Discussion
N Dentressangle said:
Loved Money when I read it years ago. Identified with John Self - could be good, could be bad 
Tried to read Rachel Papers after Amis died. Gave up halfway through - feels very dated and maybe best read when you're not 52...
I loved the Rachel Papers, but was about 19 at the time. I think you're right, it's unlikely to have aged well Tried to read Rachel Papers after Amis died. Gave up halfway through - feels very dated and maybe best read when you're not 52...
I have now retrieved my copy of the RPs from daughter’s boyfriend (see above) and am halfway through it, first re-read in perhaps 20 years. It is clearly a young man’s book, but still laugh out loud funny in parts, and I’m enjoying it more than I did 20 years ago but probably not as much as I did 40 years ago when it opened the doors to clever, funny, and of course sexy, fiction for the first time. Having also read most of his collected journalistic output in the last few months since he died as well as criticism of his style in obits etc, it is interesting to see how his distinctive style, e.g., with phonetics, was there right from the get go. “Juskers they wear the t*ts doesn’t mean…” (Brother in law Norman, he of the Lotus Cortina, moaning about his wife and women generally, and perhaps example of why Amis had a reputation for misogyny in his early days, which he strongly rejected later). Lit crit over for the day.
DeForest’s car was a “huge red Jaguar”, in which 5 sat, so unlikely to be an e-type as I suggested above. And to continue with the theme with which this thread opened, there is also mentioned an old fashioned sports car (this was c 1970), as well as “double parked Alfa Romeos, Morgans and MGs [which] jostled and revved”, which Amis was using to illustrate the class, privilege and arrogance of the toffs at Rachel’s tutors (Charles Highway was a grammar school boy, like Amis). Charles’s father was envious of Norman’s Lotus Cortina.
DeForest’s car was a “huge red Jaguar”, in which 5 sat, so unlikely to be an e-type as I suggested above. And to continue with the theme with which this thread opened, there is also mentioned an old fashioned sports car (this was c 1970), as well as “double parked Alfa Romeos, Morgans and MGs [which] jostled and revved”, which Amis was using to illustrate the class, privilege and arrogance of the toffs at Rachel’s tutors (Charles Highway was a grammar school boy, like Amis). Charles’s father was envious of Norman’s Lotus Cortina.
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