Money

John Self, a wealthy but permanently drunk and self loathing advertising director, is summoned to New York by the producer Fielding Goodney to direct his first feature film, a project that lets Amis send Self hurtling through a nonstop circuit of fast food, pornography, alcohol, and casual cruelty on Goodney's apparently bottomless expense account. Self juggles a strained relationship with his English girlfriend Selina, who is sleeping with his rival Ozzie Twain, against a doomed New York infatuation with the actress Martina Twain, all while receiving menacing phone calls from a man identifying himself only as Frank the Phone, who eventually catches up with Self in person and beats him badly. A novelist named Martin Amis turns up repeatedly in Self's own story, first as an acquaintance and eventually as a direct participant, warning Self, uselessly, that his entire film deal is a fraud. It is: Goodney reveals that the contracts, the actors, and the whole production were never real, that every dollar Self spent was borrowed against a credit line Goodney now calls in, and that Goodney himself was Frank the Phone all along, engineering Self's total financial ruin from the very beginning. Self also learns, almost as an afterthought beside his own bankruptcy, that the man he thought was his father is not, and the novel ends with him stripped of money, career, and identity, attempting suicide and surviving into a diminished, sobered version of himself he can only call Fat John.

Amis writes in a relentless, high energy first person voice built from slang, brand names, and Self's own compulsive self disgust, and the novel reads fast and exhausting in roughly equal measure, since very little relief interrupts Self's spiraling consumption; the metafictional games, especially Amis inserting a version of himself as a character who both narrates and manipulates Self's fate, ask a reader to trust a narrator the book keeps proving is being played.