Money

A Suicide Note

By: Martin Amis

Narrated by: Steven Pacey

Named one of Time’s 100 best novels in the English language, Money is “savagely hilarious. It risks, it boils with energy . . . it even manages to shock” (The Washington Post).

Including a new introduction by Lorrie Moore, author of I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home

Originally published in 1984, Martin Amis’s classic novel Money is a searing critique of late-stage capitalism that remains a poignant and relevant commentary on the trappings of materialism and the illusions of success.

Money is everything. Especially to John Self, a successful commercial director from London. He spends his days steeped in booze and pornography and prostitutes, lost in the hedonistic lifestyle of his peers.

But John has bigger dreams, and he sets off for America on the invitation of the filmmaker Fielding Goodney in the hope of getting his first feature film, titled Good Money, off the ground. It is in America where John must contend with his degenerative proclivities, or risk the life he’s built.

Money is Martin Amis at his very best: a hilarious, razor-sharp, and wholly singular storyteller.

A Macmillan Audio production.

Critic reviews

"As a messy, bitter, split-open capsule of ’80s celebrity and consumption, Money is priceless." —Alexandra Jacobs, The New York Times

It has not aged well

I read this novel when it was published and I was in my 30s. I thought it was biting, iconoclastic and enormously clever. Now, in my 70s, I find the long-winded coarseness tiresome. Hours and hours of the same bad behavior and trash talk grated on me. Having seen its effects on someone, it is amazing that John Self could literally survive the vast amounts of alcohol he consumes. Still, some very funny spots, such near the end when a a woman drops a 10p coin in Self's upturned cloth cap. The narrator, however, is brilliant. Maybe I've become crusty with age.

As good audibly as I remember

Martin Amis was a writer of ferocious talents, and “Money” demonstrates them all. Word choice, phrase, sentence, paragraph, and chapter, few can manipulate them like Amis could, sluicing them all down the comic river in combinations that sometime require the reader to catch his breath and wipe tears of mirth away.