the rachel papers book review

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Martin Amis novels – ranked!

As literature’s oldest enfant terrible turns 70, John Self, who took his pen name from an Amis character, revisits the collected works

14. The Pregnant Widow (2010)

From the portentous title (via Russian thinker Alexander Herzen) on, this is a project that should have been strangled at birth. It betrays its troubled origins – the unpicked remnants of an autobiographical novel – in the thinness of the material, which is all the more scandalous when you think how rich and full Amis’s other long novels are. This fiction about feminism via a 1970s Italian holiday is cheerfully vulgar but – the worst horror of all for comic writing – fundamentally boring. Typical line “How was it that he had never taken due note of this –the beauty, power, wisdom and justice of women’s thighs?” Amis tropes Authorial intrusion, height, men called Keith, sex, time

13. Dead Babies (1975)

Amis’s second novel sought to shock with its drugs, violence and (mostly “cancelled”) sex among a group of repellent hedonists who reject humane values as “dead babies”. Inside there’s an attempt at murder mystery and a Menippean satire on society’s progress and the limits of liberation, but it’s drowned out by a chaotic structure and the stink of the male characters’ misogyny. Typical line “Keith Whitehead lay on sandpaper blankets farting like a wizard.” Amis tropes Height, Keith, sex, teeth

12. Lionel Asbo (2012)

The best to be said about this book is that Amis clearly had fun writing it. But his style now is harder than it used to be, with less give, and this blunt comedy about a lottery-winning yob, vindaloo-eating dogs (“you never give them the Tabasco!”), 25-year-old grannies and a cast from a Channel 5 shockumentary feels sour, especially as written by a man in a Brooklyn brownstone and subtitled (yes!) State of England . Typical line “Cilla and Lionel were known in the family as ‘the twins’, because they were the only children who had the same father.” Amis tropes Porn, Special Brew, yobs

11. The Rachel Papers (1973)

We are now as far from Amis’s debut as it was from Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse , so it shouldn’t surprise that the attitudes creak, but the grotesque descriptions of women are hard to take. Amis said anyone would have published his debut purely through curiosity, which is true. (Recall the New Statesman competition for the unlikeliest book title: winner, Martin Amis – My Struggle .) This story of a young man’s seduction plans has a handful of funny set pieces but is crude and immature. Typical line “Having Kleenex on the bedside chair was tantamount to a poster reading ‘The big thing about me is that I wank a devil of a lot.’” Amis tropes Sex, teeth

10. Yellow Dog (2003)

What a mess! Nobody reads Amis for his plots – it’s the page-pleasure and the pungent atmospheres we want – and this one has chaos baked into its febrile structure. But for all its weaknesses (Xan Meo’s resurgent male violence, the baffling coffin-on-a-plane strand) there are full-blooded, funny Amis grotesques in tabloid journalist Clint Smoker and King Henry IX. The softening of vision (or sentimentality), in his writing about children is notable too. Typical line “His divorce had been so vicious that even the lawyers had panicked.” Amis tropes Apocalypse, sex, yobs

9. Success (1978)

Amis’s third novel brought much needed structure to his antic early style. It’s told in neatly paired narratives by adoptive brothers Gregory and Terry Riding, whose respective fortunes vary wildly. It also shows a new interest in characterisation, though oddly for a self-professed “gynocrat” (“the world would be better if women ruled it”), this was Amis’s third book in a row where women are little more than sexual objects. Typical line “I want to shout with pain and pull the world apart, but I just vaguely peek in the direction of the girl’s breasts.” Amis tropes Height, sex, teeth, twins

8. House of Meetings (2006)

Amis’s best novels this century have been those that don’t offer diminishing returns on his 80s and 90s comic peak. You can feel under the page the effort he put into this novel , a love triangle in a Soviet gulag. Outside the loose plot, it’s mostly research left over from his Stalin book Koba the Dread , but the highly controlled narrative voice, with just echoes of the usual Amis repetitions and neologisms, makes it work. Typical line “Something strange was happening in the Soviet Union, after the war against fascism: fascism.” Amis tropes History, sex, time, twins

7. Other People (1981)

If Success was Amis’s first interesting novel, his next book Other People (subtitled A Mystery Story : geddit?) was his first good one. It even has a female protagonist, albeit one who looks in the mirror in order to admire her breasts. Mary Lamb’s amnesia enables Amis to employ defamiliarising descriptions borrowed from Craig Raine’s Martian poetry, and a conceit from William Golding’s Pincher Martin . Typical line “Limp hardly did justice to the spectacular unevenness of Mrs Botham’s gait: she walked like a clockwork hurdler.” Amis tropes Authorial intrusion, sex

6. The Zone of Interest (2014)

The technique for Amis’s best novel of the 21st century – and his second about Auschwitz – is similar to that of House of Meetings : it’s research-driven, but the strong narrative voices (two Nazis and one Jew) put character in the foreground. What happens when the unstoppable force of Amis’s style meets the immovable object of the Holocaust? More than you might expect. Typical line “Who are you? You don’t know. Then you come to the Zone of Interest, and it tells you who you are.” Amis tropes History, sex

5. London Fields (1989)

Amis’s most London novel (“the streets like a terrible carpet”) is also his longest and most ambitious. It’s relentlessly quotable and memorable, but multiple focal points (sexy “murderee” Nicola Six, darts-playing lowlife Keith Talent, third wheel Guy Clinch and tricky narrator Samson Young) and a complicated structure give the narrative a clotted, staccato feel. And even by Amis’s standards, its misanthropy is off the scale. Typical line “Keith didn’t look like a murderer. He looked like a murderer’s dog.” Amis tropes Apocalypse, authorial intrusion, Keith, sex, time, twins, yobs (jackpot!)

4. Time’s Arrow (1991)

Amis once accepted that his metier is “banalities delivered with tremendous force”. That summarises this book’s high concept : the Holocaust could make sense only in an inverted world, so let’s tell the life story of a Nazi doctor backwards. The execution is perfectly achieved: at first somewhat comic, then devastating. It won Amis his only Booker shortlisting and deserved it. Typical line “When is the world going to start making sense? Yet the answer is out there. It is rushing toward me over the uneven ground.” Amis tropes History, time

3. Night Train (1997)

His shortest novel has Amis’s only female narrator, and is written as a police mystery about a young woman’s suicide. But it cuts deep, with an understated (for Amis) style and his most humane protagonist: he finally wrote, after all these years, a good person. This book is one of his greatest achievements. Don’t believe me? Seek out Janis Freedman Bellow’s essay Second Thoughts on Night Train . Typical line “Here’s what happened. A woman fell out of a clear blue sky.” Amis tropes Addiction, twins

2. The Information (1995)

Another big book about London (“the streets looked like the insides of an old plug”), centred on a struggling writer whose only friend has become the thing he fears most: a bestselling novelist. The comedy is unsparing but affectionate and the existential angst more acute than ever, even if the connected plot featuring minor criminals (Amis’s usual obsession) is less successful. Typical line: “The information is telling me – the information is telling me to stop saying hi and to start saying bye.” Amis tropes Apocalypse, authorial intrusion, height, tennis, time, yobs

1. Money (1984)

Money was a leap ahead of Amis’s previous books, an expansion of talent nudging genius, a helplessly funny voice, a 400-page monologue about addiction, failure, despair and lack of self-awareness. So appalling is his narrator John Self (I had to keep faith with my namesake) that Amis appears as a character in the book to show distance. Money shows that style is not something tacked on to a story: the style is the story. Typical line “Look at my life. I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking: It’s terrific! It’s great! You’re thinking: Some guys have all the luck!” Amis tropes Addiction, authorial intrusion, sex, teeth, tennis, twins

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Rereading: The Rachel Papers by Martin Amis review — the debut of the nastiest voice of his generation

In Martin Amis ’s latest novel, this autumn’s autobiographical Inside Story , he recalls his debut, The Rachel Papers . Published in 1973 when he was 24, it is the story of its narrator’s masterfully cunning and scrupulously recorded seduction of his first “love” — inverted commas here because Charles Highway’s teenage contempt for everything encompasses love, and Rachel too.

This book was my adolescence’s The Ginger Man or Portnoy’s Complaint . “‘Extravagantly sexual . . . highly enjoyable’ Evening Standard ,” boasts the porny cover of my 1977 Panther paperback — which would make me 19 when I spent 75p on it. From Primrose Hill and his father Kingsley’s gaff had come the nastiest voice of my generation, a moneyed, educated punk, before punk

Review: The Rachel Papers by Martin Amis

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May 26, 1974 The Rachel Papers Not the son of Lucky Jim By GRACE GLUECK THE RACHEL PAPERS By Martin Amis. ust 20 years after "Lucky Jim," Kingsley Amis's famously funny novel about life at a minor British university, his 24-year-old son Martin has made so bold as to produce a novel himself; though--to say it right off--not really one to give a novelist father the sweats. (It seems quite in the order of things that the jacket bears a blurb from Auberon Waugh hailing Amis fils as "a new novelist of intelligence, wit and an apparently reckless honesty. . .a formidable and exceptional talent." Is there a club for novelists' novelist sons?) We shall, of course, sportingly refrain from referring to Martin's book as "Son of Lucky Jim." And, since we know that novels are meant to inflect, not reflect, real life, we shall abstain from comment on the fact that in this crotch-and-armpit saga of late adolescence the young anti-hero finds his father to be a large order of bastard. About to be 20 and fighting a last-ditch stand against Manhood, Charles Highway (whose ìmedium-length, arseless, waistless figure corrugated ribcage and bandy legs gang up to dispel any hint of aplomb") is a hypochondriacal connoisseur of fleshly lapses (his own and others), a compulsive pimple-squeezer, nostril tweezer, used handkerchief inspector and wrinkle enumerator. Here, f'rinstance is Charles's lyrical description of his mother: "What a heap. The skin had shrunken over her skull, to accentuate her jaw and to provide commodious cellarage for the gloomy pools that were her eyes; her breasts had long forsaken their native home and now flanked her navel; and her buttocks, when she wore stretch slacks, would dance behind her knees like punch-balls." (Commodious cellarage--Jeez! Shakespeare lives.) Burdened also with asthma, a feeling of personal grubbiness and an itch to write, Charles enters the sexual arena with a certain trepidation, bolstering his confidence by frequent consultations of a folder marked "Conquests and Techniques: A Synthesis." In London to attend a cram school for Oxford, he meets Rachel, a tall, black-haired young beddable (at first suspected-- groundlessly--of being half-Jewish) to whom he lays siege with the spontaneity of a War Office planner. The classy Rachel's seduction, which Charles styles The Pull, takes place against some sleazily funny counterpoint: Charles's life as a boarder in his sister's prole household; the retchy, pill- popping drop-ins of his school chums, a venereal-alarm visit to a homosexual doctor, his between-the-acts-quickies with a less refined but more generous girl named Gloria. All the while Charles, who finds more abandonment in language than in sex, reports on such matters as his bodily functions, the purchase of plonk (I can't figure out what the hell that is, but it comes in bottles), the smell of his room, the physical grossness of his brother-in-law Norman (also suspected by the family of being Jewish). His enchantment with Rachel fades when he discovers, alas, her corporeality: at one point she wets the bed, at another she sprouts a pimple and finally, from certain clues, he deducts that like everyone else she--defecates! With passing regret, he gives her over to a bumbling American, DeForest Hoeniger, and braces for the journey through Oxford. Now, it takes a certain comic talent to make Charles the delectably unappetizing creature he is, and Martin Amis has it. What's lacking is the ability to animate the other characters so that they become more than mere projections of Charles, and to provide the kind of plot invention that would make the book more than an easy-reading, mildly funny series of bed-and-bathroom observations. In the end, I'm afraid, even Charles comes off as too much of a type. I'm sure he'll grow up to work for The Times Literary Supplement. Grace Glueck is a cultural news reporter for The Times. Return to The New York Times Book Review Table of Contents

In his uproarious first novel Martin Amis, author of the bestselling London Fields , gave us one of the most noxiously believable - and curiously touching - adolescents ever to sniffle and lust his way through the pages of contemporary fiction.

Charles Highway, a precociously intelligent and highly sexed teenager, is determined to sleep with an older woman before he turns twenty. Rachel fits the bill perfectly and Charles plans his seduction meticulously, sets the scene with infinite care - but it doesn't come off quite as Charles expects.

'Amis's arrogantly assured manner is a formidable weapon, spraying the target with disdainful wit, ingenious obscenity, astute literariness, loathing, lust, anxiety and an all-pervading hyper-self-consciousness.'

'Amis has brought off the feat of satirizing his contemporaries while making them both funny and, in a bizarre way, moving. Scurrilous, shameless and very funny .'

Review by Ben Macnair (310110) Rating (8/10)

Charles Highway is not what could be described as a typical romantic hero. He is not handsome, suffers from a myriad of mild health complaints, does not take easily to sports, and is most often to be found studying, when he is not with a succession of Girlfriends.

A dysfunctional family, and his aspirations to go to Oxford, and sleep with an older woman are the back drop to his life. Rachel fits the bill perfectly, she is older, good looking, and faintly exotic, with a back-ground far removed from Charles’s. They have a friendship that is based around many of the same things. The poetry with which Charles seduces other women works on Rachel, but only because she knows it. The only problem is her boyfriend, Deforest. He has a campaign to seduce her, and the more time they spend together, the better his plan seems to be going. They meet each other’s families, spend a lot of time with each other, and have realistic sex, not the type that is described in books, but of the teenage variety.

Charles has issues with his father, and writes an epic letter to him, that he never finishes. He has a teenage writing project he must finish before he hits twenty, and he has to revise for exams, so he can escape the fate that has befallen many of the people he knows.

The characters are all well drawn, with the relationships between Charles, and his siblings, and his Mother and Father working well, although the scene where Charles meets his father’s latest Mistress at his sister and brother-in-law’s flat shows just how cruel his father can be, particularly towards his wife.

The realms of Academia are well described, with Charles being offered the place at Oxford, only so he can’t get any worse.

The story is well told, and well written, although at times the self-pitying Charles as narrator can be a bit much, and some of the characters could have been better drawn. Rachel’s boyfriend Deforest, for example, is allowed very little depth, whilst Rachel’s character is not as well developed as it might have been.

There was a film made of the book, but it did not really go anywhere, and is different to the story told in the book. The book has no happy ending, but a fitting one. Rachel has gone back to Deforest, and Charles is seen writing in his room, as the clock strikes 12.00, and he turns 20. Ben Macnair (31st January 2010)

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The Rachel Papers are diaries kept by Charles Highway, about to be twenty (apparently a dividing line as ambiguously...

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THE RACHEL PAPERS

by Martin Amis ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 1974

The Rachel Papers are diaries kept by Charles Highway, about to be twenty (apparently a dividing line as ambiguously regional as the Mason-Dixon -- after twenty you're a man or a mensch and your sexual topography is all downhill) and these journals are a continuation of his Conquests and Techniques: A Synthesis preparing him along with Blake and two Edna O'Briens for the conquest of the title -- Rachel. Amis has written a scapegrace and shamelessly funny book and you can hardly think of another in which the unaesthetic glories and indignities of postadolescent, or pretwenty as he would put it, performance have been charted with such explicit awfulness -- itch by twitch -- even his armpits ""hum."" But there's a little more to all these things which ""come and go"" in the name of ""experience"" as his father puts it; not much story to be sure and very little allure -- but a certain commentary on his so sharply demarcated age group all the way down to the hippie subculture. Amis is a devastating observer and he also has a remarkable recording ear for inflection, vernacular and cant. But for the most part it is sex, pure sex, impure sex, which you might say is precision tooled. The ultimate question is whether you can convert brass into pure gold, since some people will not necessarily find that ""The nastier a thing is, the funnier it gets.

Pub Date: April 1, 1974

Page Count: -

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974

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The Rachel Papers by Martin Amis

But despite his obvious narcissistic downfalls, I found myself frequently sympathising with Charles. The Rachel Papers is all a bit meta; our narrator structures his life around the literary greats (“I know what it’s supposed to be like, I’ve read my Lawrence”) and struggles to articulate genuine feelings when things stray out of this romanticised framework. From arranging his books to casually exude intellectualism, or reciting T. S. Eliot to delay orgasm, no action is devoid of cultural significance.

The Rachel Papers is—partially, at least—about being a writer and buying into the pervasive myth that true creativity belongs to troubled geniuses. The subsequent pressure to make life worthy of documentation causes Charles to long for something heart-wrenching to occur:

The thing is that I am a member of that sad, ever-dwindling minority… the child of an unbroken home. I have carried this albatross since the age of eleven, when I started grammar school. Not a day would pass without somebody I knew turning out to be adopted or illegitimate […] How I envied their excuses for introspection, their ear-marked receptacles for every just antagonism and noble loyalty.

But by insisting on viewing ordinariness as an encumbrance and grading every encounter in terms of storytelling value, Charles becomes hard to decipher. He treats his relationship with Rachel as a kind of social experiment in what love entails: berating her for letting her façade of femininity slip in a “Celia shits” incident; having sex with another girl minutes before she arrives and reusing the condom; treating intimacy as a list of moves to be ticked off (“I completed a really very complicated set of manoeuvres. It featured, among other things, the worrying of her hip-bone with my elbow, stroking her eyelashes, and kissing her ears”). Charles wants Rachel to be exceptional—the subject of a Shakespearean sonnet, the Juliet to his Romeo—but, unsurprisingly, she can’t live up to the heights of his expectation.

But despite Charles’ emotions being constantly “catalogued and filed away” for analysis, moments of unscripted vulnerability do occur, even though you get the impression that Charles is oblivious to this reality. He grows to like Rachel for who she is rather than the idea of her (“Goodness me, I really did like her”) and seems genuinely upset by his father’s infidelity. Perhaps most poignant is when he shares a moment with his sister, commenting: “We had both wanted to talk, I think; I don’t know why we didn’t.” This almost-there type of authenticity recurs throughout the novel. Charles nearly says something important, but opts to say what he thinks he should instead. But that’s kind of the point:  The Rachel Papers is a portrait of someone young, selfish and absorbed by the idea of cultural brilliance, which completely informs the way the story is told.

For all its unappealing characters and overwrought encounters, The Rachel Papers is told in a hilarious and astutely observed manner; I particularly enjoyed the description of Rachel doing a “Walt Disney shiver”. It’s perhaps not the literary masterpiece Charles—and even Amis—is striving for, but it’s a brilliant debut novel that, for all its hopelessly contemplative reflections, is strangely touching.

The Rachel Papers is Martin Amis’ debut novel, first published in 1973 by Jonathan Cape.

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Amis has brought off the feat of satirizing his contemporaries while making them both funny and, in a bizarre way, moving

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The Rachel Papers

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1973

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An element of fantasy suffuses all three stories: May and her descendants possess the power to "keep time still." At first, this power feels less like a volitional exertion than the onset of a panic attack. To go into more detail about what exactly is going on would spoil part of the fun of reading the final section; suffice it to say that the time-arresting power has something to do with "an ancient lotus seed." Like his grandmother before him, Nick learns to control this power and opportunistically exploit it by studying longer and more intensely than his classmates.

Many philosophical ideas get an airing in Real Americans , including the existence of free will and the ethics of altering genomes to select for "favorable" inheritable traits and suppress unfavorable ones. "What could we change about our lives? Could we nudge inheritance in particular directions?" wonders one character. Unfortunately, too many of these moral conundrums are expressed in the baldly straightforward manner of a scientific study. But the questions that drive May's academic research baldly double as animating questions for the novel. Unsubtle as they are, they're also queries that we will likely have to answer in the near future — a time when polygenic screenings are increasingly common, people lengthen their lives with elixirs, and beginnings become harder and harder to recall.

Rhoda Feng is a freelance writer from New York whose criticism has appeared in 4Columns, The Baffler, The White Review, The New Republic, Public Books, Village Voice, and others.

'Real Americans' review: Novel explores race, class, cultural identity

This cover image released by Knopf shows "Real Americans" by Rachel Khong. Credit: AP

REAL AMERICANS by Rachel Khong (Knopf, 416 pp., $29)

Rachel Khong's sweeping, multigenerational saga “Real Americans” — the title alone suggests its weighty subject — wrestles with issues of class, race and the genetic component of disease.

The novel is narrated by three members of the same family: May, the Chinese-born matriarch; her American daughter, Lily; and Lily’s biracial son, Nick. It opens in 1999, when 22-year-old Lily is working as an unpaid intern at a media company, a few months away from her NYU graduation.

At a holiday party, she meets her boss’ nephew, Matthew, five years older and heir to a pharmaceutical fortune. Tall and “golden haired,” he is likable and self-assured. Lily, on the other hand, is insecure, unambitious and prone to ruminating about what a disappointment she is to her hard-charging mother, a brilliant scientist who specializes in genetic engineering.

Nonetheless, they fall in love, get married and, after much difficulty, have a son named Nick who narrates the second section, which begins in 2021, when he is a teenager. He was raised on a remote island off Washington state by his single mother, feeling like a misfit and wishing more than anything to be normal.

Wondering why he does not, as his best friend says, “look Chinese,” the two of them search an online genetic database and find Matthew, his long-lost white father. Nick’s subsequent decision to go to Yale (Khong’s alma mater) sets up a series of dramatic encounters on the East Coast with the dad he never knew.

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The most vivid character in the book is Nick’s grandmother May, who grew up in China during the Cultural Revolution and fled to America after making a pact, of sorts, with the devil. She narrates the third section of the book in 2030, when she is dying. Only then are the riddles of Lily and Nick’s discombobulated lives finally explained.

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Book Review: Rachel Khong’s new novel ‘Real Americans’ explores race, class and cultural identity

This cover image released by Knopf shows “Real Americans” by Rachel Khong. (Knopf via AP)

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In 2017 Rachel Khong wrote a slender, darkly comic novel, “Goodbye, Vitamin,” that picked up a number of accolades and was optioned for a film. Now she has followed up her debut effort with a sweeping, multigenerational saga that is twice as long and very serious.

“Real Americans” — the title alone suggests its weighty subject — wrestles with issues of class, race and the genetic component of disease. Though largely a work of social realism, it has a touch of science fiction, with characters experiencing “blips” in existence, when time itself seems to get stuck.

The novel is narrated by three members of the same family: May, the Chinese-born matriarch; her American daughter, Lily; and Lily’s biracial son, Nick. It opens in 1999, when 22-year-old Lily is working as an unpaid intern at a media company, a few months away from her NYU graduation.

At a holiday party, she meets her boss’s nephew, Matthew, five years older and heir to a pharmaceutical fortune. Tall and “golden haired,” he is likable and self-assured. Lily, on the other hand, is insecure, unambitious and prone to ruminating about what a disappointment she is to her hard-charging mother, a brilliant scientist who specializes in—spoiler alert—genetic engineering.

Nonetheless, they fall in love, get married and, after much difficulty, have a baby. That child, a boy named Nick with blond hair and blue eyes, narrates the second section, which begins in 2021, when he is a teenager. He was raised on a remote island off Washington state by his single mother, feeling like a misfit and wishing more than anything to be normal.

Wondering why he does not, as his best friend says, “look Chinese,” the two of them search an online genetic database and find Matthew, his long-lost white father. Nick’s subsequent decision to go to Yale (Khong’s alma mater) sets up a series of dramatic encounters on the east coast with the dad he never knew.

The most vivid character in the book is Nick’s grandmother May, who grew up in China during the Cultural Revolution and fled to America after making a pact, of sorts, with the devil. She narrates the third section of the book in 2030, when she is dying. Only then are the riddles of Lily and Nick’s discombobulated lives finally explained.

Khong, who was formerly the executive editor of the now defunct food magazine Lucky Peach, has offered up a veritable smorgasbord of ideas — about IVF, genetic engineering, different cultural styles of parenting, and what it means to be a “real American.”

AP book reviews: https://apnews.com/hub/book-reviews

‘Real Americans’ is a sweeping novel with an eye for detail

Rachel Khong follows up ‘Goodbye, Vitamin’ with the tale of three generations of people grappling with identity

What is coded into our blood, passed down by the generations that came before? In Rachel Khong’s second novel, “ Real Americans ,” betrayals burrow down into the marrow.

Using the lens of one family, Khong examines our collective impulse to claim a place in this voracious and forgetful culture. Here, unlike the constellation of rueful scenes, diaristic observations and quirky dialogue that made up her debut, “ Goodbye, Vitamin ,” Khong structures the story into a heroic triptych. Ranging from communist China to corporate America, “Real Americans” reaches for big questions as it portrays three matrilineal generations.

After a museum heist prologue during the 1966 Cultural Revolution in Beijing, Part I concerns itself with Lily, the unmoored daughter of Chinese immigrant scientists, in 1999 New York. She is just one of the closely observed characters with a symbolic history that Khong uses to interrogate who controls inheritance, whether stories, genetics, culture, ambition or money.

Buried under student loans during the dot-com bust, Lily has been curating travel photo galleries for an unpaid internship when she meets Matthew. The young White scion of a pharmaceutical empire, he courts and weds the beautiful, reticent Lily, thereby transforming her prospects.

There is a falsified quality to the novel’s central conceit: One holiday party and a spontaneous trip to Paris later, Lily transforms into the romantic power broker and Matthew, the besotted. Raised by a disappointed woman who “had always longed for more,” Lily cross-examines her impulse toward interracial love. Seeing her and Matthew’s reflection in the mirror “was like pressing a bruise, wanting to see if the pain lingered.” Disturbed by the trend she sees among Asian female friends who date White men, Lily resists becoming what could be perceived as a trophy wife.

Ultimately, she becomes a single mother instead, living on a Pacific Northwest island teeming with evergreens. We never learn whether she regrets the choices that placed her in relative isolation, because her character is flattened by the self-interested narration of her son, Nick, who takes over in Part II. Nick’s most interesting quality is that he looks just like the handsome, rich White dad he never knew. Marred by having no true insight into his parents’ motivations, Nick “was distant, incapable of intimacy, closed off,” though, in his mind, “it felt like the opposite: There was so much inside me it was overwhelming.”

Nick’s predilection for stonewalling is revealed to be part of a sinister structure endemic to cultural assimilation. Encouraged by his overly interested best friend in high school, Nick uploads his DNA into an ancestry platform and reconnects with his estranged father, whose surname and credit card provide a springboard for Nick to ascend from the hard-fought middle class of his single mother to upper class with an Ivy League education.

There will be no student loans to burden Nick’s choices; the only readerly question in the face of his privilege is how much of his subsequent impact on the world is attributable to oblique self-loathing. Where to find sympathy for the pathos of the rich? Needing to prove oneself never ends, it seems. In that, “Real Americans” is spot on.

The people of this book endure tragedies, from the terrorist attacks of 9/11 to the ideological fervor of the Red Guard, but it is often their own self-conception that seems most hazardous to their well-being. Lily’s fraught relationship with her mother, May, for instance, stems from the woman’s stony ambition and deep yearnings.

Drawing upon near-term application of gene editing that hearkens to CRISPR, “Real Americans” pairs plausible (read: dystopian) science fiction with a heritable, fantastical stoppage of time that seems to mimic the extravagance of choices that Americans are posited as having in this novel.

“All the time in the world — it has the ring of luxury,” Lily thinks at one point. “But considering every option, feeling the past and imagining the future at the same time — it was a burden.”

As we discover in Part III, May is a scientist who is estranged from Lily for good reason. As a mother, May is a nightmare. As a character, she is gold. To negotiate her girlhood freedom, she studies hard enough to advocate for her escape from home into an academic environment that makes her prey to Mao’s anti-intellectual campaigns of pain and punishment.

A determined and calculating survivor who is self-indicting in retrospect, May fights for what can be hers, given the constraints of her existence. She is conditioned by her oppressive birth family to believe that “each person was allowed only a bit of ease. There was a limit to fulfilled desire in a life.” Only later does she realize that “life lay in the interruptions — that I had been wrong about life, entirely.”

Well written and perceptive, if predictable, about issues of power, money and class, Khong’s sophomore book covers so much ground over three continents and 50 years that by the very nature of its epic sweep, it cannot have the crackling energy and page-level panache that characterized her wry, episodic debut.

In this big, market-friendly novel, the characters feel designed and polished for a broad sensibility. But, like Kong Tee, an artist who mentored May throughout her childhood within a harsh patriarchy, Khong affirms that it is “an artist’s work to be attuned to everything,” particularly small moments. Whether filtered through Lily, Nick or May, who observes that “Americans wore uncomplicated expressions,” Khong shines with keen insights into how we access our personalities through the cultures made available by circumstance.

“As an American child, I had been told I was exceptional,” Lily thinks. “And here, maybe, I might have simply existed, part of the fabric of something larger, and been content.”

Kristen Millares Young is a journalist, essayist and author of the prizewinning novel “Subduction.”

Real Americans

By Rachel Khong

Knopf. 416 pp. $29

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The Rachel Papers Mass Market Paperback – May 12, 1975

• Language English
• Publisher Ballantine Books
• Publication date May 12, 1975
• ISBN-10 0345244303
• ISBN-13 978-0345244307
• See all details

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Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Ballantine Books (May 12, 1975)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0345244303
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0345244307
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 4.5 ounces
• #101,548 in Contemporary Literature & Fiction

About the author

Martin amis.

Martin Louis Amis (born 25 August 1949) is a British novelist. His best-known novels are Money (1984) and London Fields (1989). He has received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his memoir Experience and has been listed for the Booker Prize twice to date (shortlisted in 1991 for Time's Arrow and longlisted in 2003 for Yellow Dog). Amis served as the Professor of Creative Writing at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester until 2011. In 2008, The Times named him one of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945.

Amis's work centres on the excesses of late-capitalist Western society, whose perceived absurdity he often satirises through grotesque caricature; he has been portrayed as a master of what the New York Times called "the new unpleasantness". Inspired by Saul Bellow, Vladimir Nabokov, and James Joyce, as well as by his father Kingsley Amis, Amis himself went on to influence many successful British novelists of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, including Will Self and Zadie Smith.

Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

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