The Rachel Papers

Martin Amis The Rachel Papers (1973)
It's a coming of age novel, according to someone or other, probably the late Simon Morris. Our teenager is Charles Highway, and the title refers to a folder full of notes he compiles in preparation for seducing someone called Rachel. I assume the compilation of said notes is therefore an immature enterprise from which Charles is liberated once he gets to knob the aforementioned Rachel; and it's a load of musings on paper, just like a book - so that's all a bit postmodern, I guess.

The thing is, nice idea though it may well be, it's difficult to say whether the correlation of Charles' presumably creepy notebook actually makes much difference to the subsequent penetration of Rachel, or even to anything at all. Whilst I violently reject the insipid notion that a novel should include sympathetic characters, it usually helps if you don't actively hate those featured, and Charles just seemed like your average over-moneyed Oxford-bound Hooray Henry, inhabitant of a world of braying wankers to which I have never been granted access. I found it not only difficult to care what happens to the twat, but even to be amused, or to find much of a point to this novel having been written in the first place. Everyone drifts through their slightly privileged existence, from cradle to grave without consequence, idly marvelling at their own progress from time to time as though lacking any idea as to why any of it is happening; all seasoned with descriptions of it going in and out, complete with smells, which I'm sure impressed the hell out of Simon but did bugger all for me.

It's not the worst book I've ever read. It's about fifty billion miles from being the best. It's just there, keeping you busy for a couple of hours with its underwhelming and ever so slightly smartarsed wisecracks.