Note: My review of Mathias Énard’s The Deserters for Chicago Review of Books linked here.
Money. By Martin Amis. New York: Picador, 2025. 384 pp. $19.
Some readers might be disappointed to learn that P.G. Wodehouse reused similes. In Summer Moonshine we find an American magnate, Elmer Chinnery, who “had married young and kept on marrying, springing from blonde to blonde like the chamois of the Alps leaping from crag to crag”, and in The Butler Did It, the retired gentleman’s personal gentleman Augustus Keggs is said to at least “seem to pop from spot to spot like the chamois of the Alps leaping from crag to crag.” One likes to think these winsome devices are custom made for character and situation, like a child’s rocket built and decorated for one memorable launch, but instead the Master, practical and resourceful, seems to be placing them here and there for color and whimsy. It is still a little disappointing. Then again, by itself, “the chamois of the Alps leaping from crag to crag”, sounds like a silly piece of nature or travel writing for a magazine, something already second hand. Wodehouse world is made of language and literature high and low, including Wooster’s Etonian, Oxonian, but also American slang, along with Jeeves’ old reliables from Shakespeare, Keats, and Burns. If the phrase is even his, a little self-plagiarism is excusable according to his style of play.