MEN WHO HATE WOMEN
By JAY
PARINI
Martin Amis
SUCCESS By Martin Amis. 224 pp. New York: Harmony Books/Crown
Publishers. $15.95.
SUCCESS has dogged Martin
Amis from the outset. The son of Kingsley Amis (how he must hate to hear
reviewers say this), he wrote ''The Rachel Papers'' - an energetic but immature
novel about a young man's obsessive quest for sexual fulfillment - soon after
graduating from Oxford in the early 1970's. He soon became a fixture on the
London literary scene, a satirist of the smart set in the tradition of Evelyn
Waugh - with whom he shares a profound misanthropy, the sine qua non of all
successful satirists. His third novel, ''Success'' (originally published in
Britain in 1978 and now issued here for the first time), might easily have been
called ''Vile Bodies'' had Waugh not got there before him.
Misanthropy becomes
misogyny in ''Success,'' another novel on the theme of sexual obsession. The
novel's two narrators, Gregory Riding and Terry Service, hate women almost as
much as they hate themselves, though it remains unclear where Mr. Amis stands
on all this. Recalling a particular tryst, for instance, Gregory says: ''That
first morning she sprang out of bed - having had her noisome way with me -and
knelt naked before the bookcase, rummaging in her bag for some item that her
genes loved. I watched, dressing her with my eyes. Her bottom is quite out of
control, I thought; and I can't take the smell she has down there. It's not her
fault, I know. It's her nerves' fault.'' A little of this goes a long way, and
there's a lot of it here.
The novel is a double
memoir, told in alternating and remarkably distinct voices. Gregory is an
esthete, endlessly supercilious and charming, prone to view the world through
rose-tinted pince-nez. ''I work in an art gallery,'' he tells us. ''Yes, the
job is rather a grand one, as you'd expect. High salary, undemanding hours,
opportunities for travel, lots of future.'' More to the point of ''Success,''
Gregory is sexually overactive. A bisexual, he would happily be a trisexual if
a third sex suddenly materialized. People offer him their favors at every turn,
much to the chagrin of unsuccessful Terry, his foster brother and reluctant
flatmate.
Unlike Gregory, Terry is
down on himself. ''I look like educated lower-class middle-management, the sort
of person you walk past in the street every day and never glance at or notice
or recognize again,'' he informs us at the beginning. Even worse, from his
viewpoint, he has not seduced a woman for six months, and it's driving him
crazy. Obsessed by this lack of amatory success, his speech is clogged with the
most famous four-letter word in the language. Its abrasive monosyllable
accounts for, perhaps, 15 percent of his vocabulary. One feels sorry for Terry,
whose mother is dead and whose father butchered his little sister, thus forcing
him upon the charity of the upper-class Ridings (Mr. Riding stumbles through
the novel like a lost character from P. G. Wodehouse). But Terry's
self-denigrations and complaints soon wear thin, and one quickly looks forward
to Gregory's preening and strutting.
As Terry's prospects at
work begin to improve through dealings with a seedy union organizer, and his
relationship with Ursula, Gregory's psychotic sister, takes on a sinister
aspect, one senses a shift in the wind. Eerily, Terry's rise seems to
precipitate Gregory's fall, and Mr. Amis holds our attention quite skillfully
as we wait, like a gallows crowd, for the floor to drop beneath Gregory's feet.
Yet ''Success'' is, finally, a distasteful book, full of loathing that the author
seems not fully to have understood or drawn through the crucible of art. UGLY
AND POOR AND MAD
Correct me if I'm wrong,
but it seems that approximately one in three of this city's indigenous
population is quite mad - obviously, openly, candidly, brazenly mad. Their
lives are entirely given over to a bitter commentary on the world, the light,
the time of day it is. In every busload there will be six or seven people who
just sit there growling about nothing with tears in their eyes. Every cafe
contains, at all times, a working minimum of two gesticulating maniacs who have
to be shown or chucked out into the street, where they will hover and shout and
threaten until someone redoubles their efforts to make them go away again. On
every street you walk along you find the same proportion of people who do
nothing but fizz all the hours there are, fizz with hatred or disappointment or
grief, or fizz simply because they are ugly and poor and mad. They ought to get
together. They ought to organize (they would form a very powerful lobby). They
ought to organize, and make everyone else . . . tonto too.
From ''Success.''
Jay
Parini teaches at Middlebury College in Vermont. His latest novel is ''The
Patch Boys''; a book of poems, ''Town Life,'' will be published in January
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