Currently Reading: The Rachel Papers

The Rachel Papers
by Martin Amis
Alfred A. Knopf 1974

When it first came out, people said this was a sexed-up, worthless piece of juvenilia, and they're probably right, but that seems to be exactly what Martin Amis was getting at. I've heard he was only nineteen and twenty when he wrote this, his first novel, which makes it even more impressive that by the end you're hearing the voice of a much older man. It's like Amis is rubbing our noses in the self-consciousness and horniness of youth as a vaccine, so we'll be inoculated and ready to face adulthood.

Charles Highway, the protagonist, is seriously flawed: he is cunning and unwise; bright and shallow; well-educated and under-experienced. It must be the first narrator I've met in literature who is hyper-intelligent and completely unable to parse his emotions. Amis describes late adolescence as a kind of natural autism. Charles has a lot of heady, rushed sex in dank bedrooms, and he launches into an aggressive romance with a simple girl who cannot possibly understand him, all while sloughing off his responsibilities and skating easily into the English department at Oxford University. With the action focused so closely on Charles and his warped psychology (none of the adults in his life are better equipped to handle adulthood than he is, except perhaps his father, a Kingsley Amis figure whom Charles loathes), it should end up being a callow and misogynistic story. But there is some part of Charles (and the 19-year-old writer standing behind him) that acknowledges the depravity of his day-to-day existence, and cannot wait for everything to be solved on midnight of his twentieth birthday, when Charles believes he will suddenly and finally cease to be such a bundle of spunk and gloom.

You won't like Charles Highway, but Charles Highway doesn't like Charles Highway either, and by agreeing with him on this subject you can forge a common bond that will make this story quite an interesting one. The book's ending reminded me of Mark Renton, who walks away with all of his friends' cash at the end of Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh, which is another grim and often hilarious novel in which you can't decide if the protagonist should be exterminated from without (by all the forces he has brazenly and foolishly antagonized) or from within (by the almighty powers of self-realization). I really loved this book. Critics might say it reeks with depravity and narcissism, but I say it crackles with contradictions and narrative energy.