Books like The Rachel Papers
—because Charles Highway’s real seduction is verbal: the appalling confidence, forensic self-consciousness and comedy of watching intelligence become an accomplice to appetite. These three novels offer distinct versions of that same dangerous pleasure.
If you liked The Rachel Papers, you’ll love these
Not lookalikes — kindred books. Each one shares something essential with The Rachel Papers, and we tell you exactly what.
If Charles’s meticulous accounting of lust made you laugh even while recoiling from him, Alexander Portnoy is essential company. Speaking to his psychoanalyst in one sustained eruption, he turns desire, family grievance, shame and self-exoneration into manic comic rhetoric. Like Charles, he can diagnose his every motive without acquiring the slightest power over it.
Roth’s scandalous breakthrough became a landmark of postwar American fiction because its obscenity is inseparable from its intelligence: every outrageous confession tightens the narrator’s trap. It is louder and more fevered than The Rachel Papers, but driven by the same exhilarating question—what if dazzling self-knowledge merely made a man better at lying to himself?
The obvious next Amis is also the right one. John Self, a director of commercials shuttling between London and New York, is Charles Highway’s comic monstrosity enlarged to adult scale: voracious, verbally inventive and forever mistaking indulgence for freedom. His voice is a torrent of drink, pornography, advertising, humiliation and sudden, startling perception.
Widely regarded as one of Amis’s finest novels, Money perfects the method his debut discovered. The sentences have more velocity, the jokes carry more menace, and the culture itself seems to speak through the narrator’s appetites. Anyone who loved The Rachel Papers for the friction between formal brilliance and moral ugliness should not miss Amis at full power.
Tarquin Winot invites us on a seasonal culinary tour, dispensing recipes, aesthetic judgments and memories in prose of exquisite assurance. But his cultivation soon begins to feel like domination. He classifies tastes and people with the same fastidious entitlement Charles applies to women, and the pleasure lies in noticing what his elegant arrangements cannot quite conceal.
Winner of the Whitbread First Novel Award, Lanchester’s debut has earned enduring devotion as a small masterpiece of the unreliable voice. Where Amis is grubby, hormonal and explosive, Lanchester is polished, epicurean and chillingly composed. Read it for the rare thrill of being charmed by a narrator while every beautifully chosen word gives you another reason not to trust him.