Amis has often emphasized his keenness for focusing on issues of style in his writing. He stresses this at the level of the sentence and the paragraph, but it can also be identified in terms of his self-reflexive approach to the structure of his novels and the mode of narration by which he presents the story. As I have already discussed, Amis's fiction can be seen to be employing narrative techniques related to postmodernism and this is an important aspect of his fiction throughout the 1970s and 1980s. One of the most prominent techniques he uses in this context is metafiction, a form of writing that self-consciously alludes to its own status as fiction. Amis's distinctive use of metafictional techniques interrogates the narrative contract between the author and the reader that is assumed in much ‘conventional’ realism. This aspect of Amis's writing is also part of him establishing a distance from the previous generation of British novelists, a group which would, of course, include his father Kingsley. The novels Amis produces in the 1980s are perhaps influenced more than his other work by metafictional techniques, and serve to establish Amis as a postmodern writer at a time when postmodernism was perceived as an exciting, and potentially radical, new style in literary fiction. A theme that Amis develops in both Other People: A Mystery and Money: A Suicide Note is the idea of constructed and fictional characters at loose in the ‘real’ world. Amis is also influenced by (post-)Marxist theories in his use of metafiction, and both novels include characters, Mary Lamb and John Self in Other People and Money respectively, who behave in the ways they do because of their false consciousness and lack of awareness of the underlying (and often economic) factors determining their behaviour.

Alongside a Marxist-influenced conception of the unreal in Amis's fiction at this period, there is a psychoanalytic context for the use of metafiction. Amis has commented that we should always trust our unconscious, and of course the Freudian model of psychoanalysis, whereby deeper unrevealed drives affect people's behaviour, lends itself well to the metafictional framework that Amis establishes in these two novels (and others including Dead Babies and London Fields in particular).