Money: A Suicide Note

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For the English Self, New York City is an enormous brothel, with fast food restaurants in close proximity. The place excites him in a curious way: “You step off the plane, look around, take a deep breath–and come to in your underpants, somewhere south of SoHo, or on a midtown traction table with a silver tray and a tasselled tab on your chest and a guy in white saying Good morning, sir. How are you today. That’ll be fifteen thousand dollars . . .” NYC demands money just to stay alive, lots of it. It makes the making of money as a goal in itself comprehensible, even worthwhile.

Hitchens retaliated via an article in the Atlantic, but the friendship was apparently unaffected. “We never needed to make up,” Amis told the Independent in 2007. “We had an adult exchange of views, mostly in print, and that was that (or, more exactly, that goes on being that). My friendship with the Hitch has always been perfectly cloudless.” When Hitchens died, in December 2011, Amis delivered his eulogy.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

In the sharpest imaginable contrast, Amis ran towards gunfire: towards the dangerous terrain of class, sex, genocide, violence, and the twisted depravities of fundamentalist religion. His novels were unsafe spaces. His non-fiction was untroubled by the fear of causing offense. “I don’t want to tread carefully and be editing myself,” he told the Guardian in 2010. Because its plot hinged upon the rivalry between two writers – the vacuously successful Gwyn Barry and the failed novelist Richard Tull – The Information was often assumed to be a crude roman a clef about Amis’s falling out with Barnes. In fact, it is more accurately understood as a troubled exploration of the professional writer’s soul: the endless war that is waged within every author, between Barry and Tull, between hunger for recognition and literary integrity. But there is no escape from Money, its claws fastening more as one tries to escape. John cannot help it. He cannot hide from Money. And it is his greed, his inability to take control which brings his doom. When he sits there defeated, a part of me can sympathize with him, for the ruin he is faced with, is brought about by a being a part of the society where money is supreme and where ‘thinking’ spirals downwards as debauchery, greed and lust rise to unleash their power.His former UK editor, Dan Franklin, said: “For so many people of my generation, Martin Amis was the one: the coolest, funniest, most quotable, most beautiful writer in the British literary firmament. His UK editor, Michal Shavit, said: “It’s hard to imagine a world without Martin Amis in it. He was the king – a stylist extraordinaire, super cool, a brilliantly witty, erudite and fearless writer, and a truly wonderful man. The Guardian writes that "all his critics have noted what Kingsley Amis [his father] complained of as a 'terrible compulsive vividness in his style that constant demonstrating of his command of English'; and it's true that the Amis-ness of Amis will be reco Martin Amis is an English novelist, essayist, and short story writer. His works include the novels Money, London Fields and The Information.