Books like Money
After John Self’s headlong monologue, ordinary satire can feel underpowered: you want prose drunk on its own velocity, an appalling narrator you cannot abandon, and jokes that expose something genuinely bleak.
If you liked Money, you’ll love these
Not lookalikes — kindred books. Each one shares something essential with Money, and we tell you exactly what.
Mickey Sabbath is John Self’s spiritual relative: ravenous, obscene, self-sabotaging and horribly gifted at making his degradation entertaining. Roth gives his disgraced puppeteer a voice of relentless comic invention; every grievance swells into performance, and every performance threatens to become confession.
Winner of the National Book Award and often regarded as one of Roth’s fiercest novels, it matches Money’s rare fusion of verbal exuberance and moral ugliness. Sabbath is not softened into likability. Instead, Roth makes his monstrous appetite so alive on the page that disgust becomes inseparable from exhilaration.
Read this for the shock of sentences that seem capable of saying anything. Beginning with its narrator before the US Supreme Court, The Sellout turns American pieties inside out through deadpan argument, surreal escalation and jokes whose precision only makes them more dangerous.
The first American novel to win the Booker Prize, it shares Money’s belief that satire should not stand at a tasteful distance from its targets. Beatty implicates the speaker, the reader and the language itself. His subject is different, but the experience is kin: comic momentum so ferocious that you laugh first and discover the wound a moment later.
Exley’s cult classic offers the intimate, bruising side of what Money does. Its narrator—grandiose, alcoholic, intermittently institutionalized and devoted to the New York Giants—records failure with a candor that never excludes vanity. He can diagnose his ruin brilliantly while remaining helplessly committed to it.
The style is less neon than Amis’s, but the central magic is identical: a disastrous man seizes control of the book through sheer vocal force. Funny, humiliating and painfully alert to the distance between the life one imagines and the life one lives, A Fan’s Notes is the book to read when John Self’s comedy has left you wanting the ache beneath the swagger.