Cheap Money (Book) (Martin Amis) Price

Related Products

Customer Reviews of Money

Ambivalence
Martin Amis is a widely praised author, and with good reason. He's gone on record saying that writing is 'inredibly easy' for him, and I don't doubt that measure, and it's not a bad thing. Reading anything of his, one gets the sense of a highly sharp-witted man with an in-born feel for the way words work together, and for comedy. The problem is that this utter facility with the minute and the imediate-one liners and brilliant flares of imagery-tends to let in problems with the overall conception of the work, and Money is a case in point. The minutiae are virtually at war with the overall movement of the book.While Amis' CONSCIENCE is in good places with this one(satirizing 80s excess and greed, mysogyny, the media, and pornography), the book seems to shamble along for 300 pages, and then stop, and when its over, you feel as though nothing really happened, and, truth to tell, not a whole lot does, at least nothing decisive. One isn't entirely surprised to run aground on the surprise ending, which manages to be both completely and totally left field and a disappointing cop out at the same time. Put another way:it's like listening to a story somebody 'absolutely must' tell you for five hours, but they never actually get to the point. Along the way though, you can laugh, gag, and grimace along with John Self's always-entertainig adventures in drinking, pornography and the filmmaking industry. The tone Amis manages to sustain for so long is nothing less than miraculous, and Self's observations will always garner a reaction(Not always a good one:I remember quoting one particularly harsh paragraph to a friend of mine and her only reply was,"Nope. I can't do that one."). Taken with distance, and at small doses, it's worth having a look at.

---

"I have money but I can't control it."
Money. It makes the world go 'round, and that's the problem. It seems the Earth's spinning on its axis has less to do with physics and more to do with those who don't have money chasing those who have it. And novelist/satirist Martin Amis cashes in on the corrupting influence of currency with his delightfully savage book, MONEY.

Director John Self is a self-admitted loser. There's not much to like about him: he smokes too much, drinks too much--he's an irresponsible buffoon with an addiction to porn and prostitutes. But he's got money, and as he waits for the financing of his next film to come together, he makes London and New York his sinful playgrounds. Leapfrogging back and forth across the pond, he leaves a shambled trail of self-destruction in his wake. Over the course of his bizarre journey, John shares his thoughts and philosophy on the intricacies of life: Life according to John Self, a drunken bugger with money. In fact, the story happily plays a second fiddle to John's reflections, and John's reflections carry the story from one zany mishap to the next.

Amis is sheer genius. He writes with a demented pomposity--a politically incorrect finger-in-your-eye--that has the reader laughing one moment, cringing the next. With a clever tongue-in-cheek device to show nothing is sacred, he even inserts himself into the story. It's fascinating reading, as Amis allows his protagonist's thoughts to wander all over the dysfunctional map of human corruption (often within the same paragraph). MONEY is a triumphant satire that blasts away at our consumer culture and reveals our fragile human foibles. It is the type of book I wish I had the backbone to write.
--D. Mikels, Author, WALK-ON

---

Entertaining and uncomprimising modern Lit
With a good book, you finish it and then can't help but think for a time in the style of its narrater, kind of the way a melody gets stuck in your head. If you enjoy this kind of thing in the first person, then Money is it. Period. It is the holy grail of modern first person male narration. What I mean is its not only got a super narrative voice, but the fact that the character is such a disgusting pig of a man, paradoxically, serves to ingrain and reinforce Amis' own ultra sophisticated, chillingly refined authorial strategies, a gut bustingly funny tension the text itself actually then goes on to expose and discuss in depth.

The thrust of the story is that John Self, 35 year old London based TV ad director, is in New York trying to get a film off the ground. An overly helpful young financier, one Fielding Goodney, is the reliable money man who believes in the project, and keeps pumping John with disconcertingly massive amounts of seemingly limitless cash. John, a creature of base addictions (porn, cigarettes, fast food, booze, prostitutes) spends the money as fast as Fielding can get it to him, and as a result is generally fall down drunk throughout the entire initial phases of film production. But oddly, the more out of it he gets, the more the money and potentialities seem to roll in and multiply: soon he's auditioning A list actors, doing promotions, considering plastic surgery. He's succeeding despite himself. The satire works both ways: what do we make of John, but also, what do we make of a New York City that caters directly to his every need and thrives on his energy?

The cold thing about Money is how most of the main characters in operate in a kind of zero-self-consciousness way: if John has money, he spends it, and he spends it on booze and drugs. He doesn't think about it, its just a given. In the same way, John's "relationship" with his live in girlfriend is structured along hilariously simple supply/demand lines: John's demand for her always comes at a price - and this is, quite naturally, the way he likes it. John sees money as the ultimate democracy: everything has a price, and to John, since he's got money, this is a source of tremendous comfort. Of course there are things John can't buy, like education, sensibility, true love, and this is generates a consternation and weakness and doubt in him. Little does John know how much he stands to lose as a direct result of his disinterest in the things he can't buy. Can whatever you can't buy ultimately come back to hurt you? How so?

Money takes all these ideas and runs them to hilarious extremes. One of the best things Amis has done.