 First UK edition | |
| Author | Martin Amis |
|---|---|
| Cover artist | Keith Davis [1] |
| Country | England |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Fiction |
| Publisher | Knopf (US) Jonathan Cape (UK) |
Publication date | 1973 |
| ISBN | 0394491432 |
| Followed by | Dead Babies |
The Rachel Papers is Martin Amis's first novel, published in 1973 by Jonathan Cape. [2]
The Rachel Papers tells the story of Charles Highway, a bright, egotistical teenager (a portrait Amis acknowledges as autobiographical) [3] and his relationship with his girlfriend in the year before going to university. Narrated by Charles on the eve of his twentieth birthday, the novel recounts Charles's last year of adolescence and his first love, Rachel Noyes, whom he meets in London while studying for his entrance exams into Oxford. Charles meets Rachel at a party and vows to win her over with his wit and wisdom. Unfortunately, she is seeing an American visiting student named DeForest, and Charles must employ a variety of meticulously calculated schemes to steal her away.
The title is an allusion to one subset of notes that Charles works on diligently throughout the novel – detailed instructions on everything from how to convince his Oxford don of his brilliance, to how to pick up and seduce girls. Instead of studying for his exams, Charles pours most of his time into these narcissistic chronicles, and after he meets Rachel, "The Rachel Papers" become the primary outlet for his neurotic brilliance. Gradually, however, these notes evolve beyond a set of conniving machinations geared toward getting Rachel into bed with him, and into a sincere story of their brief but passionate romance.
As the title indicates, writing is one of the main themes of the novel, but Amis's protagonist is a parody of the novelist writing about the writing process itself. Charles Highway is obsessed with literature and literariness, as evidenced by the fact that he continually peppers his narrative with references to great poets and novelists, most notably William Blake. He is equally obsessed with adding a literary flair to his life, not just by hyperbolically comparing himself to figures like Blake and Keats, but by working the people and events of his life into his elaborate system of notes, essays, and diaries, among which "The Rachel Papers" become central. He is so thoroughly engrossed in and delighted by this artificially constructed world that he is incapable of having genuine human relationships [4] – besides Rachel, the only other person he is close to, his one friend Geoffrey, is constantly high on a cocktail of drugs and alcohol.
While his intense self-awareness at times allows Charles to be cannily poignant and honest about sensitive subjects (his troubled relationship with his philandering father, his sister's dysfunctional marriage, the awkwardness of adolescent romance), his precociousness and narcissism also blinds him to a great deal of his own faults and shortcomings. [5]
Amis's first novel received mixed critical reception. [6] While he was praised by some critics for his "ruthlessly brilliant comedy", [7] he was also taken to task for failing to sufficiently animate any of the other characters besides Charles, making the book merely "an easy-reading, mildly funny series of bed-and-bathroom observations." [8] Nevertheless, in 1974 The Rachel Papers won the Somerset Maugham Award for best novel by a writer under the age of thirty-five.
In preparing to write his 2010 novel The Pregnant Widow , Amis revealed that he re-read The Rachel Papers for research purposes (as "the time frame is similar"). [9]
Amis's view of his debut novel diminished considerably in his later years. Regarding what he made of the novel upon re-reading it, Amis remarked in a 2010 interview that, by his high standards the novel "seemed crude...Not the writing. That was terribly alive. The craft. The sex. The setups… [were] all incredibly cack-handed." [9] In a subsequent later appearance at the Sunday Times Literary Festival in March 2010, he criticised his debut further, stating, "A first novel is about energy and originality, but to me now it looks so crude. I don't mean bad language – it's so clumsily put together. The sense of decorum, the slowing a sentence down, the scrupulousness I feel I have acquired, aren't there. As you get older, your craft, the knack of knowing what goes where, what goes when, is much more acute." [10]
In 1989, the book was made into a film of the same name, starring Dexter Fletcher and Ione Skye.
Sir Kingsley William Amis was an English novelist, poet, critic and teacher. He wrote more than 20 novels, six volumes of poetry, a memoir, short stories, radio and television scripts, and works of social and literary criticism. He is best known for satirical comedies such as Lucky Jim (1954), One Fat Englishman (1963), Ending Up (1974), Jake's Thing (1978) and The Old Devils (1986).
Saul Bellow was a Canadian–American writer. For his literary work, Bellow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the 1976 Nobel Prize in Literature, and the National Medal of Arts. He is the only writer to win the National Book Award for Fiction three times, and he received the National Book Foundation's lifetime Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 1990.
Edward Morgan Forster was an English author, best known for his novels, particularly A Room with a View (1908), Howards End (1910) and A Passage to India (1924).
Sir Martin Louis Amis was an English novelist, essayist, memoirist, and screenwriter. He is best known for his novels Money (1984) and London Fields (1989). He received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his memoir Experience and was twice listed for the Booker Prize. Amis was a professor of creative writing at the University of Manchester's Centre for New Writing from 2007 until 2011. In 2008, The Times named him one of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945.
The English novel is an important part of English literature. This article mainly concerns novels, written in English, by novelists who were born or have spent a significant part of their lives in England, Scotland, Wales, or Northern Ireland. However, given the nature of the subject, this guideline has been applied with common sense, and reference is made to novels in other languages or novelists who are not primarily British, where appropriate.
Ian Russell McEwan is a British novelist and screenwriter. In 2008, The Times featured him on its list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945" and The Daily Telegraph ranked him number 19 in its list of the "100 most powerful people in British culture".
Sebastian Charles Faulks is a British novelist, journalist and broadcaster. He is best known for his historical novels set in France – The Girl at the Lion d'Or, Birdsong and Charlotte Gray. He has also published novels with a contemporary setting, most recently A Week in December (2009) and Paris Echo, (2018) and a James Bond continuation novel, Devil May Care (2008), as well as a continuation of P. G. Wodehouse's Jeeves series, Jeeves and the Wedding Bells (2013). He was a team captain on BBC Radio 4 literary quiz The Write Stuff.
Colm Tóibín is an Irish novelist, short story writer, essayist, journalist, critic, playwright and poet.
London Fields is a blackly comic murder mystery novel by the British writer Martin Amis, published in 1989. The tone gradually shifts from high comedy, interspersed with deep personal introspections, to a dark sense of foreboding and eventually panic at the approach of the deadline, or "horror day", the climactic scene alluded to on the very first page.
Time's Arrow: or The Nature of the Offence (1991) is a novel by Martin Amis. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1991. It is notable partly because the events occur in a reverse chronology, with time passing in reverse and the main character becoming younger and younger during the novel.
Adam Mars-Jones is a British novelist and literary and film critic.
Money: A Suicide Note is a 1984 novel by Martin Amis. In 2005, Time included the novel in its "100 best English-language novels from 1923 to the present". The novel is based on Amis's experience as a script writer on the feature film Saturn 3, a Kirk Douglas vehicle. The novel was dramatised by the BBC in 2010.
Night Train (1997) is a comedic parody of American detective novels by the author Martin Amis, named after the song "Night Train", which features twice in the novel.
The Information is a 1995 novel by British writer Martin Amis. The plot involves two forty-year-old novelists, Gwyn Barry (successful) and Richard Tull. Amis has asserted that both characters are based on himself. It is, says Amis, a book about "literary enmity".
Other People: A Mystery Story is a novel by British writer Martin Amis, published in 1981.
Dead Babies is Martin Amis's second novel, published in 1975 by Jonathan Cape. Its first UK and US paperback edition was published under the title Dark Secrets. Amis's second novel—a parody of Agatha Christie's country-house mysteries—takes place over a single weekend at a manor called Appleseed Rectory. In 2000, the book was adapted into a film of the same name, starring Paul Bettany and Olivia Williams. In 2001, BBC critic David Wood wrote "Amis's second novel ranks among his most incendiary with its mordant wit, black comedy, and sense of the violently absurd." It has an epigraph attributed to the Cynic Menippus and the novel has been interpreted as a Menippean satire.
Throughout the life of the poet Philip Larkin, multiple women had important roles which were significant influences on his poetry. Since Larkin's death in 1985, biographers have highlighted the importance of female relationships on Larkin: when Andrew Motion's biography was serialised in The Independent in 1993, the second installment of extracts was dedicated to the topic. In 1999, Ben Brown's play Larkin with Women dramatised Larkin's relationships with three of his lovers, and more recently writers such as Martin Amis, continued to comment on this subject.
Success is Martin Amis's third novel, published in 1978 by Jonathan Cape.
A novelist is an author or writer of novels, though often novelists also write in other genres of both fiction and non-fiction. Some novelists are professional novelists, thus make a living writing novels and other fiction, while others aspire to support themselves in this way or write as an avocation. Most novelists struggle to have their debut novel published, but once published they often continue to be published, although very few become literary celebrities, thus gaining prestige or a considerable income from their work.
Lemmons, also known as Gladsmuir and Gladsmuir House, was the home of novelists Kingsley Amis (1922–1995) and Elizabeth Jane Howard (1923–2014) on the south side of Hadley Common, Barnet, on the border of north London and Hertfordshire.