I have to say, Money by Martin Amis was a finely tuned piece of literature. This book was the closest I’ve ever been to feeling like I was reading a car. That doesn’t make sense. But it’s true. This book was like a car, it was fast, oily, noisy. I felt like it had an exhaust pipe.
I’ve never read anything by Amis before, but I am a big Christopher Hitchens fan and when I learned about the extreme mutual respect between these two I knew I’d have to read him. I believe the exact quote about their relationship is, “My friendship with the Hitch has always been perfectly cloudless. It is a love whose month is ever May.” How can I resist a guy who says that? Plus Bryan, my husband, read Money and really liked it. So I read it, not expecting such a perfect, moving, reality to unfold.
There were aspects of Money that made me feel spectral, like I was inside the writer’s, not the protagonist’s, head. I felt that I understood the struggle Amis went through to torture his character with the plot he put him through. A doozy of a plot. Amis’ language is extremely original. His voice is so well-developed, it feels like he’d been writing since birth, in the womb. In this way, Amis almost reminded me of Cormac McCarthy; totally singular, striking, and chaotic. But while I was reading both of these authors, I felt like I was being controlled. I felt like my pace and page turning had already been calculated with each word they’d written.
Money was artistic.
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