Success is Martin Amis

Martin Amis

Martin Louis Amis is a British novelist, the author of many novels including Money and London Fields . He is currently Professor of Creative Writing at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester, but will step down at the end of the 2010/11 academic year...

' third novel, published in 1978 by Jonathan Cape

Jonathan Cape

Jonathan Cape was a London-based publisher founded in 1919 as "Page & Co" by Herbert Jonathan Cape , formerly a manager at Duckworth who had worked his way up from a position of bookshop errand boy. Cape brought with him the rights to cheap editions of the popular author Elinor Glyn and sales of...

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Plot

Success tells the story of two foster brothers—Terence Service and Gregory Riding, narrating alernate sections—and their exchange of position during one calendar year as each slips towards, and away from, success.

Themes

Success is Amis' first statement of the doppleganger theme that will also preoccupy the novels Money

Money (novel)

Money: A Suicide Note is a 1984 novel by Martin Amis. Time magazine included the novel in its "100 best English-language novels from 1923 to the present".-Plot summary:...

, London Fields

London Fields

London Fields is a park and the name of an area of London, situated in the eastern borough of Hackney. The park itself was first recorded in 1540. At this time it was common ground and was used by drovers to pasture their livestock before taking them to market in London.London Fields is just over ...

, and, especially, 1995's The Information

The Information (novel)

The Information is a 1995 novel by British writer Martin Amis. The plot involves two forty-year-old novelists, Gwyn Barry and Richard Tull . Amis has asserted that both characters are based on himself...

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Reception

Success was widely praised upon publication. The Guardian

The Guardian

The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...

 observed that "Gregory and Terry double the narrative in a way that makes Martin Amis' Success like a kind of two-way mirror"; critic Norman Shrapnel

Norman Shrapnel

Norman Shrapnel , was an English journalist, author, and parliamentary correspondent.Shrapnel was born in Grimsby, Lincolnshire, and was educated at The King's School, Grantham. In 1947, after war service in the RAF, he joined the Manchester Guardian as reporter, book reviewer, and theatre critic...

 praised the novel's "icy wit" and called the narrative approach "artfully appropriate...[it] builds up an air of profound unreliabiity—entirely fitting, since things are by no means what they seem." In The Observer

The Observer

The Observer is a British newspaper, published on Sundays. In the same place on the political spectrum as its daily sister paper The Guardian, which acquired it in 1993, it takes a liberal or social democratic line on most issues. It is the world's oldest Sunday newspaper.-Origins:The first issue,...

, critic Anthony Thwaite

Anthony Thwaite

Anthony Simon Thwaite, OBE, is an English poet and writer. He is married to the writer Ann Thwaite. He was awarded the OBE in 1992, for services to poetry. He was mainly brought up in Yorkshire and currently lives in Norfolk....

 called the book "a moral homily from which all traces of morality have been removed with the brisk surgery of a razor blade on a fingernail...Success is a terrifying, painfully funny, Swiftian exercise in moral disgust; it's exhilarating unpleasantness puts it alongside 'A Modest Proposal.'" Critic Hermione Lee

Hermione Lee

Hermione Lee, CBE is President of Wolfson College, Oxford and was lately Goldsmiths' Professor of English Literature in the University of Oxford and Professorial Fellow of New College. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Literature.-Biography:Hermione Lee grew up in...

observed, "After Martin Amis' Success...sibling rivalry seems almost as popular as sexual wafare, fictionally speaking." In December of 1978, the Observer named Success one of it its "Books of the Year."