50 years old and also read in the context of Amis's recent death. In context, The Rachel Papers is a quite remarkable book. Consider that Amis was just 24 at the time of writing and was clearly in the shadow of Kingsley. Sure, much of what he writes about, to a 21st-century reader, might seem mundane or trite, but to someone in 1973, the novel would surely have been seen as avant-garde. There is no shortage of either precocity or arrogance in the narrator, Charles Highway. Needless to say, autobiographical experience/modeling would undoubtedly have played a role here too. While Charles and the eponymous Rachel should both be seen as rule-breakers in their different ways, the charm and the enduring nature of the novel is that it constitutes both a snapshot of its time (the transition from the swinging '60s to the seedy '70s) and of the perennial angst of teenagerdom. A keeper, 8 out of 10.
By Martin Amis