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Nabokov on the road to Money

While Martin Amis's strong relations to Nabokov have been acknowledged, there is room for a more thorough examination, especially via Amis's early criticism, and also in relation to the shadow of Joyce which flitters through the work of both writers. As a context for the Nabokovian elements in Money, the study moves along the arc of Amis's continuous engagement with Nabokov, beginning with reviews in the 1970s and still surfacing in the responses of 2009 to The Original of Laura. These writings raise issues around actual, symbolic and literary fathers; a resistance to allusive complexity; and, in particular, the idea of ‘style as morality’. Nabokov resists the late Joyce of Finnegans Wake while Amis resists the late Nabokov of Ada, or Ardor. Where Nabokov's resistance led to rival worlds of playful and tangled complexity, Amis's resistance marks a limit which is encountered in Money. This brutally and hilariously dramatizes the conflict of the forms of knowledge and power that writers, their characters and readers have over each other. Amis had experienced this conflict in coming to terms with the legacy of Nabokov.