MONEY: A Suicide Note

The story:
John Self, an English director of commercials, is trying to enter a career in the movies. The setting of the novel is New York and London in 1981. Self pursues several simple needs: the need for sex (in a number of different forms), alcohol, drugs at times, companionship, and mainly, money. In these pursuits, he commutes back and forth from London to New York, from the uptown NYC to downtown, east side to west side and so on. This book is not about the "High Life"--rather about how a lot of money can buy you the "low life."
Through Self's 'stoned' eyes, you see a lot of interesting characters. All have one thing in common: money. His "girlfriend" in London, Selina, makes fun of him by taking him for a wealthier man. His New York friend, Martina Twain,is married to a wealthy man.
Amis wrote this in book in the early 1980s. He made an amazing accomplishment: he showed how the sexual and drug excesses of the 60s and 70s morphed into the materialistic excesses of the 1980s. And he did this even at the start of the decade.

Extract from book:
"California, land of my dreams and my longing.
You've seen me in New York and you know what I'm like there but in L.A., man, I tell you, I'm even more of a high-achiever - all fizz and push, a fixer, a bustler, a real new-dealer. Last December a whole week my thirty-minute short Dean Street was being shown daily at the Pantheon of Celestial Arts. In squeaky-clean restaurants, round smoggy poolsides, in jungly jacuzzis I made my deals. Business went well and it all looked possible. It was in the pleasure area, as usual, that I found I had a problem.
In L.A., you can't do anything unless you drive. Now I can't do anything unless I drink. And the drink-drive combination, it really isn't possible out there. If you so much as loosen your seatbelt or drop your ash or pick your nose, then it's an Alcatraz autopsy with the questions asked later. Any indiscipline, you feel, any variation, and there's a bullhorn, a set of scope sights, and a coptered pig drawing a bead on your rug.
So what can a poor boy do? You come out of the hotel, the Vraimont. Over boiling Watts the downtown skyline carries a smear of God's green snot. You walk left, you walk right, you are a bank rat on a busy river. This reastaurant serves no drink, this one serves no meat, this one serves no heterosexuals. You can get your chimp shampooed, you can get your dick tattooed, twenty-four hour, but can you get lunch? And should you see a sign on the far side of the street flshing BEEF-BOOZE-NO STRINGS, then you can forget it. The only way to get across the road is to be born there. All the ped-xing signs say DON'T WALK, all of them, all the time. That is the message, the content of Los Angeles: don't walk. Stay inside. Don't walk. Drive. Don't walk. Run! I tried the cabs. No use. The cabbies are all Saturnians who aren't even sure whether this is a right planet or a left planet. The first thing you have to do, every trip, is teach them how to drive."

About the author:
Born on August 25, 1949 in Oxford (his father was the well-known Booker Prize winning author, Kingsley Amis), Martin Amis spent his early years in Swansea (Southern Wales) where his father taught. He later spent a year at Princeton, where again his father taught, before returning to England and settling in Cambridge. At the age of twelve his parents divorced, and Amis spent the following year on Majorca, Spain, with his mother, brother and sister. He completed his schooling through a series of "crammers" (intensive tutoring schools), but didn't seem to be successful. One headmaster even declared Amis was "unusually unpromising."
After his stepmother, the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard, introduced him to the works of Jane Austen, he began preparing for Oxford University's entrance requirements. In 1968, he entered Oxford's Exeter College, and three years later graduated with a degree in English with first-class honours. He then was given a position as book reviewer for the London Observer in 1971, and then held a series of editorial positions over the next eight years, for such publications as the London Times Literary Supplement, the New Statesman etc.
A couple of recurring themes in the fictional works of Amis are: the bipolar presentation of two contrasting characters, of which one is successful and discovers his success is an illusion, while the loutish opposite prevails; and the awakening of a character from a "death" which leads to a relearning process and an alternate look at the world.
Amis has been married to Antonia Phillips since 1984 and has two sons. He enjoys darts, tennis, snooker, and pinball.

Buchdaten:
MONEY: A SUICIDE NOTE by Martin Amis
Sprache: Englisch
Taschenbuch - 400 Seiten - Penguin Books Ltd
Erscheinungsdatum: 3. Februar 2000
ISBN: 0141182393
Preis: € 15,50

If you want to buy this book second hand
Gebrauchsspuren - (Penguin paperback, 1984),
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The price of it is € 10 incl. postage.

More works from the same author:

hier online bestellen Time's Arrow	hier online bestellen The War against Cliche