The Rachel Papers

Martin Amis’s The Rachel Papers introduces Charles Highway, a young man of such intense self-regard that one suspects mirrors file complaints when he leaves the room. Nineteen, clever, priapic, literary, ridiculous and armed with notebooks, theories and an almost touching belief in his own sophistication, Charles prepares to enter adulthood by attempting to seduce Rachel and turn the whole enterprise into an intellectual project. Romance, in his hands, becomes less a matter of feeling than filing.

This is Amis’s first novel, and it arrives already grinning unpleasantly at the furniture. Charles is the kind of narrator who has read enough books to become dangerous but not enough life to become wise. He analyses, categorises, plots, records and congratulates himself, all while being at the mercy of ordinary lust, insecurity, vanity and youth’s great tragic delusion: that noticing one’s own absurdity somehow cancels it out.

The “papers” of the title are Charles’s notes, schemes and observations, because naturally he cannot merely fancy a girl; he must document the campaign as if preparing a doctoral thesis in seduction with supplementary diagrams. Rachel herself becomes target, ideal, fantasy, person, problem and eventual evidence that women are not quite as cooperative as literary young men would prefer. The gap between Charles’s grand private machinery and the actual business of another human being is where much of the comedy lives, writhing slightly.

There is a cruel little irony in the novel’s intelligence. Charles is bright enough to make excellent sentences out of his own foolishness, but not bright enough to stop being a fool. That is adolescence at its most dangerous: eloquent stupidity. He can turn his appetites into style, his vanity into wit, and his selfishness into performance, which is impressive until one remembers he still has to share the planet with other people.

Amis gives the whole thing a sharp, flashy, grotesque energy: sex, class, food, bodies, books, jokes, exams, family, London, ambition and the awful comedy of being young and convinced one is already an exception. It is not a tender coming-of-age novel in which a sensitive boy learns quiet truths beside a river. It is a coming-of-age novel in which a clever little monster collides with desire, consequence and the limits of his own cleverness.

For readers of Martin Amis, literary fiction, comic nastiness, unreliable narrators, 1970s youth, male vanity under glass, and novels where every sentence seems to have dressed up to misbehave, The Rachel Papers is prime early Amis. It is rude, sharp, showy, funny and appalling in approximately the proportions intended.

Good copy, as sold by Crappy Old Books. A solid Penguin paperback, suitable for anyone who enjoys watching literary adolescence perform surgery on itself with a butter knife. No guarantee that Charles Highway will improve your faith in young men, but he may improve your appreciation of sentences behaving badly.

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