paris Review has died


James Salter photographed by Jill Krementz on September 12, 1993, in East Hampton.
James Salter, 1925-2015, photographed by Jill Krementz on September 12, 1993, in East Hampton.
Back in the mid 1990s I had Talented Mr. Ripley-ed my way into an editorial position at the Paris Review, George Plimpton’s vaunted literary magazine. I was a trained astrophysicist with absolutely no literary experience. I conned George into hiring me by claiming to possess the technological expertise necessary to teleport his magazine from the ice age of rotary phones and typewriters into the twenty-first century.

James Salter, a Writer's Writer, Dies at 90

James Salter, 1975

James Salter, a ‘Writer’s Writer’ Short on Sales but Long on Acclaim, Dies at 90



By HELEN T. VERONGOS
JUNE 19, 2015


James Salter, whose intimately detailed novels and short stories kept a small but devoted audience in his thrall for more than half a century, died on Friday in Sag Harbor, N.Y. He was 90.

His wife, Kay Eldredge, confirmed his death, saying he had been at a physical therapy session. He lived in Bridgehampton, N.Y.

Mr. Salter wrote slowly, exactingly and, by almost every critic’s estimation, beautifully. Michael Dirda once observed in The Washington Post that “he can, when he wants, break your heart with a sentence.”

Tuesday, June 23, 2015

James Salter in The New Yorker


James Salter
James Salter
 BIOGRAPHY
in The New Yorker

BY 

JUNE 20, 2015

The writer James Salter died on Friday in Sag Harbor, New York. He was ninety years old. Perhaps best known for his 1967 novel, “A Sport and a Pastime,” he had a reputation, as Nick Paumgarten wrote in a 2013 Profile of Salter, “as a writer’s writer, or, as John Ashbery once said of Elizabeth Bishop, a writer’s writer’s writer.”