Success - Softcover

Amis, Martin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0679734481 ISBN 13: 9780679734482

Publisher: Vintage, 1991

Synopsis

In Success Amis pens a mismatched pair of foster brothers--one "a quivering condom of neurosis and ineptitude," the other a "bundle of contempt, vanity and stock-response"--in a single London flat. He binds them with ties of class hatred, sexual rivalry, and disappointed love, and throws in a disloyal girlfriend and a spectacularly unstable sister to create a modern-day Jacobean revenge comedy that soars with malicious poetry.

About this title

About the Author:

Martin Amis is the best-selling author of several books, including London Fields, Money, The Information, and, most recently, Experience. He lives in London.

From Publishers Weekly:

Amis's American reputation is accelerating, and this early novel, published in Britain nine years ago, is appearing here for the first time. It bears his usual hallmarks: an irresistible narrative flow, writing that seems effortlessly to embrace extremes of tough verismo and delicate poetry, and a remorseless cynicism that one London reviewer has unerringly characterized as "exhilarating unpleasantness." Amis's tale is of two foster brothers: Gregory, an aristocratic, self-deluded esthete and sexual all-rounder, and his lower-class adopted sibling Terry, who is as physically uncouth as Gregory is gorgeous, but whose grim tenacity and realism enable him to prevail in the hideous social struggle that is Amis's vision of London in the '70s. This is not a book for the squeamish: there is misogynism and racism galore (shades of Amis pere?), an obsessive attention to the messier bodily functions, a prevailing mood of apocalyptic hysteria and a number of comic asides that inspire winces more often than laughs. Amis is a vast talent who seems to have only his prose under control; but there is no escaping his ghastly readability, or the way his festering visions linger in the mind.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 1991
• ISBN 10: 0679734481
• ISBN 13: 9780679734482
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224