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Money noted
"Money represents a high-water mark in Amis's career, building on the strengths of his earlier novels but far exceeding them in scope, depth of characterization, and organic unity. It also stands as one of the indispensable novels of and about its decade." --James Diedrick, Understanding Martin Amis.
[Site manager's note: this page contains links to two complete essays on Money, as well as a selective bibliography of criticism, reviews, and interviews relating to the novel.]
Essays:
Articles and Sections of books containing discussions of Money:
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Alexander, Victoria. "Martin Amis: Between the Influences of Bellow and Nabokov." The Antioch Review (Fall 1994): 580-90. |
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Ashley, Leonard R.N. "`Names are Awfully Important': The Onomastics of Satirical Comment in Martin Amis's Money: A Suicide Note." Literary Onomastics Studies 14 (1987): 1-48. Amis's inventive, suggestive use of names in his novels deserves sustained attention. Ashley's analysis of Money is a start, though his compulsive, discursive style detracts from his insights. |
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Bernard, Catherine. "A Certain Hermeneutic Slant: Sublime Allegories in Contemporary English Fiction." Contemporary Literature 38 (1997): 164-84. Discusses the "revival of allegory and the almost coincidental emergence of a postmodernist form of the sublime" in the works of contemporary British novelists Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Graham Swift, D.M. Thomas, and Jeannette Winterson. Money: A Suicide Note, London Fields, and Time's Arrow are central to Bernard's analysis of these writers' simultaneous attraction to and suspicion of allegory and the sublime. "In such indeterminacy may lie the hermeneutic stance of much of contemporary English fiction, poised between a postmodernist distrust of discourse and a modernist belief in language" (182). |
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Brantlinger, Patrick. Fictions of the State: Culture and Credit in Britain, 1694-1994. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996. Brantlinger's genealogy of "public credit" takes him from the founding of the Bank of England to the 90s, from 18th-century Augustan satire to Martin Amis's account of 1980s yuppies in Money. Brantlinger finds a common basis of both financial and literary fictions in credit, or belief. Apropos of Amis and Money, Brantlinger writes that in the postindustrial, postmodern period, the "once almighty pound continues to lead a sort of spectral/spectacular existence" (254). |
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Doan, Lara L. "'Sexy Greedy Is the Late Eighties'": Power Systems in Amis's Money and Churchill's Serious Money." Minnesota Review 34-5 (Spring-Fall 1990): 69- 80. Faults Amis for participating in some of the power structures (especially heterosexist) he is ostensibly satirizing. Inexcusably reductive. |
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Lodge, David. After Bakhtin: Essays on Fiction and Criticism. London: Routledge, 1990. Excellent brief discussion of Money, which Lodge calls a "skaz narrative in the Notes from Underground tradition, a demonic carnival." |
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Massie, Allan. The Novel Today: A Critical Guide to the British Novel 1970-1989. London: Longman, 1990. A chapter on "the contemporary scene" discusses Amis's career up to Money, which Massie calls "an entrancing work of art." |
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Miller, Karl. Doubles: Studies in Literary History. London: Oxford University Press, 1985. Important in establishing Amis's fiction as worthy of serious literary analysis. Miller places Amis in a tradition of writers preoccupied by the "double." Contains brief but suggestive readings of Success, Other People, and Money as "orphan deliriums." |
Selected reviews:
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Burgess, Anthony. "Self Possessed" (review of Money). Observer 30 (September 1984): 20. |
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Review of Money by John Gross (New York Times Book Review, March 15, 1985). |
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Geng, Veronica. "The Great Addiction" (Review of Money: A Suicide Note). The New York Times (24 March, 1985): 7: 36. |
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Hamilton, Ian. "Martin and Martina" (review of Money). London Review of Books 20 (September-3 October 1984): 3-4. |
Selected interviews and profiles relevant to Money:
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Haffenden, John. "Martin Amis." Novelists in Interview. London: Methuen, 1985, 1-24. The best extended interview with Amis, who talks at length about his narrative strategies and concerns. Includes important discussion of Money. |
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McGrath, Patrick. "Interview with Martin Amis. Bomb 18 (Winter 1987): 26-29. Reprinted in Bomb Interviews. Ed. Betsy Sussler (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1992, 187-187. Good extended discussion with Amis; covers some of the same ground as the Haffenden interview. |
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Site maintained by James Diedrick, author of Understanding Martin Amis, 2nd edition (2004).
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