People who hate Martin Amis and his overblown contemporary writers will find a ton to hate in this novel - and I think, had I read it as an adult, I might've liked it quite a bit less. But I'm 25. The heartbreaks and missed-chances and drunken misadventures of my college days are still pretty fresh in my mind - fresher, in many ways, than the same things that happen in the real world. Because when you're all trapped together for a couple of years like that, it's bound to feel more real than anything out in this more disparate 'real world'. Masters' novel made me feel. It caught something intangible inside of me and, for the few hours it took to read over the course of a rainy night over a scotch or two, it's like I was there. Eliot and I, we might be pretty different - but we share a commonality of experience that makes us brothers. Just like my real college brothers.

More TK at RB: http://ragingbiblioholism.com/2014/04/05/noughties/ ( )

This book isn't an advertisement for the virtues of an Oxbridge education, focused on a group of students boozing away their final night at Oxford while the narrator, Eliot, flicks between drunken present and memories of past fumblings. It could have been so much more but ends up ignoring morality and ethics in favour of wallowing in unappealing stereotypes. ( )

Noughties is the first novel written by Ben Masters, a former Oxford and Cambridge student who offers an update to Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time: First Movement. Eliot Lamb and his friends go out for a night of unattractive drinking, starting with the social games of a pub, moving to the dissociative setting of a drink bar, and ending in an almost unbridled sexual/aggressive club scene.

Unlike the wonderful narrative of Powell describing the personalities and interactions of his 4 young men as they come of age, Masters gives the reader unwanted glimpses of the behavior and thoughts of characters half-baked in the current literary style of sledge hammer sarcasm and complete lack of humor. The vehicle for the British university students (attempting to make the transition from extended adolescence into adulthood selection of career and relationship paths) of drinking without wit distinguishes Masters’ view of development from that of Powell’s. Noughties characters utter drivel in the pub, puke in the bar, and fight in the club.

During all of this, Eliot’s relationships with his long-time girlfriend Lucy and subsequent lady love Ella are described in the context of his study of literature at Oxford and his struggles with career choices. Again, the clumsy descriptions of people’s actions compared with Powell’s elegant telling of the same story lines shows the difference between 19th Century generations and Masters’ saga of the current self-absorbed young men of the 21st Century. Unlike Hemingway’s ‘Lost Generation’ described in The Sun Also Rises, Masters’ group of mewling, puking, crying men illustrate the international hopelessness of any future social improvement. Instead of Mo Yan’s ‘Psychedelic Realism,’ Masters’ style can be called, ‘Alcoholic Realism’ that leaves the reader with a crashing literary hangover. All in all, Masters has written a good first attempt at a very popular style used by some contemporary writers. ( )

‘Noughties’ takes place over the course of one night- and over the course of four years. The narrator, Eliot, is spending his last night at Oxford with his fellow grads, going from pub to bar to club. As the night goes on (and Eliot and his friends drink aggressively), Eliot reminisces over his last year of school, his entrance to Oxford, his three years there, his ex-girlfriend Lucy, the people he is drinking with. He is faced with becoming an adult, and is woefully unprepared. His time at Oxford has taught him a tremendous amount about English literature, an equally tremendous amount about drinking, and not much else. Up until this night, his course of action was always laid out for him; his lower middle class parents expected him to do better than they did and to them it was a given that he would attend university; once at Oxford, his course was set for three years. Now he has to make his own decisions.

I have mixed feelings about this novel. The mixing of past and present work well. I thought the sections about the tutorials were brilliant- the way the students were set into competition against each other, the professor who cultivates a persona of shocking hipster. The characters, however, all seemed somewhat stereotyped, and Eliot is a total prat. He’s horrible to women and not the greatest friend. He’s so eager to hide his origins from his Oxford mates that he decides his girlfriend from home is embarrassing- and is upset that they like her. While most of us aren’t at our best at his age, Eliot is hard to take. It’s difficult to empathize with someone who has no redeeming characteristics. All in all I liked the story, but not nearly as much as I’d hoped. I do think Masters has a great future as a novelist, but he needs more years of writing under his belt.