Figures of Catastrophe by Francis Mulhern

Author:Francis Mulhern
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

In this way, Money reiterates and confirms the apprehensions of The Collector. However, although the theme and even the phrasings are familiar from Miranda and Fred, the hour is much later. The novels belong to distinct periods. Miranda is, literally enough, a daughter of the National Health Service, and in Fred something of the old working-class will to education persists, even if in a weak and misshapen form. John Self, in hyperbolic contrast, buys his dental care for cash in the medical black economy, and is aggressively philistine both in his work in advertising and in his personal life. In his own summation, he is a ‘yob’.

Textually, Self is a voice: Money is from beginning to end an address. His desires having come to nothing or worse – his film-making ambitions have led to ruin, not riches, and the two women in his life have left him – he is writing a suicide note, to whom is not quite clear, even though the short-list of likely addressees is short indeed, and certainly includes the likes of ‘you’, the reader of so-called literary novels. The substance of the narrative is the elaboration of this speaking subject and the environment that sustains it. What happens in the course of this is by way of illustration only, a set of non-events in a closed historical situation.

Older markers of nationality and class do not quite capture Self’s identity. The child of English and American parents, he has grown up partly in New Jersey and partly in a London pub called the Shakespeare, now speaking a demotic that mixes US and British English slang. Nearly if not quite working class by origin, he has risen to become a partner in a successful advertising firm, well-off, and mobile to the point of rootlessness: his apartment and everything in it are rented; only his car is his own. Hardly bourgeois either, in any received sense, he is a condensed social figure, a plebeian with the reflexes of a street tough and pockets full of money. In him, mobility appears as degradation. Self is above all a force of consumption, by his own avowal ‘addicted to the twentieth century’; he gorges himself unceasingly on a late-century cocktail of alcohol, tobacco, drugs, pornography and junk food. Money is the shared denominator of these things, and of his personal relations with others – Alec, who uses him as a free overdraft facility; Barry, his purported father, who has billed him for the expenses of his upbringing; and Selina, the expensive girlfriend whose auto-pornographic routines are the climax of gluttonous evenings on the town. Money the novel is satire in the prophetic spirit – radix malorum est cupiditas2 – and the bright lights of the town, London or New York indifferently, display the truth of the situation it excoriates, parading the familiar names and titles of classic literature everywhere – stay at the Carraway, eat at Kreutzer’s, drink Desdemona Cream and, for those anxious moments, take a Serafim – but with not a book in sight or in mind.

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