Lobstergirl's Full Review: Martin Amis - Rachel Papers
“My medium-length, arseless waistless figure, corrugated ribcage and bandy legs gang up to dispel any hint of aplomb,” adolescent narrator Charles Highway describes himself on the first page of The Rachel Papers (1974). “…I used to have to fold the bands of my trousers almost double, and bulk out the seats with shirts intended for grown men. I dress more thoughtfully now, though, not so much with taste as with insight.”
It’s a promising opening for this first novel from the (then) 24-year old son of the English writer Kingsley Amis. Charles is both cocky and self-deprecating and, it seems almost too obvious to observe, a lot like Martin Amis: puckish, precocious, brilliant at English literature, infatuated with writing and pretty girls. Charles has some serious father issues (he hates his). He also spends more time than your average literary hero wanking off, draining pus from pimples, coiffing his pubic hair, hawking phlegm into a cup stowed beneath his bed, and examining his girlfriend’s dirty underwear, actions whose verisimilitude to Amis’s own I am as yet wholly unqualified to address (Amis’s memoir Experience is still in my To Read pile; I am ever hopeful that memoirs won’t shortchange issues of grooming and personal hygiene). If you had to find Charles a literary twin, you wouldn’t go too wrong with the Philip Roth antihero Alexander Portnoy.
On the threshold of turning twenty, Charles leaves home to attend cramming courses in preparation for application to Oxford (from which Amis graduated with honors in English in 1971). He moves in with his sister Jenny and her husband Norman, a bilious, booze-gobbing proletarian who is not above knocking his wife around a little. “In the role of elder sister,” Charles opines, “she had seemed to me merely graceless and sulky. None of my friends (for instance) had ever asked to be told what her tits were like.” But his new proximity to Jenny forces him to reevaluate her desirability; now, “there was no reason to believe that with her clothes off she would smell of boiled eggs and dead babies.”
Much of the narrative concerns Charles’ angst-filled pursuit of Rachel, a pulchritudinous (but not aggressively sexy) lass who is already dating DeForest, a bland, Jaguar-driving American. A latter day Pepys, Charles meticulously documents every detail of the hunt (the titular Rachel Papers) just as he has accumulated a suitcase-full of folders, notepads, letters, and diaries documenting his life and its supporting cast of characters. (His mother gets her own portfolio, while the siblings each get a quarto booklet; his father doesn’t even merit a notepad.) The most relevant file (covering all aspects of girlchasing) is labeled “Conquests and Techniques: a Synthesis”.
What makes this a novel well worth reading? Not to be sappy, but it captures the sweetness of youth. A concave-chested, venereally diseased British youth, to be sure, but there’s a lot of charm in these slimy bedroom exploits. There is an undeniable appeal in the fastidiousness (and eagerness to please) with which Charles arranges his bedroom props according to which girl is coming over for a visit (for Rachel, 2001: A Space Odyssey is on top of the record pile, and Persuasion open face down on the bed). You find yourself rooting for Charles despite the thick film of snot that must certainly coat his bathroom sink, and rooting for characters is usually a sign that a writer is doing a good job of character development.
Then, of course, it’s very droll and clever. Here’s Charles’ depiction of his mother:
What a heap. The skin had shrunken over her skull, to accentuate her jaw and to provide commodious cellarage for the gloomy pools that were her eyes; her breasts had long forsaken their native home and now flanked her navel; and her buttocks, when she wore stretch-slacks, would dance behind her knees like punch-balls. The gnomic literature she was reading empowered her to give up on her appearance.
Clearly, Amis can do things with words that most writers only dream about.
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