Martin Amis

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

The Rachel Papers

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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