A Good Man Goes Bad

Mar

tin Amis wants a vodka Negroni. It is — for the record — a drink composed of vodka, Campari and sweet vermouth, but the waitress at this rather expensive New York City hotel bar has never heard of it. Meanwhile, a man in a large and loudly beeping truck is trying — over the course of five deafening minutes — to parallel park in the spot right next to Amis' sidewalk table. Amis, 54, observes the scene coolly, a small, neat man, the picture of amused British resignation. If nothing else, he can take satisfaction in the fact that the whole scene, a cosmic conjunction of petty annoyances, is quintessentially Amis-esque.

For a while, in the 1980s, he was the literary world's unofficial No. 1 seed, the guy to beat. But after his respectfully received The Information in 1995, Amis went on an extended excursion into journalism, criticism, memoir, short stories and genre fiction. Doubts crept through the world of letters. Shots were taken, publicly, by the likes of Julian Barnes and A.S. Byatt. People found his immense talent obtrusive and, frankly, kind of irritating. Now Amis' first big novel in eight years, Yellow Dog (Miramax Books; 340 pages), has arrived in the U.S., still charred and smoking from vicious attacks in the British press. Does he, not to put too fine a point on it, still have it?

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The hero of Yellow Dog, such as he is, is a mild-mannered and dutiful husband named Xan Meo. For Xan, 47, a Londoner, "marriage is a sibling relationship — marked by occasional, and rather regrettable, episodes of incest." But after a mysterious stranger cracks Xan's skull in a bar fight, he changes. He becomes primitive, abusive, constantly battling volcanic surges of rage and horniness. The new Xan is a man who "seldom saw a woman of any age whose bathwater he would have declined to drink." His life becomes a struggle to hang on to the norms of civilized behavior. Wrestling with shadows, Xan reels and staggers through some paralyzingly funny satirical subplots involving Henry IX, the baffled and ineffectual king of England; a shameless tabloid hack named Clint Smoker; and Joseph Andrews, a master criminal so hardened he finds himself committing felonies even in his alibis.

There are problems with Yellow Dog, and not small ones. It tries to be structurally clever, but several of its strands either get tangled up with one another or fail to tangle up properly. But through it all, one feels that Amis writes the way he does not to show that he can, but because what he has to say is just too important for prose that is less than painfully acerbic, relentlessly intelligent and pitilessly funny. The men in Yellow Dog are both Jekyll and Hyde, stunned and trapped by lust and anger.

Amis has a paradoxical gift for lending words to violent men, men who eschew words for blows. "The problem of violence is the human problem," he says, looking conspicuously peaceful as his Negroni finally materializes. "Violence seems the solution to difficulty, whereas history more or less universally tells us that nothing resolved by violence is ever resolved. It's just postponed."