‘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.