According to critical tradition, satire relies on a normative background to do its work of correction and moral retribution. What happens when those norms are fraying or absent altogether? Martin Amis’s Money (1984), a key text of the Reagan-Thatcher years, stages this aesthetic and political aporia with coruscating wit and an apocalyptic atmosphere. The relations between satire and value, text and norm, enter a crisis that is morally alarming but artistically productive
