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BOOK 111: THE RACHEL PAPERS: MARTIN AMIS

The Rachel Papers is Martin Amis' first novel, published in 1973 by Jonathan Cape.

The Rachel Papers tells the story of Charles Highway, a bright, egotistical teenager (a portrait Amis acknowledges as autobiographical) and his relationship with his girlfriend in the year before going to university. Narrated by Charles on the eve of his twentieth birthday, the novel recounts Charles' last year of adolescence and his first love, Rachel Noyes, whom he meets in London while studying for his entrance exams into Oxford.

In preparing to write his 2010 novel The Pregnant Widow, Amis revealed that he re-read The Rachel Papers for research purposes (as "the time frame is similar").

Amis's view of his debut novel has diminished considerably in recent years. Regarding what he made of the novel upon re-reading it, Amis remarked in a 2010 interview that, by his high standards the novel "seemed crude...Not the writing. That was terribly alive. The craft. The sex. The setups… [were] all incredibly cack-handed."In a subsequent later appearance at the Sunday Times Literary Festival in March 2010, he criticised his debut further, stating, "A first novel is about energy and originality, but to me now it looks so crude. I don't mean bad language – it's so clumsily put together. The sense of decorum, the slowing a sentence down, the scrupulousness I feel I have acquired, aren't there. As you get older, your craft, the knack of knowing what goes where, what goes when, is much more acute."