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/

2.5
Noughties is the story of Elliot Lamb, who has just finished studying English at Oxford and is having a celebratory night out with all his friends-with the novel being split into Pub, Bar and Club. However, there is plenty of unfinished business between Elliot and his friends Ella and Jack in particular-and his ex-girlfriend Lucy is continually trying to get in touch with him.
Masters' writing is generally pretty good, he definitely brings to life the university experience and all the anxiety and nerves that come along with it-which I can imagine are exacerbated at the very top universities. However, the plot just wasn't really that strong and it felt as though a lot of the 'twists' weren't really tied up that well.
Interestingly, I felt that his characterisation was strongest when dealing with his female characters-surprising, considering Elliot's treatment of them-but I found Ella and Lucy in particular to be the most interesting characters. Especially the latter, who I just felt sorry for.
My main problem with this novel as that the protagonist just didn't appear to have any redeeming features. Whilst he occasionally acknowledges the fact that he has a chip on his shoulder about attending state school before going to Oxford, and that he doesn't always portray people well-Elliot just did not seem like a good person. I felt that it was unclear whether Masters intended this increase in snobbery to be a warning about the current university system or not. Instead, I just became distracted by the similarities between Elliot's experience and that of Ben Masters himself-both from the Northampton area and both studying at Oxbridge-that I began to worry that the novel was almost autobiographical and that maybe Masters was kind of a jerk as well.

I picked this up because I tend to like contemporary writing by young British writers, and this tale of the last night at Oxford sounded promising. Eliot (our narrator), Jack, Scott, and Sanjay are out for a night of epic drinking (the book's three acts mirror the three watering holes on their crawl: pub --> bar --> club), along with ladies Ella, Abi, and Megan, to celebrate the end of their undergraduate days. Intermingled with the night's events are many flashbacks of Eliot's time at Oxford and before, as well as his recounting odd dreams, and a barrage of texts from his girlfriend back home. Unfortunately, the book manages to be simultaneously boring, annoying, and too clever for it's own good, which is quite a trick. It's boring because there is no plot, the general theme of "wow, I have no idea what to do after uni..." is beyond trite, and Eliot's main dilemma of what to do about the girl he has back home is entirely uninteresting. It's annoying because Eliot is an entirely unsympathetic and uninteresting jackass, and none of the supporting characters have any depth to them whatsoever, and as they get drunker and drunker, this only becomes amplified. It's too clever because it appears to be jam packed with "literary resonances, allusions, quotations" (per the author's note, but I prefer to call them "wink-winks") that presumably are there in order to make sure the reader knows that despite writing a profanity-laden book about a booze-up, complete with vomiting, the author is a well-read dude. I have to confess, by the end of the first part (page 107), I found little reason to read on -- I didn't connect in any way with any of the characters, and I didn't care about their concerns. There was exactly one memorable chunk in these first hundred pages: Eliot's recounting of his admissions interview for Oxford, which was very well told and amusing. But a handful of decent pages out of a hundred just isn't a good enough ratio for me to invest any more time with these characters.

I attempted to read an ARC of Noughties that I picked up at a local thrift shop.

I wanted to try this book because the premise sounds relatively interesting, but I gave up after about 30 pages. The story felt like it went nowhere at all. It was also difficult to make sense of what little story we got during Eliot's drunken ruminations on what to do after college.

No, just no.