Name: The Rachel Papers
ISBN: 9781446401705

Martin Amis

Charles Highway is every mother’s worst nightmare. Precociously intelligent, mercilessly manipulative and highly sexed, Charles devotes the last of his teenage years to bedding girls and evading the half-arsed overtures of his distant parents. That is, until, he meets the aloof, wildly unattainable, Rachel. As Charles’s twentieth birthday – and the Oxford entrance exams – loom, his plans for seducing Rachel will draw him into a private collection of obsessional notes and observations: the eponymous ‘Rachel Papers’. WINNER OF THE SOMERSET MAUGHAM AWARD 'Scurrilous, shameless and very funny' The Times Literary Supplement ‘Amis has brought off the feat of satirizing his contemporaries while making them both funny and, in a bizarre way, moving’ Peter Ackroyd

The Rachel Papers

On the eve of his twentieth birthday, Charles Highway reviews his campaign to win over a self-assured girl named Rachel

I.m. ruzz

I'm without historical context for why this short novel should sit somewhere in my heart. I hear it was funny at some point. then maybe too cynical at another. 

It felt to me, at times, like reading a bright young whipper snapper's weblog. Nothing at all wrong with that, just not compelling in any way. 

amis' writing is always sharp and loaded with extra meanings and his bluntness about how men think about some things must have been a bit of a slap in the face to the post hippie world of the early 70s where men had begun to tell lies about getting in touch with their feminine side. I say lies because you can't retrain instinct, only convert it into something "higher" (by the female measure, of course) before it leaves your mouth. 

I think the could have been born story here is more about amis and how his intellect has detached him from the reality of the flesh. how ideas and technical terms, timelines and order are neatly placed center stage in experience at the cost of any genuine physical (non-logical) value. 

in the main character's mind a woman is an assembly of words sniped out of anatomy books. A carriage of well documented bundles of emotion sniped dually from the great writers and a cursory understanding of clinical psychology. Everything is described in terms of something else and nothing is truly what it was, as filter through the unique eyes of a person living it. 

there's a lot of safety to be marshaled by hiding in one's mind but in this case it keeps the novel a coming of age story (by force of time) rather than a coming of awareness story (by force of life, and experience) and that story is already told daily in the numbed goings on of people far less intelligent. 

in short, a polemic against the virtue of thought and at once a compelling argument for being a mildly brain injured but highly sensory being.

The Rachel Papers

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