Gordon Comstock is such a stereotypical Angry Young Man that he is almost a parody of his own embittered and hate-filled self. He has declared war on money - although he never seems to have any - because he feels that society is too obsessed with it, and too in its thrall. To protest against the way in which society seems controlled by the desire to earn money, he quits his job as a copywriter for an advertising agency in London - a job at which he was actually very good, and which held good prospects for his promotion and earning capacity in the future. He deliberately takes a poorly paid job instead, and claims to be devoting himself to becoming a poet.
Gordon was actually raised in a wealthy family, but their star is on the wane. Inherited moneys have all but dried up, but this hasn't stopped Gordon from feeling extremely peeved that he needs to work for a living. Coming from a prominent and high class family, he feels that his family should be supporting him whilst he pursues his literary dreams. Gordon's sense of entitlement is the core of his being. Not a particularly pleasant person to begin with, he becomes downright despicable when faced with life's difficulties, such as a writer's block and self-imposed money worries. He has become a laughing stock, and is petty with his family. He is also becoming mentally unstable.
To pay his basic bills - food, rent of a tiny bedsit - he works part time in a small bookshop owned by a man named Mr McKechnie. When not working he struggles with his poetry, which he has taken to calling his "magnum opus", a rather grandiose title for what amounts to a book of poems about his London days. Gordon becomes more of a paradox every day; he feels a certain pleasure in his meagre existence, as if he is proving something to the world by his deliberate penury, but he also hates poverty and resents living differently from those around him.
The less money Gordon has, the more obsessional he becomes about money being the root of all evilness of character. He feels that nobody is real, or genuine, anymore, because every human relationship is tainted by the humans' worshipfulness of money, and the way it acts as a social indicator. His pet peeve is the fact that girls don't seem to find him attractive, but if he had more money, they would. Surprisingly, Gordon does actually have a girlfriend; he and Rosemary used to work together at the advertising agency, but she is growing increasingly frustrated by his financial situation. He even has to borrow money to buy her a drink at the pub.
Gordon does not have many friends; Philip Ravelston, though, is last man standing when it comes to conducting a friendship with the increasingly unkind Gordon. Ravelston is a Marxist. He publishes a Marxist magazine and is what might be termed a champagne socialist, in that he agrees with the principles of socialism, but lives a very nice, comfortable and wealthy life himself. This is a point of contention in the friendship between the two men, but Ravelston does try to help Gordon beneath the radar, getting a very thin volume of his writing published, and printing some of his essays.
One of the main frustrations in Gordon's life, apart from his poverty, is his relationship with Rosemary, primarily her refusal to have sex with him before they are married. She is happy to spend time together, though, and suggests a nice day out in the country. The country air, and the time together, seems to wear down Rosemary's defenses, and Gordon cheers up too, believing that he has convinced her to have sex with him. Wanting to show off to her, he opts to eat lunch at an over-priced, under-achieving hotel restaurant. The bill wipes out the money he had set aside for the entire trip. He borrows from Rosemary, reminding her that she will have to keep both of them if they are eventually to be married. When Rosemary refuses to have sex with him because he has not brought contraception, he becomes angry and blames her for refusing him because he has no money, and because she doesn't want to get pregnant knowing that she can't afford to give up her job to raise a child.
After a contentious night out with Rosemary and Ravelston, at the end of which Gordon is fined for being drunk and disorderly in public, a reporter hears of the incident and writes a short piece about it in the local newspaper. Gordon's boss sees the article and fires him. With no money coming in, his poetic juices dry up all together. His life spirals ever-downward. He takes a job in a library that pays less than the job he was fired from but appreciates it for its complete lack of demands on him; it requires no ambition, no effort and no thought. He takes a filthy room in a filthy house in a terrible area. At this point, his sister Julia and his now ex-girlfriend Rosemary decide that an intervention, of sorts, is needed. They want to convince him to go back to the advertising agency. Rosemary drops by casually to visit, although she has been avoiding him, and they have sex with no real emotion attached to it. After another break in communication, Rosemary visits Gordon at the library when he is working and tells him that she is pregnant with his child. Gordon has reached a crossroads in his life; he can leave Rosemary to bring up a baby on her own, ostracized by her family and by polite society as a whole for being an unmarried mother, or he can marry her, get a job and become respectable again.
Gordon chooses respectability, Rosemary's pregnancy the excuse he needs to go back to work for the sole purpose of making money, citing her situation as the reason for doing so without compromising what he considers to be his fundamental principles. They take a pleasant apartment on the Edgeware Road, smack in the middle of lower-middle-class suburbia. Gordon buys an aspidistra plant for their living room. Now their house looks just like all the others. Gordon's transformation is complete.
