Money: A Suicide Note

The subtractive test bites, and the book has a strong defence. Self must be kept drunk, broke, jet-lagged and distracted for the con to work: the binges, the flights, the calls from an anonymous voice on the telephone and the meetings with actors who will not do what the script asks are the means by which a man is kept from seeing that the money he spends is his own. Cut them and the plot becomes an anecdote with a twist. The chapters with Martin Amis and the chess game are required: they are where the trap is shown. What holds the axis is that the repetition outlasts its function: the reader grasps the law of the binge well before the book stops applying it, and several drunken set pieces, and some of the scenes at the Shakespeare, could go. Perhaps a sixth is permitted rather than compelled.

Score: 7.8 / 10

The disclosure can be stated and it holds: a culture that makes money the measure of everything makes a man who is nothing but appetite, and such a man cannot know himself or read the plot of his own life. Self believes he is buying and is being sold; the con is the finding made literal. Every appetite in the book, fast food, drink, pornography, the film itself, is a way of being consumed while consuming, and Self’s own name says what his decade made of the self. A second finding concerns fiction: a character in a novel is owned, and the author who appears in it says as much, so that Self’s suffering is the reader’s pleasure. Held below the gate because much of the condition is a comic mood of excess, and Self states the diagnosis of himself, often and well, rather than leaving it to be found.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Elevation comes often, and nearly always as the comic sublime: the voice at full pressure, a riff on a hangover or a city that rises past comedy into a rapture of disgust. The tennis match with Fielding Goodney, in which Self is humiliated by a man in perfect health, is a set piece at that height. The scene in which his father presents him with a bill for the cost of his upbringing is comedy at the edge of horror. The chess game with the author, where Self begins to see what has been done to him, rises to real dread; the failed suicide is bleak and strange. What the book does not reach is beauty or grandeur: Martina Twain’s world of books and calm is drawn as the height Self cannot see, and it is the flattest writing in the novel. Height is frequent, and of one kind.

Score: 7.9 / 10

Part of the myth is built. The book is a morality play in a modern city: an Everyman called Self, a tempter called Fielding Goodney who offers good money, a girlfriend called Selina who sells, and a good woman, Martina, who offers him books and is refused. The plot is a pact: Self signs for everything and is ruined by what he signed. Above it stands the author as a god of the book, a creator who appears to his creature, tells him in effect that he is made to suffer, and beats him at chess. Othello and Animal Farm are set in the action as texts Self is given and cannot read. Held below the gate because the allegorical names point more than they bear, the pact is a con rather than a damnation, and the figure of the author is as much a game played with the archetype as a structure that carries it.

Score: 7.9 / 10

The inheritance is plain: Bellow’s large, appetitive first person, which Amis admired above all; Nabokov’s unreliable narrator and his author who enters the book; Kingsley Amis’s comic novel, and behind it Waugh; Burgess’s invented vernacular. The turn is in the fusion and the risk. Amis gave a British comic novel an American scale, gave an illiterate narrator a style of great virtuosity, and put himself into a realist comedy as a character, a device the British novel of the time left to the avant-garde. The voice, part London street and part high literary performance, was new in English fiction, and it carried a long novel without relief. The stake was real: a book that could read as a self-regarding stunt, or as the thing it satirises. Held below the gate because each element was inherited, and the swerve is in combination more than in a new instrument.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Change the form and much of the knowledge goes. The first person is the instrument of the con: the reader sees only what Self sees, and Self sees almost nothing, so the reader must learn to read past him, as Self cannot. The suicide note as frame says at the start that the narrator will not survive in the form he has, and turns the whole into evidence. The entry of the author changes what the book is: the trap Fielding sets for Self is mirrored by the trap the novelist sets, and the reader is made to feel which is worse. A paradox is built in: a man who cannot read speaks in prose of great literary power, so that the voice is his and not his, money speaking through a mind it owns. Held off the top because the middle is episodic, and several sections could stand in another order.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Evidence rather than promise, and forty-two years supply some. The questions stay open: what the author’s entry into the book means, whether the novelist is its villain or its conscience; whether Self’s survival at the end, poorer and gentler, is redemption or merely exhaustion; whether the book is a satire of a misogynist world or an instance of it, argued since its appearance; how far the voice, which the reader enjoys, makes the reader the consumer the book indicts. It has been read beside Bellow, Nabokov and the British novel of the Thatcher years, and returned to as the summit of its author’s work. Held below the higher reaches because much of the yield lies on the surface of the voice, and once the con and the frame are known a return finds the same mechanism, renewed chiefly by the pleasure of the sentences.

Score: 8.1 / 10

The field is English-language fiction of the 1980s, and within it the British novel. The intrinsic force is real: the book brought a scale of voice and a metafictional daring into the British comic novel, and made the satire of money the matter of a high literary style, a reorganisation of what the comic novel of its decade could hold. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it became the defining British novel of its decade’s appetite, and its manner, the virtuoso comic first person and the mixing of high and low registers, was taken up widely by younger British writers through the late 1980s and the 1990s. The charge: much of that reach belongs to the Amis manner, spread across several books, more than to this novel’s form, and the manner’s influence has waned as its decade has receded.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Survival is weighed over forty-two years, on what has been shown. The text survives whole, as published, and has been in print throughout, in Britain and the United States and in translation. Presence is continuous: it is read, taught on courses in contemporary British fiction, and named as its author’s best book. Its surface is heavily dated: the royal wedding, the arcade games, the prices, the pornography and the television of 1981. But, as with the consumer satires of its kind, the surface is the subject, and the book has outlived the summer it catalogues. Charged: the dated surface, which needs annotation, and a presence narrower outside Britain than its fame suggests; together they hold the axis a tenth below the usual figure for its span. Four decades demonstrate less than the centuries behind the summit.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Judged on Amis’s English, with no translation between. The command is of a voice and of the sentence that carries it: the long comic period built of slang, brand names, coinages and sudden literary precision, the joke timed to the end of the clause, the riff that keeps rising past the point where another writer would stop. It is load-bearing: the argument about appetite lives in the sentence’s own appetite. The con is constructed with real skill, its clues placed where Self cannot read them and the reader can. Three charges hold the axis below the top: the voice is one voice for the whole long book, and its riffs repeat in shape; the women, Selina, Martina and the actresses, are drawn with less life than the men; and the scenes with Martina, meant as the book’s calm, are its slackest writing.

Score: 8.6 / 10

One law governs: money is the medium of everything, and everything in the book is bought, sold or owed. Take the two most distant elements: Self at the Shakespeare in London, where his father bills him for his childhood, and the chess game in which the novelist who made him beats him. They obey the same law: the father prices his son, the author owns his character, and both relations are money. The con, the film, the pornography and the hangovers are one physics, and the metafiction stays within the law rather than breaking it, which is the book’s best formal stroke. Charged: the range is wide in tone but narrow in kind, one appetite in two cities; and the comic exaggeration that governs the New York scenes sits at a distance the book does not quite bridge from the near-realist pathos of the end.

Score: 8.3 / 10

The orders held are several, and one consciousness holds them. Money and the economy, at every level from the street to the financing of a film. Work, in the making of commercials and of the film. The family, in a father’s bill, a dead mother and a question of paternity. Sexuality and pornography. Class, in Self’s London origins and his New York money. The city, two of them. The culture of television and fast food. Fiction itself, in the author who enters the book. They are integrated: every order arrives priced. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve is what is thin or absent: the state and history appear only as the backdrop of a royal wedding and of riots, the sacred and the natural order not at all, and every consciousness but Self’s is seen from outside.

Score: 7.6 / 10