Laith
It’s a sign of the times that this book has lost its charm, the entire premise is worn so thin by reality that it robs the novel of nearly all its nuance. I have to agree with other reviewers: you cannot read this book in 2026 and not read John Self as a proto-Trump, or a proto-Weinstein.
John Self is a lustful reprobate who treats New York as his brothel and playground, a collection of massage parlours, bars, and fast food joints. The only things that get his blood pumping are the thought of more money and more pornography; he spends all his time trapped in drunken excess, a slave to both. Told from his own perspective, though, he’s something to be worshiped, one of the haves — his obvious flaws meant to reveal the rot at the heart of society, to say look what your money has bought. He’s even self-aware of his own detestability, his mind occasionally turning toward the realization that’s obvious to the reader from page one — this is no way to live — only to turn away from that fleeting clarity and dull his senses with more, more, more. I can tell this ugliness is deliberate: the ugliness of the character, the ugliness of the prose itself, the suppression of conscience with drink and sex, all in service of illustrating what happens when money drives a society, when greed is good. Written in 1985, I’m sure this was a sharp piece of social commentary. The trouble is we now live in a world where the John Selfs of fiction were proven right.
What really dates the book, though, isn’t just that its warnings came true — it’s that its central observation about money was already old news in 1985. The idea that wealth and luxury are a panacea, that enough money buys you out of being human, was a tired cliché well before Amis got to it; what was supposed to carry the novel is the way it’s illustrated, the texture of being trapped inside that delusion. And that’s exactly where the book loses me. Spending three hundred pages inside John Self’s head isn’t illuminating, it’s just unpleasant in precisely the way you’d expect going in. His moments of self-awareness are so fleeting and so incomplete that they read less like insight and more like Amis checking a box, and there’s no real pleasure or surprise in inhabiting a psyche that announces its own rot this loudly and does so little with the admission. As Self puts it of his own kind: “You never let us in, not really… We’re here to stay.” Fine — but I already knew that going in, and the book doesn’t seem to know much more than I did.
That sounds like I’m faulting Amis for being right, and maybe to a degree I am. Maybe it’s millennial angst, the constant low hum of wondering whether my life is a joke to these people. But I was genuinely put off by the hands-in-the-air resignation with which the narrative treats the problem. The ultimate message seems to be: I’m just calling balls and strikes here, maybe people should read more, maybe that’ll fix it. Yet another one of society’s problems quietly handed off to the next generation. Maybe it’s the prose too — Amis is trying entirely too hard, pitching this squarely at the literati, exactly the audience already inoculated against the problems of money. I don’t believe for a second that the people who needed this book ever read it. I can say that with some confidence having just watched a for-profit cage fight staged on the White House lawn (Happy 80th T-Bone).
The book’s full title is Money: A Suicide Note, a subtitle that almost never survives into conversation about it, and it’s a shame, because it’s doing real work. On the surface it’s about John Self’s identity collapsing once he learns who his father is and loses his fortune — his own suicide note, of sorts. But it’s just as much about the slower suicide of his lifestyle, and beyond that, the slower suicide of a society organized entirely around the pursuit of money. That’s the genuinely prescient part of the book, and it’s a shame the title rarely makes it past the cover (if it ever made the cover), because it’s a sharper piece of commentary than the three hundred pages of John Self’s psyche that follow it.
It’s a sign of the times that this book has lost its charm, the entire premise is worn so thin by reality that it robs the novel of nearly all its nuance. I have to agree with other reviewers: you cannot read this book in 2026 and not read John Self as a proto-Trump, or a proto-Weinstein.
John Self is a lustful reprobate who treats New York as his brothel and playground, a collection of massage parlours, bars, and fast food joints. The only things that get his blood pumping are the thought of more money and more pornography; he spends all his time trapped in drunken excess, a slave to both. Told from his own perspective, though, he’s something to be worshiped, one of the haves — his obvious flaws meant to reveal the rot at the heart of society, to say look what your money has bought. He’s even self-aware of his own detestability, his mind occasionally turning toward the realization that’s obvious to the reader from page one — this is no way to live — only to turn away from that fleeting clarity and dull his senses with more, more, more. I can tell this ugliness is deliberate: the ugliness of the character, the ugliness of the prose itself, the suppression of conscience with drink and sex, all in service of illustrating what happens when money drives a society, when greed is good. Written in 1985, I’m sure this was a sharp piece of social commentary. The trouble is we now live in a world where the John Selfs of fiction were proven right.
What really dates the book, though, isn’t just that its warnings came true — it’s that its central observation about money was already old news in 1985. The idea that wealth and luxury are a panacea, that enough money buys you out of being human, was a tired cliché well before Amis got to it; what was supposed to carry the novel is the way it’s illustrated, the texture of being trapped inside that delusion. And that’s exactly where the book loses me. Spending three hundred pages inside John Self’s head isn’t illuminating, it’s just unpleasant in precisely the way you’d expect going in. His moments of self-awareness are so fleeting and so incomplete that they read less like insight and more like Amis checking a box, and there’s no real pleasure or surprise in inhabiting a psyche that announces its own rot this loudly and does so little with the admission. As Self puts it of his own kind: “You never let us in, not really… We’re here to stay.” Fine — but I already knew that going in, and the book doesn’t seem to know much more than I did.
That sounds like I’m faulting Amis for being right, and maybe to a degree I am. Maybe it’s millennial angst, the constant low hum of wondering whether my life is a joke to these people. But I was genuinely put off by the hands-in-the-air resignation with which the narrative treats the problem. The ultimate message seems to be: I’m just calling balls and strikes here, maybe people should read more, maybe that’ll fix it. Yet another one of society’s problems quietly handed off to the next generation. Maybe it’s the prose too — Amis is trying entirely too hard, pitching this squarely at the literati, exactly the audience already inoculated against the problems of money. I don’t believe for a second that the people who needed this book ever read it. I can say that with some confidence having just watched a for-profit cage fight staged on the White House lawn (Happy 80th T-Bone).
The book’s full title is Money: A Suicide Note, a subtitle that almost never survives into conversation about it, and it’s a shame, because it’s doing real work. On the surface it’s about John Self’s identity collapsing once he learns who his father is and loses his fortune — his own suicide note, of sorts. But it’s just as much about the slower suicide of his lifestyle, and beyond that, the slower suicide of a society organized entirely around the pursuit of money. That’s the genuinely prescient part of the book, and it’s a shame the title rarely makes it past the cover (if it ever made the cover), because it’s a sharper piece of commentary than the three hundred pages of John Self’s psyche that follow it.