Gendered Money Drabble

"In numerous novels, plays, and poems, the culture of 1980s Britain and its people are represented in terms of extremes: rich and poor, empowered and victimized, enlightened and ignorant, enthusiastic and embittered.

So begins J. Miracky's exploration of Martin Amis's Money - an almost pitch perfect description of the juxtaposed Extremes that John Self experiences through the course of the novel, his suicide note. Although Money seems a very Self motivated (pun intended) novel, driven solely by the vulgar and hedonistic character as he navigates through the world, it is a novel that actually depends wholly on that "Royal Wedding/Riots in 1981" world to properly function. It is not so much John Self that the reader is asked to react to but his reactions to a 20th century world and what that world means not only to him and the characters in the book, but to us as well.

I think it's interesting how, in the early pages of Money we experience the world exactly as Self experiences it. Everything is described with a hazy gloss, everything is funneled directly through his eyes with no sense of reality (in some ways, parts of the novel remind me of the unreality of Crash in that respect). Cab drivers, bell-hops, strippers, even smells and sounds all seem to be things that come at him, like a never ending landscape to a driver on a long stretch of highway. It's a sort of constant bombardment of information that's never processed or meditated upon, in keeping, as Miracky says, with the "attention-deficit-disordered quality" of John Self.

I agree that media and the general climate of Thatcher's England, though never addressed in a concrete way, is a huge part of what makes Self's life what it is. His addiction to things, to the very notion of addiction, is an idea that I think many people now living in even this 21st century world with its excesses and its uncertainties can relate to.

In the scene where Self leave's Martin Amis, after telling him about his undoing by Frank the Phone - I saw the breakdown of Self's usual worldview. The world was coming at him - a real, objective world beyond the sheen of television and porno mags. He hears "the streets scream," and indeed this is the most real reaction to the world that he's had throughout the entire book. He says "you're told about street culture," by the media, by the world, and for the first time he actually looks and sees the world for what it is - perhaps not for what it actually is but certainly for what it actually is in relation to him, his actual self, and not the false self that he's built up with the identity of a director, with his addictions, with his obsessions with Martina and Selina. Suddenly he's rejecting that TV is real - and the realization frightens him. Because if TV isn't real, if the shadow of the life he's built for himself isn't real, if the last hundred or so pages of the novel isn't real than that means he isn't real, either.