The Rachel Papers

by Martin Amis

In his uproarious first novel Martin Amis, author of the bestselling London Fields, gave us one of the most noxiously believable -- and curiously touching -- adolescents ever to sniffle and lust his way through the pages of contemporary fiction. On the brink of twenty, Charles High-way preps desultorily for Oxford, cheerfully loathes his father, and meticulously plots the seduction of a girl named Rachel -- a girl who sorely tests the mettle of his cynicism when he finds himself falling in love with her.

Genres: Fiction, Novels, Coming Of Age, Contemporary, Classics, Literary Fiction, British Literature

224 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1973

About the author

Martin Amis was an English novelist, essayist, and short story writer. His works included the novels Money, London Fields and The Information.

The Guardian writes that "all his critics have noted what Kingsley Amis [his father] complained of as a 'terrible compulsive vividness in his style... that constant demonstrating of his command of English'; and it's true that the Amis-ness of Amis will be recognisable in any piece before he reaches his first full stop."

Amis's raw material is what he sees as the absurdity of the postmodern condition with its grotesque caricatures. He has thus sometimes been portrayed as the undisputed master of what the New York Times has called "the new unpleasantness."

Reviews

[Baba · Rating 3 out of 5]

Marin Amis' debut novel which he himself has been critical of in later years tells the tale of literature obsessed 19 year old Charles Highway's last year before attending university in which he falls in love for the first time. For all the story not dating well it is a masterly and rarely seen very real feeling and sounding look at the world from the perspective of a typical Western youth obsessed with sex and how the world perceives them to a degree, but from their limited and eschewed view of the world. Even though I continually moaned about how badly dated the book was whilst reading it, I also acknowledged how well the book captured the lack of emotional intelligence of many young men at this age, as well as their almost complete lack of pertinent self awareness. An interesting debut novel that I rated 6 out of 12, Three Stars worth one-read.

..and yes the film adaptation featured a very young James Spader!
2024 read

[Jen · Rating 2 out of 5]

I first heard of Martin Amis through the fellationary (I refuse to accept the unreality of this word) anecdotes of late friend, and tireless polemicist, Christopher Hitchens. Now Hitch, for those who don’t know, is a man of such virility that the normal rules for using lugubrious in a sentence (which is to say; don’t) do not apply. So hearing all his praise for Amis sank an image into my psyche, into the binary operations of my most atavistic operating systems, a conceptual depth charge descended, bobbing like a giant rotten apple on black streams of lizard consciousness. The picture of a man in a gimp suit, leaning over a bowl of cereal which, instead of confections in the shape of happy iconography, is heaping with words like: tumescent, postprandial, scabrous, emetic, detumescence, termagant, extempore, pubical (okay, that’s not a real word either). Fiendish spoonful's disappear into the grim aperture of his executioner’s mask. His hunger — never sated.

Needless to say, I’ve been in a state of confused arousal since that time. So, I thought, it’s time to explode this mine using the soft, water logged, organic tissues which comprise my being to muffle the detonation. Thus have I ridden The Rachel Papers like the proverbial Texas Rattlesnake with my thighs gripping all the while with force enough to explode a field pumpkin.

What’s it about? Well, it’s about a self obsessed twat with a frail constitution (and ego) who meticulously chronicles his manipulative hijinks, the bulk of which are directed towards obtaining a rather ordinary girl who has etched herself large in his imagination due to the difficulty in obtaining her. Not to be thwarted by what he views as her simian boyfriend, he draws upon his self aggrandizement to further self aggrandize, using notebooks to codify mannerism, affect, ambient lighting conditions, and speeches which beg, borrow, steal, and sometimes confabulate insights he has gained from being a bed ridden book worm in the past, all in order to loom equally as large in Rachel’s mind.

All of this was humorous and oddly charming from a self insertion perspective. Where I couldn’t help but imagine being Rachel and breaking this conniving little shit from sucking eggs using my own diabolical snares. Which, funnily enough, made me sympathize with him, because maybe we’re cut from the same cloth and he just has the unfortunate tic of scribbling out his machinations like an action item list. After all, I have set up vignettes within my own room to evoke certain impressions in visitors. Leaving an art pad out with Boltzmann’s equations scribbled on it, and stained just so with Rorschachs of Jägermeister, will, in equal measure, attract and repel prospective mates. So if I can accuse him of anything, really, it’s being unbearably fastidious and going to pieces when the bottom falls out. Roll with the punches you insecure, phlegm ridden weasel! Break ‘em from sucking eggs, I will... But on the other hand, maybe I would’ve pity shagged. He’s a bit adorable, in a horrible person kind of way.

Anyway, the story wasn’t terribly interesting to me, if not for the fact that it was written by Martin Amis.

Allow me to clarify. If the writing style of the book can be imagined as a window, then it can range from opaque to completely transparent. Sometimes Spot jumps over the fence, and sometimes Spot luxuriates in rich prose, doesn’t manage to clear the hurdle at all, and snags his beanie babies in an unceremonious landing. Which is a thinly veiled commentary on the pursuit of happiness. See what I mean? No? Forget it! You’re a terrible dog anyway!

Now, with Amis, it’s a bit like a foggy mirror in the loo. You see shapes being traced in real time by someone on the other side. Something beautiful and impossibly detailed, defying the normal restrictions of phalangic art. You’re astounded to see the nervous system of Hyena Matriarch materializing slowly. This also allows you to glimpse something of the responsible party.

“Wait. Is he...”

Next to this beautiful cross section of Crocuta crocuta of the Hyaenidae family. The Queen’s arterial branches coalescing and terminating in a frighteningly large clitoris which she uses to absolutely terrify the males of the pack any time there’s a row that needs sorting. (Look this up if you’re curious). There’s something else taking shape.

“Is that a penis on a... skateboard? Wait! Is that the author over there rubbing one out?!”

And that’s pretty much Martin Amis. What a treasure.

[Steven Godin · Rating 4 out of 5]

First novel of lock down 2.0 didn't turn out to be as bad as I thought it would be. In fact, it surprised me just how much I ended up liking this. Generally, I don't like reading about teenagers now at my age: in this case a nineteen-year-old, let alone their sexual exploits, but I just felt like something different for a change, and always wanted to read more Amis but just never got around to it. One of the reasons It worked so well for me is that Amis at the time wasn't far off the same age as the protagonist Charles Highway, and the first person narrative worked a treat. This is the portrait from a male perspective of someone young, selfish, someone absorbed by sex and whacking off, and the idea of mastery, and that's how the book reads. That's the whole point. Go into it thinking about romance then don't. When it comes to the self-aware Highway, Amis doesn't hold back on all the little personal details and pungent smells: he is a pimple-squeezer, a sniffer of panties, a dirty handkerchief and used condom inspector, obsessive of bodily functions, someone who generally feels grubby, and who also suffers from asthma. Whilst we're not dealing with a virgin: him having quickies with another girl, Gloria, It's the seduction of the older Rachel: a sort of social experiment, who he describes as 'the pull' that takes centre stage, and with his confidence bolstered by recurrent consultations of a folder titled Conquests and Techniques, it leads up to a bedroom sex scene between the two that plays out so acutely realistic compared to a lot of other sex scenes I've come across elsewhere in literature. Despite Charles' conquest for wanting to bed an older woman, funnily, it turns out, Rachel was barely much older than he was. With Charles now more focused on getting into Oxford, and despite initially falling in love with her, he palms her off back to the incompetent American boyfriend Deforest after she wets the bed and gets the odd spot or two. What's missing here overall is the capacity to bring to life the other characters so that they appear more than just projections of Charles, but as a surveillance of bedroom/bathroom antics it was fun. Got a couple more of his novels to follow.

[Tony Vacation · Rating 4 out of 5]

Vacca’s Complaint:

I am inconsolably jealous when I consider that Martin Amis published his first book at 24 and had actually done the writing at least a year before, also I am disgusted with how much talent and confidence the bastard already had at my age. Here I am approaching my first quarter of a century and I have no first novel. I have no fame. I’m not deflecting pertinent questions from feminist reviewers by flirting with them. I have accomplished nothing with my life. Nothing!

The Rachel Papers, Martins Amis’ debut novel, is a snide and rude bildungsroman about an insufferably pretentious and over-articulate git named Charlie Highway, who, in the final hours before making that magical transformation into a twenty year-old, proceeds to ruminate over the past three months and his brief romance—his first experiences with love—with a posh bird named Rachel. The exact and expansive details of the relationship have been obsessively complied in a series of documents (Charlie collects material and produces portfolios for all the women in his life) called, you guessed it, the Rachel Papers. Over the course of this playfully metafictional novel, the reader gets to learn firsthand all of Charlie’s overbearing opinions on sex, literature, classism, youth, aging, zits, self-loathing, farts, art, music and poetry, and all of this is further compounded by his snarky resentment for the entirety of the adult world, by which I mean his carelessly cruel and cavalier father. This book is by no means a great book but there is no denying the deep well of talent Amis is working with as he convincingly gives voice to his wannabe academic of a teenage boy. Yes, Rachel’s portrayal is as thin as the paper on which she is deconstructed in excess by Charlie, who is very much a crude and shallow narrator. The Rachel Papers is a genuinely funny and cynical look at youth and childish notions of love, and how (most) young people don’t really have shit to say about anything meaningful. Apologies Holden and whateveryournamesare in John Green’s novels.

[Vanessa · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 Often crude and rude but highly entertaining if not easily offended. The main thing I took from this book is Martin Amis has a unique way with words. I also learnt that teenage boys are extremely gross. He does well to capture the selfishness and insecurities of adolescence, if it wasn’t as funny as it was this book would have been so cringeworthy.

[Roman Clodia · Rating 3 out of 5]

I guess I surprised myself by liking this more than I expected to, even though I ended up getting bored and skimming straight to the last chapter which ended exactly as I'd expected.

All of Amis' youthful verve and energy is on show as he creates a voice for his nineteen year old protagonist, Charles, obsessed with sleeping with an 'older woman' (Rachel is a month older!) before he exits his teens. There's something very knowing and self-aware in Amis' depiction of Charles' misogyny, self-aggrandisement and privilege, even while he exposes his anxiety, vulnerability and sheer incompetent youth. As a female reader I did baulk at some of the descriptions of female bodies which reveal Charles' disgust, while older men are castigated less emotively for their balding pates and bloated stomachs.

In some ways, Amis is freshening up the bildungsroman mode for his time, and there's also something of a 'The Graduate' feel to it though this version follows its own trajectory.

In the end, though, while I could appreciate the prose and the clever way it delineates its narrator - a bit show offy and precocious as he prepares for his Oxford entrance exams - there wasn't enough substance here to keep me reading: it feels a bit like a one-trick pony.

[Jonfaith · Rating 5 out of 5]

If Philip Roth is correct and life is misunderstanding people, then I remain awed by the riddle which is Martin Amis. His first novel The Rachel Papers injects self-awareness into satire, leaking a fecund foam which changes everything about how we regard the way we live now. The insecurity of adolescence is illustrated by our protagonist, one Charles Highway, who diagrams said angst and provides cross-references from the literary canon. One can imagine the reader or protagonsit saying bugger Holden Caulfield, then recognizing that Highway has likely compiled a list of ten reasons as to his superiority over Mr. Caulfield.

During a lazy gap year Charles writes, drinks and woos the titular Rachel. Life doesn't meet his precis. Plans have to change. Matters become a little Meta and we are left a little uncertain about what is actual and what is fictive. This is one of the most hilarious novels I've read. Numerous passages left me almost convulsing with laughter.

[Ian "Marvin" Graye · Rating 3 out of 5]

Almost Entranced

Charles Highway is a 19 year old student who has two obsessions with entry. One is to pass his Oxford entrance exams and the other is to sleep with Rachel Noyes before he [Charles] turns 20 in three weeks.

This isn't a quest to lose his virginity (that has already happened with Gloria or someone before her) or to have sex with an Older Woman (Rachel is only a month older than Charles).

It's more about an over-sexed, literary white English male arbitrarily setting out to enter the sexual realm that a new female acquaintance has theoretically made available to him (even if she already has an American boyfriend called DeForest Hoeniger).

Charles doesn't perceive anything special in Rachel. She will just be another “pull”, his “last teenage fuck", another success or notch in his bedpost. The description of his first sight of her is unenthusiastic, uninspiring and lacking in romance:

“She was fairly formidable, a bit out of my league really. She didn't belong to the aggressively sexy genre...However: tallish, nearly my height, shoulder-length black hair conventionally shaped around strong features, she made much of her eyes, her nose made much of itself, black boots and black cowgirl skirt met at the knee, manly white blouse, expensive handbag, few bracelets, one insignificant ring, rather stern no-crap stance, intelligent lower-middle class with a good job, something bossy like public relations, living alone, older than me, possibly half Jewish.” (She turns out not to be Jewish.)

Ione Skye and Dexter Fletcher in the 1989 film of the novel (which I haven't seen)

The Techniques of Conquest

Charles scores high marks for observation and description, though in reality it resembles perving or preparation for a kidnap (a la John Fowles' “The Collector").

Charles uses the same approach for both entrance exams. He has a folder into which he inserts notes, quotes, diary entries, diagrams, lists, plans, poems, speeches, letters, prose, portraits and sketches. One folder is more academic, the other more literary (and pretentious). The latter is labelled “Conquests and Techniques: a Synthesis". His seductions, therefore, seem to be a self-conscious exercise in sexual praxis. By the time Charles has finished, he can more or less submit an extract from “Conquests and Techniques" in satisfaction of his course requirements. Hence, “The Rachel Papers".

All This Wanky, Intellectual Shit

Charles rarely accomplishes anything beyond his “adolescent egotism". The more you learn about him, the less appealing he becomes. His friend, Geoffrey, counsels him:

“No, man, don't get too wanky with her. And cut out all this intellectual shit. Chicks don't want to be over-awed.”

Still, he persists, and we get the novel in its current form (“a sorry jumble of cold facts and free-associative prose"). It under-awes. It's mildly amusing, so it's not quite awful. You have to wonder whether it’s a self-help manual for a chronic masturbator or an egregious exaggerator (Charles keeps a meticulous multiple orgasm count, whether or not they're achieved single-handedly).


SOUNDTRACK:

The Beatles – “Within You Without You"

https://youtu.be/HsffxGyY4ck

"We were talking, about the space between us all
And the people, who hide themselves behind a wall of illusion."

The Velvet Underground – “Heroin"

https://youtu.be/qFLw26BjDZs

[Clare · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a bit of a curate's egg of a reading experience. I began finding Charles Highway's escapades mildly amusing, took a detour into down and out hatred of vacuous Rachel and odious Charles and ended up in a state of turbulent hilarity. This is basically a book about being a teenage boy - obsessed with phlegm, spunk and pulling girls. At times Highway is intensly dislikeable - like wading through a teenage boy's room in fact - but he is undeniably fascinating. However, the prize for most dislikeable character must surely go to Norm, who Charles pales into insipidity beside. Even in the comic interludes, in which he holds centre stage, he is difficult enough to give reading room to.
As to the writing, this was one of Amis' early novels - apparently published when he was 24. Some of the structure is a little rough - particularly the eccentric use of the "you" character later in the book (perhaps I read it too haphazardly to recognise it's true significance). The "papers" to which the title refers are an interesting literary conceit but seem to get sidelined and are never fully fleshed out or used particularly cleverly. (The Night Train uses a similar idea with a lot more success).

However, the character of Charles is entirely believable. Perhaps Amis's relatively youthful age meant that he held nothing back in sticking a nail into the embarrassments of adolescence(after all he had had none of the intervening years to develop the nostalgia for make-believe youth.) Recommended to anyone who thinks they may experience a mid-life crisis and thinks they need talking down.

[Eleni · Rating 1 out of 5]

I haven't read other Martin Amis novels. I have read analyses about Martin Amis, I have read interviews of Martin Amis and I have read raving reviews of OTHER novels of Martin Amis and I believe everybody who praises his talent. Unfortunately I should have also believed the people who praise his talent and who warned me not to choose The Rachel Papers as an introduction to his work, on the grounds that – surprisingly enough - it sucks.

I didn't and it was a big mistake. I chose The Rachel Papers in the hope that it would turn out to be my High Fidelity of the 70s (without the music), or at least a light version of it, because to actually match High Fidelity is too ambitious even for comparable books that chronologically precede it. I also hoped it would turn out to be an easy and fun read about teenage lust, which would be GREAT. Give me the Footloose and Pretty In Pink videotapes ok it’s dvds, anytime and I’ll watch them, never mind the dozens of times I already have done so. For each of these movies.

/end of synopsis of (laughable in retrospect) expectations.

Well. This was no fun read for sure. It wasn't even an easy read and it's a short one, and suffice to say, I won't dignify that book with the slightest comment on potential proximities to a 70s version of anything even remotely related to the Hornby universe.

So what is The Rachel Papers?
The Rachel Papers is an incredibly B-O-R-I-N-G and badly written coming of age novel about some Charles 20-year old who, similarly to the entire book, is completely humourless. Charles doesn't give a fuck about anything in life except getting laid, preferably with the number one popular Rachel girl, with whom he is obsessed. Which is fine. And completely understandable if you’re not even 20, like Charles.

Unfortunately, at least for a human (can’t vouch for extraterrestrials), Charles also features a remarkably rare combination of all of the following: inferiority complexes, delusional ideas of grandeur, sinister feelings for his father, lack of trustworthiness, self-esteem instability, lack of empathy towards everybody, hallucinational – apparently - ideas that planetary systems where being a complete arsehole is cool are already known to man and a desperate need for attention. He is exactly the kind of person who will try to sell their half-knowledge of the Dostoyevsky wikipedia entry (and maybe of one of those short stories by Pushkin) as expertise on Russian literature. You know how it goes.

Of course, lovely books where the main character is a complete jerk are not only perfectly possible, but also in existence, in abundance. In fact, 1984 and Crime And Punishment have to be my two most favourite books ever (so far anyway), and the protagonists in both books suck. They suck. One of them is also a murderer! So that's clearly not an issue for me.

The issue is that Charles both sucks and has nothing to share with the reader, good or bad. Top this up with a bunch of extra two-dimensional underdeveloped characters – yes; that means Rachel too – and an obnoxiously crude writing style and that's it.

Does this sound tempting to you?
I didn't think so.

[lorinbocol · Rating 4 out of 5]

sono più che mai convinta che un charles highway nella vita andrebbe frequentato almeno un po'. e proprio in virtù delle di lui smisurate cadute di stile, degli inciampi, delle fobie. delle gambe storte, della condotta variamente laida e - peggio che mai - della voce stridula e nasale. perché fatti salvi taluni repentini moti di disappunto, ci si divertirebbe un tot.
(forse con ragazze perbene si intendono semplicemente quelle a cui son toccati in sorte ragazzi appena troppo noiosi).

[Barry Pierce · Rating 3 out of 5]

thinking about the shit streak in rachel's knickers.

[Rob · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've given up trying to defend Martin Amis books. I tend to agree with every criticism that people offer, but to me they've missed the point. He's so wonderful to read because he has more technical mastery than any writer of the last fifty years that I've read. He can make his prose, and consequently his characters, do absolutely anything he likes.

As this is his first novel the pyrotechnics are somewhat muted, making it probably one of his more accessible novels. He has focused a bit more on characterisation, creating Charles Highway, who can stand as the equal of any of the unpleasant young men of literature in my opinion. He's at once detestable and forgivable, and he's instantly recognisable to anyone who's ever anticipated the sexual act with equal measures of dread and excitement, or felt an odd pleasure at coughing up a livid green lump of mucus.

If you've never read Martin Amis, or ever wondered what goes on in the head of self-involved young men, this is a good place to start.

[Ailsa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hell yeah.

.
.
.
"I took Rachel to a French film, La Rupture, as an oblique way of indicating to her how good in bed I was going to turn out to be." 109

"University challenge: the contestants seemed to be alarmingly well informed but, on the other hand, reassuringly hideous." 134

[Juan Nalerio · Rating 4 out of 5]

¿Quién o qué es Charles Highway? Formalmente es el protagonista y narrador de esta historia de amor, sexo estilo 70´s y búsqueda de un lugar en el mundo. Charles es mentiroso, calculador, con actitudes de niño e inteligente y aspiraciones de entrar a Oxford.

Con mucho ironía y datos autobiográficos Amis va construyendo esta divertida historia, alejada un poco de nuestras latitudes pero con puntos en común a todo adolescente que aspiró a un gran amor y a un gran polvo sexual.

El obsesivo Charles pone por escrito toda su relación con Rachel, incluyendo sus tácticas de abordaje, las puestas en escena para aparentar lo que no es y hasta lo que le genera ansiedad de una semana a otra en formato ranking musical. Muy buena lectura.

La tapa de Anagrama 50 debe de ser de las más feas que he visto y de las que menos representa a los personajes. No la entiendo.

[Richard Derus · Rating 3 out of 5]

Real Rating: 3.5* of five

Straight-people sex isn't much fun. This book was my clue that I wasn't wrong, it really wasn't very interesting. Because good goddle mitey, reading this at fourteen was A Chore.

At fourteen. A book about sex.

A Chore.

This was decidedly NOT the feeling engendered in me by that same year's absorption of The Lord Won't Mind. Nope. Decidedly not.

[W.D. Clarke]

So I am nineteen years old and don’t usually know what I’m doing, snap my thoughts out of the printed page, get my looks from other eyes, do not overtake dotards and cripples in the street for fear I will depress them with my agility, love watching children and animals at play but wouldn’t mind seeing a beggar kicked or a little girl run over because it’s all experience, dislike myself and sneer at a world less nice and less intelligent than me. I take it this is fairly routine?

Me: Fairly routine, at times, yeah. Then manifestly not, though not always in a good way.

Also Me: And?

Me: Occasionally in a very good way, too, though. So I dunno, can’t decide whether this is 2.5* rounded down, or rounded up. Which, I’ll admit, is an eternally adolescenty kind of thing to say, when finishing a novel. But there you go.

Also Me: Obvs. But you finished it, didn’t you? Plus, it’s a debut novel. Plus plus, it shows flashes of future brilliance, &c. Plus plus plus, it’s not Daniel Defoe, videlicet it’s got some laughs, a few brill apercus, &c…You know, style

Me: It’s also unspeakably crude.

A Me: Puritan!

Me: No, that’s just a half star off. Content Schmontent, as always: it’s chief failures are aesthetic, as with almost all first novels. Overlong longueurs, &c. You know: style.

A Me: OK.

Me: Chiefly it’s just that I had such high hopes going in.

A Me: As ever. Just get on with it, then, shall we?

Me: OK.

So: imagine a very very very (for its times, at least, hell what do I know?) smutty (in its second half) Catcher in the Rye with a narrator who’s at least twice as archly “knowing”...

Don’t I ever do anything else but take soulful walks down the Bayswater Road, I thought, as I walked soulfully down the Bayswater Road.

...and so at most half as truly self-aware, and who is also about ⅒th as likeable, not that you need to like characters, ofc—after all, you’re an adult.

But (perhaps I'll spare you the read, cos it's a big but, and, no spoiler, we're all adults here, and) there’s still gotta be some there there, amirite>?

And so there is, a there there, at least intermittently. Surtout, it’s not deadly boring, like his later slip-and-fall, The Pregnant Widow, but at times you do still wanna bail, and bounce. There’s just not enough claritas, consonantia, harmonia &c to go around.

See what he did there, slipped a lit crit ref in without explanation, much less attribution, after what he thought kidz slang sounded like? Clever! Charming!

Thinking back, actually, ‘self-infatuation’ strikes me as a rather ill-chosen word. It isn’t so much that I like or love myself. Rather, I’m sentimental about myself. (I say, is this normal for someone my age?) What do I think of Charles Highway? I think: ‘Charles Highway? Oh, I like him. Yes, I’ve got a soft spot for old Charles. He’s all right is Charlie. Chuck’s … okay.

About as Charming as Charles Highway himself, then. Charles, ho is about to turn 20, who stops “banging” Gloria to try chasing after Rachel (wrt whom he is keeping over-meticulous, personality-disordery notes toward a memoir/novel, who the hell knows or almost cares?), and while his own family falls apart while his father goes skit-chasing on his perimenopausal mother, tries to get into Oxford by boning-up on his literature, maths and classics at a “crammer” college or prep school.

He’s a huge idiot masquerading as an homme-du monde, like many a teenage boy, you understand, so you want to feel compassion there but that is kind of hard since he is just so damn unlikeable (not that, in literature, there’s anything wrong with that, you have to keep saying).

My friend quietly pointed out that he ‘had no feelings of hatred’ for his father, although he (the father) apparently spent most days with one fist down his wife’s throat and the other up the au pair’s bum. Precisely, I thought. I tipped my chair back against the wall and replied (somewhat high-mindedly, having that week read a selection of D. H. Lawrence’s essays):

‘Not at all, Pete, you miss the point. Hatred is the only emotionally educated reaction to a sterile family environment. It’s a destructive and … painful emotion, perhaps, but I think I must not deny it if I am to keep my family alive in my imagination and my viscera, if not in my heart.’

Too knowing for words, yes, I mean “ah, how inadequate these words seem.”

Part of the fun is seeing him unaware of his own pretentious name-dropping, ofc,

In fact, that was a direct quote from Conquests and Techniques: a Synthesis, a folder of mine. Most of the stuff here is in note form, with the odd diagram; but when I get a good idea, or a detail worth elaborating on, then I turn it into a full-dress sentence (and circle it with red ink). The section entitled, simply, ‘Gloria’, I now see, is done in a rather pompous mock-heroic style, like Fielding’s descriptions of pub brawls – the sort of writing I usually have little time for. But there is a sense in which this style is suited to the subject, so I’ll let it pass

And so do we, I guess, but sometimes even that doesn’t feel quite enough like fun…

On the two occasions I had seen her last August I underwent several complete identity-reorganizations, settling finally somewhere between the pained, laconic, inscrutable type and the knowing, garrulous, cynical, laugh a minute, yet something demonic about him, something nihilistic, muted death-wish type. Revamp those, or start again?

But occasionally, as I hinted at above, I spot flashes of Future Mart:

So the emotion that walks like a burglar through our house trying all the doors has found mine the only one unlocked, indeed wide open: for there are no valuables inside.

It was a wine and lights flashing and everyone jumping up and down party, as opposed, say, to a lie on the dank carpet cradling empty Pipkins wishing there was more than one girl there party, or, again, to a smoke hash and eat syphcakes while Charles Manson, Esq., pats the bongoes and recites scabrous prose poems party. It was the very best kind of party.

Sometimes those even occur in the midst of pretentious literary asides:

Intense Consciousness of Being; pathetic fallacy plus omnipresent déjà vu, cosmic angst, metaphysical fear, a feeling both claustrophobic and agoraphobic, the teenager’s religion. The Rev. Northrop Frye fetchingly terms it ‘queasy apocalyptic foreboding’. An Angus Wilson character terms it ‘adolescent egotism’, thereby driving me almost to suicide last Christmas. Is that all it fucking is, I thought. For the question that interested me about this feeling was not ‘What is it?’ so much as ‘Does it matter? Is it worth anything?’ Because if there isn’t a grain of genuine humility there, it’s the electrodes for me.

 I remembered a Dickens character, Guppy in Bleak House, telling Esther, for whom he had the hots, that ‘the soul recoils from food at such a moment’. ‘Such a moment’: it bothered Guppy only when he was in a flap. It stayed in my body like a dull allergy. It occurred to me that I might be in love

But mostly they occur when he is not (as usual) watching himself perform for us. Then his “updated”” Holdeny Caufieldesquery can amuse without overly distracting us with egghead effluvia:

I went over to my desk, put on the lamp, and got out the note-pad entitled Certainties and Absurdities. I wrote:

ANXIETY TOP TEN. Week ending September 26th
(Last week’s positions in brackets)

  ( – )     1 Clap
  (1)     2 Rachel
  (2)     3 Big Boy
  (7)     4 Loose Molar
(10)     5 Owing Norm Money
  (3)     6 Bronco
  (6)     7 Being Friendless
  (9)     8 Insanity
  ( – )     9 Rotting Feet
  (4)   10 Pimple in Left Nostril
Ones to watch: Having a smaller cock than DeForest; incipient boil on shoulder-blade.

Clap has taken the charts by storm, ousting Rachel after her confident two-week run. Spot in Nose is definitely following Disintegrating Toenails on its way out of the Ten – but watch out for Boil on Back!

So see you next week. Right? Right! Goodnight.

That kind of thing, likely best in target small doses, is sprayed shotgun style, a bit too too much even for overly-tolerant readers like yours truly, I must confess, though I will admit to being amused (in the sense of wanting to smack Charles Highway around a bit kind of way) by:

It struck me, not for the first time, that I owed it to the world to write some kind of dissertation before my untimely death. The trouble was that I never got further than the title and dedication before I started thinking how it would be received, its reviews and my trenchant answers to them. The long-awaited open letter to The Times:

From Professor Sir Charles Highway:

Sir, I should like to point out, for the last time, to Messrs Waugh, Connolly, Steiner, Leavis, Empson, Trilling, et al, that the argument of my The Meaning of Life was intended to be anti-comic in shape. The recent television publicity has done a good deal to becloud the issue …

And so on

And so on, indeed. I’ll cut to the chase. And, cos we’re all adults here, not hide the spoiler: Charles quite cockily goes to Oxford for his entrance exam…

A final run through the Interview Folder: sixty foolscap pages of notes and hints, arranged in sections – Accents, Avoiding Detailed Discussion, Dress, The Female Don –  and sub-heads – ‘Blinking’, ‘Entrances’, ‘Leg-crossing’, ‘Flattery, indirect’, etc. But I couldn’t gather much concentration. At this stage my exam performance either seemed so brilliant as virtually to replace the texts themselves, rendering all previous literary criticism defunct; or else I was at the window, on the look-out for the white-coated male nurses (whom the University had alerted) equipped with chloroform and a net. On my arrival, would I simply be lured into the college lavatories and beaten up by the proctors? Or would I be met at the station by the Vice-Chancellor and Mayor, driven through the town in an open car, waving at the crowds, laughing as I brushed the confetti and streamers from my hair…?

With featherlight fingertips I skimmed the pages of my Interview Folder. After three-quarters of an hour I had memorized Sonorous Generalizations, Portent but no Content, and the paragraph on ‘Inarticulate sincerity’. I then turned to Appearance Change Midway. It ended:

17. Enter without glasses on: put them on a) if don over 50, b) if don wearing glasses.
18. Jacket unbuttoned: if old turd, do up middle one on way in.
19. Hair over ears: if old turd, smooth behind ears on entry?
A footnote referred me to Accents, 7. There I read:

Adapt slowly. If wildly out (posh v. regional), cough at beginning of second sentence and say ‘Sorry, I’m a bit nervous’ in voice identical to don’s.

…is properly humilated by the interviewing Don…

‘For example. In the Literature paper you complain that Yeats and Eliot … “in their later phases opted for the cold certainties that can work only outside the messiness of life. They prudently repaired to the artifice of eternity, etc., etc.” This then gives you a grand-sounding line on the “faked inhumanity” of the seduction of the typist in The Waste Land – a point you owe to W. W. Clarke – which, it seems, is just a bit too messy all of a sudden. Again, in the Criticism paper you jeer at Lawrence’s “unreal sexual grandiosity”, using Middleton Murry on Women in Love, also without acknowledgment. In the very next line you scold his “over-facile equation of art and life”.’

He sighed. ‘On Blake you seem quite happy to paraphrase the “Fearful Symmetry” stuff about “autonomous verbal constructs, necessarily unconnected with life”, but in your Essay paper you come on all excited about the “urgency … with which Blake educates and refines our emotions, side-stepping the props and splints of artifice”. Ever tried side-stepping a splint, by the way? Or educating someone urgently, for that matter?

‘Donne is okay one minute because of his “emotional courage”, the way he seems to “stretch out his emotions in the very fabric of the verse”, and not okay the next because you detect … what is it you detect? – ah yes, a “meretricious exaltation of verbal play over real feeling, tailoring his emotion to suit his metrics”. Now which is it to be? I really wouldn’t carp, but these remarks come from the same paragraph and are about the same stanza.

‘I won’t go on … Literature has a kind of life of its own, you know. You can’t just use it … ruthlessly, for your own ends. I’m sorry, am I being unfair?’

…before turning twenty and breaking up with Rachel (breaking her heart, but also, if he stopped to notice, his own….)

Reading though my notes (as Charles does, before preumably, massaging them and tidying them just a wee bit before dropping them in the post to the publisher, destined to become The Rachel Papers) just seeing mainly the good bits, I am tempted to give it three, three and half stars, rounded up, just before I hit “Post”. Then I see, highlighted in red instead of the usual yellow:

Are we all such emotional Yahoos?

[Matthew Ted · Rating 4 out of 5]

Amis' first novel. And, as many have said before, it's hard not to compare it to his father's first novel 'Lucky Jim'. In some ways, they are the same, and in many ways not. On a side note, I felt as if, having read Martin Amis' memoir earlier this year, the father figure in this novel resembled Kingsley in several ways. I wonder if they ever discussed that together. Even without that, it's a very autobiographical book. I think Amis has even admitted that it is. Charles Highway (the protagonist, the very beginning of his legacy of 'Amisian' names) is trying to go to Oxford, he has problems with his teeth (which Amis had many, and wrote a lot about in his memoir), and Highway appeared, when blabbing about Blake or whoever else, to be simply voicing Amis' views on them.

So the plot is, basically, he wants to get into Oxford and he wants to sleep with an older woman.

There are many seeds here. Amis is finding his style, his wordplay, his crudeness, but also that charm he has. There are some vulgar things in this book, not quite 'Money' vulgar, but quite so. There's also a rather long sex scene. It's uncomfortable to read. There's no doubting that Amis is a good writer and the book is enjoyable, short, but rude, crude and mildly humorous at times.

Anyway, if you are offended by rude language, don't read on.

So, Charles Highway thinks things like 'you stupid bitch, you dumb clit', which presents him as being far worse, and I suppose, more modern, than the 'Lucky Jim' protagonist Jim Dixon. Highway enjoys talking about Blake and Frost and other writers, which I personally enjoy reading. He considers the 'literature of nausea, melancholy and absurdity - Satre, Camus, Joyce.' And his bedroom has posters of 'Jimi Hendrix, Auden and Isherwood, Rasputin' and his bookshelves 'retold his adolescence: Carry on, Jeeves, Black Mischief, The Heart of the Matter, Afternoon Men, Women in Love, Gormenghast, Cat's Cradle, L'Etranger.'

Here's some other great little Amis lines that tickled me.

'with a forehead the size of a buttock'

'He had virtually no sexual presence, didn't look as if he could be bothered even to masturbate.'

After having a wee he: 'flicked it; slapped it; I garrotted it with both hands; a final searing Chinese burn.'

'whose golden thighs and teeming breasts I found about as approachable as leprosy.'

To finish. I think I disagree with a lot of Amis' viewpoints in life, but this quote, well, he won me over a bit with this one.

'This seemed like a safe choice, since to be against the Beatles (late-middle period) is to be against life.'

Amis, I agree.

[Faye · Rating 1 out of 5]

Read: April 2017

I decided to read The Rachel Papers after reading the amazing Time's Arrow last year and I cannot believe these two books were written by the same author. I wrote a review of Time's Arrow at the time which showed how much I loved it and I guess I expected this book to be of a similar calibre but it was nowhere near as good.

The protagonist here is Charles, who is trying too hard to be a 'lovable rogue' sort of character, but really he comes across as pretentious and arrogant. For reasons not made clear to me he is obsessed with sleeping with a girl named Rachel and the plot follows his attempts to get to know her and seduce her.

By three-quarters of the way through this book I really didn't care what happened to Charles or Rachel. Neither were likeable or particularly interesting characters. I have since realised that this was Amis's first book which helps explain the difference in quality between this and Time's Arrow and so I will continue to look out for more Amis books in the future.

Rating: 1/5 stars

[Nigeyb · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this decades ago and could only recall a few hazy details and impressions. Re-reading it in 2024 it was better than I had recalled.

The Rachel Papers (1973) was the debut novel by Martin Amis and is an account of a seduction. Narrator Charles Highway is 19 years old and is seemingly contemptuous of everything in his life including Rachel, the young woman whose seduction he chronicles.

This is a hard novel to like, especially read through a 2024 sensibility, given Charles enthusiastically embraces misanthropy, misogyny, and general teenage grossness. None of the supporting cast are remotely fleshed out however it is still a compelling read, and an accurate portrait of some of the less savoury aspects of adolescence.

3/5

[Marcello S · Rating 4 out of 5]

La domanda qui è: io cosa facevo a 24 anni?
(…)
Di sicuro non mettevo parole una dietro l’altra con lo stile navigato di Amis.
Che, ve lo devo dire, scrive da dio.

Questa è la storia di Charles, uno di quei ventenni che la sanno lunga. Un po’ sbruffone e un po’ problematico.
Che ti fa sorridere e allo stesso tempo lo odi. Che gli daresti una testata sui denti ma alla fine gli vuoi bene.

Ci sono le ragazze (Gloria e, soprattutto, Rachel), qualche amico la maggior parte del tempo strafatto, una famiglia non del tutto normale, l’università e Londra.

La storia forse non è originalissima.
E’ pur sempre un romanzo di formazione sulla scia di Salinger e P. Roth, a grandi linee.
Però c’è tanto di quel mestiere che a dire che è un’opera prima di un poco più che ragazzino non ci crederesti.

E invece.
Ci si rivede in giro, Martin. [74/100]

[Tim · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is Amis’ first novel, written when he was in his early twenties. I greatly enjoyed his middle period but gave up on him after reading a couple of his more recent novels – Yellow Dog and House of Meetings. Then I came across this in the garden shed and realised I’d never read it…

Martin Amis has a talent for creating obnoxious characters and the narrator of The Rachel Papers, Charles Highway, certainly fits this bill. Except, unlike in his middle period when he somehow managed, almost like a conjuring trick, to cajole you into sympathising with his villains, the obnoxious character in The Rachel Papers remains obnoxious.

Charles Highway is about to turn twenty. He’s also about to go up to Oxford. Rachel is his first attempt at an adult relationship. His pursuit of her is conducted with a scholarly attention to detail. In fact it soon becomes clear she is little more than a projection of his colossal vanity. Charles describes himself thus: “Thinking back, actually, 'self-infatuation' strikes me as a rather ill-chosen word. It isn't so much that I like or love myself. Rather, I'm sentimental about myself.”
Amis has lots of fun sending up the writer because this is also a novel about the writing process. He shows us, cleverly from three steps removed – the writer watching the writer turn life into writing - how the author transposes experience into material, shows us the cynic and the self-serving scavenger in the writer.

The humour is often rather puerile and rather smug, lots of “hawking” and other jokes about body effluents but there’s no denying a well-controlled mastery of his theme and a fair bit of entertainment along the journey.

[Hux · Rating 2 out of 5]

The story of a boy turning twenty and his sexual exploits, most of which revolve (unsurprisingly) around a girl called Rachel. Charles is nineteen and heading to Oxford but not before some highly amusing middle-class high jinx. I was enjoying it to begin with, the chaotic writing style of Amis, the relentless self-referential, twinkle in the eye, narration of someone witty and confident. But after a while, I started to find the whole thing slightly smug and unbearable. This kind of novel, the comedic type, has always been something I've failed to enjoy often to the point of frustration. Even when it's well written, there's just something very smug and self-satisfied about it all, and Amis writes with such a staggering arrogance, a swagger, that the character, Charles, comes across as unrealistic and annoying, a Ferris Bueller type of character who seems to have everything conveniently fall into his lap (but with an English twist). In fact, I had flashbacks to the Secret Diary of Adrian Mole (though this was published a few years before that), and found it hard to care about this spoiled brat. I just didn't like it.

Amis can certainly write but it's all in service of a smugness that I ultimately found a little unbearable. Charles keeps meeting people that he describes as posh or privileged despite the fact that he is a middle-class lad going to Oxford, who happily bangs several attractive girls along the way. At what point am I supposed to find him charming or humorous? At what point do I view him as the oppressed underdog? Well, never. He comes across as another middle-class bore who has somehow turned himself into a victim, with no real problems, no real development, and an obvious life of luxury ahead of him.

The book's biggest problem, however, is that it clearly wants me to find it funny. So-called comedic books have a tendency to infuriate me -- they ALWAYS fail  to make me laugh and usually leave me feeling nothing but contempt. Amis is certainly a clever writer but that's probably what made me dislike Charles and him so much; namely that they're both SO very clever. Except they're not, they're simply privately educated men who have had life given to them. I hate to bring it up, but I also had flashes of Lucky Jim when reading this which only further reiterated the fact that Amis is a privileged nepo-baby who inherited his entry into the world of literature. Must be nice to just saunter into a comfortable life of writing novels, huh?

Look, it's not a bad book. I just personally found it rather tedious and overly pleased with itself. I'll give Amis another chance at some point but if this 'look how funny and clever I am' shtick is his forte, then I can't imagine we'll ever get on. 

[Johan Wilbur · Rating 5 out of 5]

El amor juvenil que siente Charles Highway por Rachel es una que todos podríamos haber vivido a su edad y, a priori, es una historia que ya podríamos haber leído un millón de veces si nos va el rollo. Una de amor idealizado de adolescente, de buscar y conquistar, de envalentonarte… Y que se termina tras haber echado un par de polvos porque, en fin, pues eres joven y es lo que toca, supongo.

Sin embargo, es que Charles, el protagonista, un chaval de clase alta, pomposo, arrogante, leído y cuasi obsesivo con las apariencias y con planear de antemano cada movimiento y cada gesto a dar, en pos de conseguir sus objetivos, que es muy fácil no empatizar, sin embargo, a mí me ha sido difícil no sentirme identificado con él en ciertos momentos.

Luego los personajes son carismáticos, la sociedad de los años 70, la hipocresía de la clase alta de entonces… Todo me parece verosímil y representativo. Siempre asociamos esos años al rock & roll, las drogas, los hippies y todo eso, pero como esto no tiene nada que ver es un soplo de aire fresco.

Y luego está el estilo de Amis, que es que me ha parecido genial a lo largo de toda la novela. Y no sé si se pondría muchas veces en plan autoficción (que bien me encajaría, porque a fin de cuentas es su primera novela y apostaría que él era tal cual el protagonista, pijetis que acaba en Oxford y demás) pero vamos, es lo de menos, la novela, siendo un reflejo de sus años de adolescencia o no me ha encantado.

[Adrian Buck · Rating 5 out of 5]

Somewhere in the middle of Lolita, I had the urgent insight that there was something quintessentially similar about the narratives of Charles Highway and John Self, and that of Humbert Humbert. In the first case I was wrong.

Yes, this is a story of a manipulative seduction, but there is no narrative of deception, or self deception. Charles Highway is unflinchingly honest with the reader and himself, and flinchingly funny. Re-reading this thirty plus years later, the flinch of self-recognition has long gone. This time it felt like I was reading the Secret Diary of an upper-middle class Adrian Mole.

The question arose, how did Martin Amis come to be seen as literary rather than a comic novelist? His family and educational background? His ability to turn a phrase? Or his deliberate and not so successful struggle to write about the social and historical rather than the personal?

[Minh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ngông cuồng, nghênh ngang mà cuốn hút; cuốn tiểu thuyết thô vụng đầu tay của Amis thật sự báo hiệu một sự nghiệp sừng sỏ. Hiếm có ai ngang tàn, bạo ngược, hoang dã, bất kham được như chàng Charles Highway, và Amis viết nên tiểu thuyết về giống loại bất kham, về khoảng biên giới mơ hờ giữa 19 20 tuổi khi con người ta bắt đầu chịu trách nhiệm. Nếu Kerouac gò mình dẫu hoang dã nhưng vẫn đẹp đẽ, thì Amis là ông bạn tốt xua tay để rồi bảo rằng cứ bung xõa đi. Tục tĩu, hài hước mà thi vị đến vô tường tận. Thật hay ho.

[Mircalla · Rating 4 out of 5]

the spocchia papers

Charles è un insopportabile egocentrico stronzetto inglese, manca poco ai suoi vent'anni e, data l'immaturità che contraddistingue l'età in questione, eccolo lanciarsi nel racconto dei suoi pensieri ossessivo/compulsivi e delle sue manie di controllo:
è un ragazzetto come tanti, ma si crede speciale il caro Charles, che serba con grandiosa spocchia ogni suo pensiero per tramandarlo ai posteri, o semplicemente per darsi all'onanismo circa la sua capacità di manipolare parole copiate da altri e pensieri rimasticati senza ricordarsi di citarne le fonti...non è difficile ravvisare l'onestà dell'autore nel suo personaggio così ben riuscito, uno dei migliori di Amis, capace di una schiettezza molto ben sbandierata e altrettanto vacua, fine a se stessa e spesso non priva di una certa compiaciuta crudeltà circa il proprio potere sui sentimenti delle persone con cui sfortunatamente entra in relazione, Charles potrebbe esser stato lo stesso Amis, genitori in conflitto, padre ingombrante e problemi ai denti sono tutte cose di cui lui ci ha messo a parte negli anni...

[Callie · Rating 2 out of 5]

So I had a really difficult time finishing this book. Several times I wanted to quit reading it, but I honestly hate stopping a book when I'm half way through. I think my big mistake with this one was seeing the terribly made 80's film adaptation prior to reading the book. Man, was that one terrible film.
Second mistake, was that I couldn't stand the main character, Charles Highway, rather I LOATHED him. What a horribly self-centered, obnoxious, womanizing, vile protagonist.
And, yeah, I get that that's sort of the point. I suppose. But I think it's pretty hard to get into anything you're reading if you despise the narrator- am I correct? His descriptions of his sexual encounters with Rachel were horrendous (I.E. "It was too dark there (thank God) for me to be able to see what was right in front of my nose, just some kind of glistening pouch, redolent of oysters"). Yuck.
Definitely not my cup of tea, thank you.

[Punk · Rating 1 out of 5]

Fiction. Self-indulgent, myopic, teenage fiction. I like Amis, but not his narrator. Charles Highway is a spoiled 19-year-old who considers himself an intellectual and tends towards something he identifies as "self-infatuation" but makes no move to resist. I couldn't handle him and nearly threw this book down twice for every page I read.

[Tony · Rating 5 out of 5]

A good little tale but I couldn’t shake the idea that he was trying to borrow his father’s shoes here.

Worth a read though!