Money: A Suicide Note – Martin Amis

Remember The Catcher In The Rye? Well, Money: A Suicide Note is basically the grown up’s version. If you like your narrators drunk, rich, and horny, then this is the book for you! Amis reportedly based the book on his experiences as a scriptwriter on the film Saturn 3 (remember that classic?). If this is really what the script-writing life is like, then half the residents of Los Angeles could surely give The Wolf of Wall Street a run for his money.

Money: A Suicide Note follows the story of John Self, a successful ad director who lives for fast food, hard liquor, and hot women. Self travels back and forth between London and New York, trying to get his first feature film project off the ground. Now, Amis very deliberately subverts the tropes of the “Englishman abroad” story; for once, a Brit goes across the Atlantic and isn’t horrified by all Americans. Self actually fits right in.

For the first two thirds of the book, there’s not really much plot – Self just eats and drinks to excess, meets with film stars, and makes rape jokes. (Oh, yeah, you’d better be willing to stomach a barrel of satirical misogyny if you’re going to take this one on.) It’s kind of like a day trip into the mind of Harvey Weinstein.

Self also has a stalker, who calls and bitches him out over the phone whenever he’s in New York. Self calls him “Frank The Phone”. When the plot finally emerges, it builds to a big showdown between the two of them, and that’s when shit really starts to unravel. It turns out that “Frank” is actually Fielding Goodney, his film’s producer.

(I was kind of disappointed by that particular plot twist – I thought there would be a Fight Club-esque reveal where the stalker turned out to be a figment of Self’s psychosis.)

Not only has Goodney been harassing Self, but the whole film project turns out to be a sham. Not only does Self lose every penny he invested, he also loses everything he has (and then some) because Goodney convinced him to personally underwrite all debts and losses. Sucks to be him, eh?

There’s also a weird wife-swapping love story that weaves in and out. Self has a girlfriend in London (Selina) who hits him up for cash every chance she gets. Around the same time that his career falls apart, he finds out that she is pregnant to one of his business associates. Self isn’t all that shook up by it though, because (funnily enough) he has a thing for that very business associate’s wife. It looks, for a minute, like Money: A Suicide Note might have a “happily ever after” (well, as happy you can get when a nice-enough woman, burned by an unfaithful husband, gets together with a hedonistic slob)… but Selina pulls off a crazy scheme to break them up.

So, in the end, Self is broke, alone, and – oh yeah – he finds out that his dad isn’t his dad, and his car breaks down. It’s a rough time all around.

Don’t go feeling too sorry for him: Self is anything but pitiable. He worships at the altar of money and self-indulgence. He’s a consumerist, in every sense of the world – food, booze, drugs, and women – and his appetite is insatiable. It’s all a very clever metaphor, of course, for 20th century capitalism and greed, but Self is so grotesque that sometimes you forget that Amis is being ironic. Really, Self’s only redeeming quality as a narrator is that he’s quite funny.

“But that’s the whole trouble with dignity and self-respect: they cost you so much fucking money.”

Money: A Suicide Note

Yes, Money: A Suicide Note is endlessly quotable, and Self’s narration is full of gems. Just about every sentence could appear on the bottom of a demotivational poster. In fact, I took the liberty of mocking up a couple…

And another fun little quirk of the story: Amis randomly introduces himself as a character!

“I once shouted across the street, and gave him a V-sign and a warning fist. He stood his ground, and stared. This writer’s name, they tell me, is Martin Amis. Never heard of him. Do you know his stuff at all?”

Money: A Suicide Note

It threw me a little at first, but it was certainly something fun and different. Amis (the character) ends up being a kind of confidant to Self. Self mocks him for “living like a student” (seemingly under the impression that writers get paid big bucks, ha!), but he begrudgingly respects him. Amis tries to warn Self about his self-destructive behaviour, but of course Self doesn’t listen. It was a nifty little narrative technique that I haven’t seen before, so props to (real-life) Amis for that one!

On the whole, Money: A Suicide Note seems a bit dated. It’s very anchored in the 1980s, when pornography was “widely accessible” on VHS (the notion of pornography “addiction” in a time when you had to leave your house to purchase it in hard-copy seems kind of quaint, now, doesn’t it?). If we were try to transplant Money: A Suicide Note into today’s world, the story wouldn’t work – Self would just stare at his phone the whole time, and have UberEats delivered every hour on the hour.

Still, if you liked Lolita for Humbert Humbert (but aren’t too hung up on the “beauty” of your prose), you’ll probably enjoy Money. If nothing else, the book is great for a few laughs.

My favourite Amazon reviews of Money: A Suicide Note:

• “I got this book on a recommendation from an adult film director who named himself after one of the characters. I found it repetitive.” – nestor bloodyvessel
• “For the most part, I believe drunks like John Self in this novel, crazy people like the Australian pianist in the movie who’s name I can’t remember, and blow-hards like Citizen Kane don’t make interesting protagonists.It takes a Dickens to create works of art based on characters whose mental life seems so circumscribed and repetitive.” – Charles Dickens Dave
• “I wouldn’t even give it one star. The best word I can find to describe this book is cheesey. It’s about as compelling as a car wreck. I’m wondering how to get rid of it. I can’t recommend it to a friend. It’s not even amusing, just dumb and kind of annoying, especially a few pages before 78, when the narrator mentions the author, Martin Amis, by name as someone whose stalking him. Just dumb.” – A customer