Hello,
In an ideal world, this post would have been completed at least two hours prior to now. Not unfortunately, I got waylaid by Humbert Humbert et al., who were watching the first episode of the serialization of Brideshead Revisited. As a serialization, I highly recommend it; I appreciate both its fidelity to the book – rare in both film and serializations – and the performances of some of the major characters; Jeremy Irons is excellent as ‘childless, homeless, loveless, middle-aged’ Charles Ryder, but even he is outshone by Nickolas Grace’s portrayal of the flamboyant aesthete Anthony Blanche. To bring out Blanche’s self-indulgent stutter, lucid lines, and deviant attitudes without appearing ridiculous is no mean feat, but Grace manages it. However, I have not foregone an hour of work to review Brideshead, so my thoughts on it must end here.
I have foregone an hour of work (I suspect Tutorial Partner has done more work than I have today, and her room is unnervingly organised) to review The Rachel Papers. Strangely, it is my first review since Lolita in December, and I endeavour to avoid the essay-esque tone of that piece. Thus, I presume the first pertinent question when reviewing any text becomes: Did I enjoy said piece?
To that question, the answer is ‘yes’. The Rachel Papers was my first Amis experience – I had wanted to read him for a long time, but when it became apparent that his work came with Hitchens’s unequivocal recommendation, I shunted him eighty or ninety places up my unending reading list (David Copperfield, Sense and Sensibility and Les Miserables fell by the wayside, at least for now). I was a little dubious about the premise – nineteen-year-old undergoing identity crisis decides to rectify said crisis by trying to sleep with attractive older women and berate his father for all of his moral and paternal failings? I had, after all, read Adrian Mole – but given my faith in Amis’s treatment of a topic that could so easily degenerate into the banal or the vulgar, I begun.
This faith was not misplaced. ‘To achieve, at once, dramatic edge and thematic symmetry I elect to place my time of birth on the stroke of midnight. In fact, mother’s was a prolix and generally rather inelegant parturition…’ When working at Working Partners for a fortnight in my Gap Year, one of the key principles driven home to me – obvious as it no doubt is, but it is never awful to be reminded of the obvious – was the need to create a character that a reader can identify with. Through the excessively verbose recounting of his birth, and the very clear conveyance of the metafictional nature of the narrative, Amis managed this piece of writer-reader sympathy very well. This is no mean feat, either, because Charles Highway – the novel’s protagonist – constantly teeters on the brink of ‘agreeably pretentious’ and ‘disagreeably pretentious’. He has an extreme sense of narcissism, is wilfully pretentious, and his attitudes towards the females he courts – Gloria and Rachel – can easily be construed as more than a little sexist.
Accusations of misogyny against Amis have, according to Hitchens, been levelled rather frequently, and one could level the same accusations against Highway. Gloria is little more than a plot device (from the ‘narrative’ perspective’) or an unimaginative stereotype (from the ‘gender discourse’ perspective, the stereotype in question here being adequately attractive harlot). The language directed towards her is hugely sexist at times, and one does begin to wonder precisely why Amis has included her. I conclude that she is merely a means of accentuating the plot, which, given its relative banality, has the potential to become turgid and repetitive, rather like Leonard’s ninth relationship with Penny in The Big Bang Theory. However, Hitchens offers his own rebuttal, and it is thus: that Amis, far from evincing dislike towards women, actually showed the rare and valuable ability of finding what was beautiful about every woman. Now, I am inclined to take Hitchens’ comments with more than a pinch of salt: his friendship with Amis is well documented, and could be likened to the romantic friendship between Charles Ryder and Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead; as a result, nostalgia and bias must be accounted for. However, correct or not, it does provide one with an interesting perspective for analysing Highway’s attitudes towards the two key non-familial females in the novel, and it is, I believe, possible that Highway’s intense planning and preparation before he dates any female could be seen, not only as conveying his neuroticism in itself, but conveying that he is attempting to – awkwardly and neurotically, it is true – trying to individuate each female in his life, especially those that he views romantically. For example: ‘Why couldn’t Rachel be a little more specific about the type of person she was? Goodness knew; if she were a hippie I’d talk to her about her drug experiences, the zodiac, tarot cards. If she were left-wing I’d look miserable, hate Greece, and eat baked beans straight from the tin. If she were the sporty type I’d play her at …chess and backgammon and things. No, don’t tell me she’s the very girl to show me what egotistical folly it is to compartmentalize people in this sad way, don’t tell me she’s going to sort me out, take me on, supply the cognitio and comic resolution. I couldn’t bear it.’ Whether this really amounts to a reductionist deindividualisation is for the reader to decide themselves, but I find it hard to perceive it as such.
The title is based on this obsessive-compulsive organisation of his life into notebooks: Highway details his entire life in literary form, and he organizes this multifaceted collection in much the same way that Sheldon Cooper organises his apartment – with cereals in order of fibre content. The Rachel Papers refers to one series of notes in this colossal memoir. However, Highway’s notes are not just retrospective analyses; they are also pre-emptive plans for his seduction. And this fastidious preparation is what gives the novel both its comic edge and its verisimilitude. Whilst Charles’s plans to recite a certain stanza of Blake at a certain point on the date in a certain situation are both unbearably pretentious and hugely pedantic, I believe that most males who suggest that they do not engage in some form of this compulsive preparation before a date or prospective date are lying.
This is one of the areas where Amis becomes particularly perceptive. For it would be too easy, and too trite, to simply have Charles’s meticulous plans to ensnare Rachel finally play off, in a sickly-sweet ending akin to one of the nauseating romantic comedies that circulate every summer. (‘The romantic comedy of this summer!’ proclaim the cinema ads. And the last summer, and the summer prior to that, and the summer prior to that…) Making Charles fall in love when his intentions were merely seduction would be some manipulation of the hackneyed plot, but also too easy. Therefore, it is very pleasant when Amis realises that it would actually make a nice change for Charles to succeed very early on in his attempts, because then he can have fun wreaking all sorts of havoc in chronicling the degeneration of the relationship, and, in doing so, undermine Charles’s ostensible maturity and nous. Undermining a protagonist is something done very often, but few writers do it as well as Amis. One recognises from the first chapter that Amis has an excellent sense of the farcical, and the speed in which one’s apotheosis can become one’s hubris. He does this through welding comic humour to the Bildungsroman structure, meaning that the novel becomes neither a vulgar piece of prosaic doggerel, nor a tired, turbid Bildungsroman. For the disjunction between Charles and Rachel comes after they move in together around the middle of the novel, and Charles becomes acutely aware that the lark of living together isn’t quite what he thought it would be. What events lead him to this realisation I shall leave the prospective reader to find out, but they are based on the ludicrous design of the human body – as Hitchens points out in his essay Why Women Aren’t Funny (incidentally, this in itself is also an amusing and interesting piece that can be found in his Arguably collection) – and the way in which the coital and excretory structures are rather closer together than a sagacious designer would have them. Thus, growing up becomes not merely a typical rite of passage that involves finding a mate, getting a job and settling down; it involves realising the unavoidable imperfections of even the most numinous female. Again – ‘obvious’, one might say, but when I reflect, it is astonishing how many writers don’t seem to realise this.
Finally, one additional area in which Amis excels is in his awareness of the intrinsic relationship between Eros and Thanatos. Eros refers not only to the sexual component of one’s desires, but also the desire to create. Charles’s organisation of The Rachel Papers, therefore, symbolise Eros at its strongest; the conjunction of libidinal desire with creative zest. (Even Hopkins, one of my favourite poets, seems to be unaware of the two, for example in his conveyance of ‘the mastery of the thing!’ in The Windhover, which occurs in a romantically sterile environment. Then again, Hopkins was pre-Freud, and had other concerns aside from the romantic, so perhaps this observation amounts to nothing more than caviling.) In any case, the moment where this interplay is perhaps the most powerful is right after Rachel has deserted Charles to be with the cretinous but affluent American DeForest (name symbolic, naturally). Charles writes a few cursory things in the Rachel note-pad, representing the last wiles of Eros’s action, and then the following is written: ‘Let us leave him, then, as the scene fades: upright in the armchair, comatose; naked except for watchstrap, a single sock, and a scarlet cushion nestling on his thighs.’ This marvellously potent and evocative description is then followed by a recollection of Charles’s slovenliness that almost amounts to his apocatastasis – eschewing all personal hygiene, drinking nearly enough to kill him, and becoming hermetic. I am sure many are aware of the moment in which the High becomes the Low (as Charles puts it), but the depiction of the interplay between the drives that further and create these states is incredibly well-recognised.
Thus, I very much enjoyed The Rachel Papers. It is funny without being wantonly vulgar, and does not resort to the cheap tactic of attempting to merely titillate (are there any lines less titillating than the following: ‘Thus I maintained a tripartite sexual application in contrapuntal patterns’? The hugely un-romantic nature of this utterance was augmented by the irony that Taylor Swift’s Red had come on shuffle as I read those pages). I hear from those better-read than me that it is inferior to Money, meaning that I shall endeavour to read said novel the weekend after Collections. It offers – like Barnes’s Sense of an Ending – a protagonist who teeters on the verge of becoming an antihero, a great ability to produce a quotable aphorism, and a gift for resonance that prevents one from becoming easily bored with a much-used plotline. It is no Sense of an Ending, and if Lolita is to be the benchmark for a ‘ten out of ten’ novel, then The Rachel Papers receives six-and-a-half, perhaps seven. Enjoyable enough, and recommendable, but, from what I can understand, an immature novel from a writer who went on to produce far better.
Back to work I go,
Regards,
Jack
jacknmoran 