“Breaking Bad” – the title is a Southern phrase for going wild – is a TV show about the world’s nutttiest midlife crisis: 50-year-old Albuquerque high-school chemistry teacher Walter White (played by Bryan Cranston) finds out he has terminal lung cancer and starts making crystal meth, hoping to leave behind a nest egg for his son and pregnant wife. After teaming up with Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul), a burnout student he once flunked, they conspire to confect the purest, most coveted meth that New Mexico has ever seen. With the death penalty of his diagnosis looming, Walt wakes from the slumber of an unfulfilling life, evolving from slothful drip to reluctant part-time criminal, then gradually to something worse: from “Mr. Chips to Scarface.”

How did he get where he is?  On this front, the show seems to be making a statement of sorts about the failed American dream.  As a teacher presumably making relatively little money, Walter had to take a second job just to provide for his family.  As a citizen, he shouldn’t have had to decide between cancer treatment and the well-being of his family. People usually deal with these obstacles in other ways, usually by racking up more debt and burdening their families. But Walt resists. He uses whatever agency he has to die on his own terms. Because the stakes of drug trafficking firmly places him so far outside the status quo, because our hero is a criminal, we might ask ourselves, if playing by the rules only gets you so far, why bother? Breaking Bad dismisses the idea that your blue-collar job will provide for you, that, if needed, the State will, too, and that doing the right thing will be its own substantive reward. It  does this without moralizing or assigning blame, but it does work to disabuse us of these little fallacies.

The “Breaking Bad” story is told with elements that feel vaguely familiar to us; felonious dad copes with stress of work and family, cue the complications.  It features an anti-hero, moral ambiguity, and themes related to the economic collapse. The show has a dark wit and a cast of characters who are somehow both realistic and cartoonish, and certainly unpredictable. On the surface, the show is about drugs, and about organized crime, and, of course, about money. But the deeper you get (and Walter takes us very very deep) the more the series began to feels less a story about thugs than one about intellectual arrogance. Walter wants to be the best: he doesn’t care what he’s the best at, he just wants to be the best (a very rare thing, as he once says to Jessie)  And Walter’s pretty good at a lot of bad things: betraying his partners, lying to his friends, and—of course—making the country’s finest crystal meth. His pride in being the perfect meth cook seems more important to him than the money (or the violence). And if anyone ever questions his credentials, he has the stacks of dirty money and the ridiculously pure product to prove his superiority.

Walter’s interest in money isn’t about actual value anway; it’s the validation that the money represents that he craves so badly. It seems obvious to say that an aspiring drug kingpin who says he’s in the “empire business” is interested in making a lot of money, and there are many funny scenes of Walter parsing the details of percentages and cuts etc.. Currency defines each of Walter’s relationships, from his unsuccessful attempt to bribe Jesse, to the money laundering that has turned his marriage into an unpleasant business partnership, even to his problematic relationship with his son, which he attempts to fix….with money.  If it’s not about money, what is it about?

So the arc of the story is Walter progressing from unassuming shlub to opportunistic gangster, and as he does so, the show seems to be daring us to excuse him, or find a moral line that we deem a point of no return (and there are a lot of moral lines drawn.)  When your lead character has a terminal illness, then gets ushered into the criminal underworld and embroiled in ever bolder and more ambitious criminal plans…well, then you have a lead character rushing headlong toward the ultimate change – from being alive to being dead.  As the seasons progress, Walt makes more and more unjustifiable choices, each one changing him, with healthy dollops of his abundant arrogance and egotism thrown in.

But can you just go from being a law-abiding chemistry teacher to an underground meth cooker? Can Walter just start breaking the law after living a life in which laws were always obeyed, and embrace a criminal lifestyle like he’s joining a club? Breaking Bad plays to the craving in every “good” man for a secret life (although it doesn’t make Walt a mere rule-breaker, highlighting instead his more repulsive qualities: his coldness, egotism, and self-pity). The show seems to be saying yes, yes you can, that someone can simply decide to morph from a good person into a bad person, that your basic nature won’t stop you, that completing this conversion is eminently doable. You can just “break bad”,  because goodness and badness are simply choices, complicated ones to be sure, but no different than anything else.

‘Dollar bills, pound notes, they’re suicide notes. Money is a suicide note.’ So says John Self, the “hero” of Money: A Suicide Note, and what he apparently means is that money is destroying him. Self-destruction (along with several of its closest hyphenated pals: indulgence, interest, loathing) has become Self’s hobby, what he does in his spare time, and what he spends his money on. It’s money’s fault, too, that this is what he spends his money on. It’s money’s fault that he hasn’t got anything better to do with his spare time.

Money is a satire that blasts away at our consumer culture, a monument to eighties excess.  It’s a novel set in the summer of 1981 – the royal wedding plays out in the background – and John Self is an obscenely successful director of TV commercials who jets between London and New York. His first feature film, loosely autobiographical, is in development. Having made a small fortune from using images of scantily clad women to sell junk food, Self now plans to make a large fortune on the big screen, under the guidance of his producer.  Martin Amis’s narrator is obese, junk-guzzling, alcoholic, chainsmoking, pill-popping, and has rotting teeth, tinnitus and a sketchy heart. His appetites know no bounds and he has no self-control. When in New York, he divides his free time between strip joints, brothels, bars, computer game arcades and fast-food outlets. In London, it’s the pub or the kebab shop or the porn emporium or the bookie’s. He’s the embodiment of 1980s greed, when monetary value was the only value.

So overall, he is pretty intolerable company, both to the other characters in the novel and to us, its dear readers. But John Self has one redeeming feature: he’s funny. Funny enough to explain why people would spend time with him (though he thinks it’s because of his money), and funny enough to make his ranting and raving against everyone and everything, his tales of depravity and humiliation….not enjoyable, exactly, but compulsive reading.  Yeah….I can’t say Money was a pleasure to read, any more than i could say that John Self seems to get any real pleasure out of his massive intake of smoke, food and drink.  Wait, i forgot to mention masterbation.

So that’s the book, really.  We have John Self, admitted loser, with nothing much to like about him, an irresponsible buffoon with an addiction to porn and prostitutes. Buuuuut….again, he’s got money, and as he waits for the financing of his next film to come together, he makes London and New York his sinful playgrounds,  leaving a shambled trail of self-destruction in his wake. Over the course of his bizarre journey, John shares his thoughts and philosophy on the intricacies of life: life according to John Self, a drunk shithead with money: whoopee. Really, any semblance of plot or story plays second fiddle to his reflections, which propel the story from one mishap to the next.

Did I say plot?  Probably not intentionally. The, uh, “plot” is about Self’s efforts to get a movie made, a movie based on his life (oh wait i did mention that) but at about page ten, you just knoooow that movie’s never gonna get made. The first hundred or so pages can easily be skipped without missing anything of significance. The characters are all stereotypes, phonies, and it’s not that necessary to keep track of the names.  Then, about halfway through the book, an odd thing happens. The protagonist changes from being an utterly disgusting drunk to a somewhat sympathetic drunk (but he still manages to offend everyone.) There are subplots of a mysterious death threat against him and even a hit contract taken out on him, but neither of those threads eventually amount to much. After progressing at a snail’s pace with frequent descriptions of the sky, the plot suddenly thickens in a jumble, then drags on for too long. Will he kill himself or not? Enough already.

It was an effort to read this book. It’s witty, it’s dark, sometimes funny, often disturbing, definitely well-written. Amis is writer who paints scenes with remarkable clarity. But a tedious violent drunk is a tedious violent drunk, whether that’s in real life, on a screen or on a page, and John Self just did a number on me. And that’s the problem with Money. The first hundred pages of the novel depict him getting drunk and being an oaf over and over, pretty much dispensing with a plot in favor of – what? analysis? – but Self getting trashed and being as offensive as imaginable, then doing the same thing again and again through 363 pages of threadbare plot, provides no great insight into character. There’s a running joke about pigs, but I, uh, already got it. He’s a pig.

dcreedfinal