Money 2/27/12

"The car and I crawled cursing up the street to my flat. You just cannot park round here anymore. Even on a Sunday afternoon you just cannot park round here anymore. You can doublepark on people: people can doublepark on you. Cars are doubling while houses are halving. Houses divide, into two, into four, into sixteen. If a landlord or developer comes across a decent-sized room he turns it into a labyrinth, a Chinese puzzle. The bell-button grills in the flakey porches look like the dashboards of ancient spaceships. Rooms divide, rooms multiply. Houses split - houses are tripleparked. People are doubling also, dividing, splitting. In double trouble we split our losses. No wonder we're bouncing off the walls" (64).

In terms of plot, this passage is indistinct. In terms of Martin Amis' voice, it is extremely telling. It is basically an entire figurative paragraph. It begins with personification. Cars, of course, cannot crawl or curse. The second and third sentences demonstrate repetition, which emphasizes John Self's statement. The rest of the paragraph is figurative as well - houses do not literally halve, divide, into multiple other houses. Landlords and developers may, in fact, restructure their buildings, but they don't actually make them into labyrinths or Chinese mazes. "The bell-button grills in the flakey porches look like the dashboards of ancient spaceships" is a simile, comparing the bell-button grills in the flakey porches to the dashboards. Rooms do not literally divide or multiply as he implies. Houses cannot park. People cannot divide or split. This language is extremely figurative, and does a marvelous job of creating a mental image not unlike that of cells dividing and multiplying. It's a very biological image and works well to portray what Amis presumably means.

This paragraph is also incredibly demonstrative of Amis' writing style in this work. So many things in Money are repetitive and figurative. Self is constantly comparing things and repeating several subjects - money, pornography, drinking, Selina, etc. the paragraph also demonstrates the casual tone Amis uses to create Self. Sentences are generally short and blunt, and very in keeping with Self's projected personality.

This paragraph also demonstrates how much Amis uses hyperbole. He exaggerates a lot of things for dramatic effect - from crawling up the street to not being able to park anymore. In all likelihood, he was probably going a normal speed up the street, and despite it being challenging, it is probably possible to park. Houses don't actually divide into sixteen residences. It's all exaggerated, as much of the writing in the novel is.