A comedic romp of a novel, filled with fast-paced equivocations on the culture of excess that was the 80s (that’s at leasy what I’m told the eighties were, as I myself only managed to experience 1987-89 as a toddler). The story of an asanine director of TV commercials who flies from London to New York in the hopes of landing his first big movie deal. He takes the odd meetings with producers and film people, but mostly his mind races commenting on his binge drinking, his food addiction, and his interest in pornography.
Very funny writing, intermittently, with good one-liners from the sterling mind of Amis junior. A lot of it is satirical takes on the consumerist mentality that got going in the eighties – and, dishearteningly enough, a lot of his satire would be just as valid today (almost 40 years later!). This could be taken to mean that not much has changed since 1984 (which of course it has), but I think Amis’ adroit apercus were a bit ahead of their time, too. Some things strike today’s reader as frightfully dated, though, like the idea that the movie business is cool or the preponderance of strip clubs and prostitution.
Amis was inspired to write the novel after his experiences as a script writer for a movie with Kirk Douglas in 1980, a scifi picture called Saturn 3 (which was a phenomenal bomb of a movie, according to available box office statistics). He must also have been interested in exploring a certain kind of male ego, which is what the whole of the novel really is – the yammering thoughts of an insecure pompous twerp. Interestingly, a real person of that type would never be able to write so funnily about his own thoughts, so it is kind of an impossible combination that makes the formula work. Amis writes himself into the book, in order to fend off any criticism that the chauvinist ramblings of the protagonist are autobiographical. But Amis has admitted that some of the scenes in the book are based on his own experiences, even though he says that he mostly just “made it up”. From the first pages it put me in mind of some books I read in my late teens, like Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho, or The Bonfire of the Vanities, by Tom Wolfe. They are also in their own way, critiques of the culture of the eighties, even though they both came out towards the end of the decade. I liked the description of American culture from a British point of view, even though Amis technically made his character half-american (in the book he mentions his American mother who died when he was young, and he spent age 7 to 15 living with his aunt in New Jersey) – noone is fooled by this trick. A person who had spend those years in the US would not come up with the things the aptly named John Self says in Money… (I should know, I spent part of my childhood there too). Money rules everything, and bank notes are somehow suicide notes, says John Self. Not everything is clear in this book from 1984, but it is very funny at times.
Amis went on to write inventive books about Stalin, a dog, a concentration camp commendant, scifi imaginings of London in the year 1999 (written in 1989) and a state of the union satire of the UK called “Lionel Asbo”.
Kinship of all Species 