Right now, I’m reading The Rachel Papers, a novel by Martin Amis that has to be autobiographical, given the collision between the text and the image above:
“At three thirty I was standing dressed in front of the mirror. Eyes narrowed, I scouted for spots. All clear. I’m not troubled by straight acne so much as by occasional sub-surface hugies, the ones that spend two days coming up and two weeks going down. An old favorite was the Cyclopean egg which put in regular appearances between my eyes, giving me a mono-browed mass-murderer’s expression. But no big boys in town at the moment.”
The book is a mordantly hilarious tale of a young man’s sexual coming of age, and his obsession with his first love. Read it, but first, read Lucky Jim (by Kingsley Amis, Martin’s father), which is of a similar vein, but a bit more innocent, and far more funny.
