Martin Bites Back

• Share

Rarely has a book been preceded by as much fevered speculation and murderous ill will as Martin Amis' Yellow Dog (Jonathan Cape; 288 pages). It's out this week in the U.K. and already getting more ink than David Beckham on a slow news day. That's because Amis, 54, is one of Britain's best-known serious novelists — and thus one of the biggest targets in the literary field — and Yellow Dog is his first big novel since The Information, eight years ago. Beginning with The Rachel Papers in 1974, Amis' cold eye, slashing wit and verbal ferocity made him a literary celebrity in his own right, not just the son of old-school lion Kingsley Amis. But as any Martin Amis fan knows, the London literary world seethes with vicious jealousy, so when one of its celebs stumbles, the rest of the pack attacks. Last year, Amis' nonfictional study of Josef Stalin, Koba the Dread, caused more than a few critics to conclude that the once invincible writer had begun to lose the plot. His publishers added to the fury this year by refusing to let reviewers see Yellow Dog unless they signed a vow of silence until it is safely in bookstores; some took that as a signal that the book is a dog in more than name.

Tibor Fischer, whose novel Voyage to the End of the Room is to be released the same day, prematurely savaged Yellow Dog in a widely quoted newspaper article last month. Other literary types piled on, sniffing in print that Amis' 10th novel would surely not be nominated for next month's Man Booker Prize, Britain's top fiction award and one the author — unlike his father — has never won. Yet the novel soon made the 23-strong list of Booker candidates (Fischer's didn't), and last week London bookmakers had it 8 to 1 to win, trailing only J.M. Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello.

So how is the book? The reassuring news is that Yellow Dog's bark is far better than the back-biting. Yes, this dog can hunt. The book is classic Amis, energetically written, peopled with colorfully named lowlifes, suffused with violence and physical decrepitude, whirring with plotlets and straining to tackle big themes. It's the story of Xan Meo, a successful London actor-writer and doting father who suffers a head injury in a seemingly random (it isn't) act of violence and becomes a crude, inarticulate jerk. His journey back to goodness pits him against Joseph Andrews, a vicious East End gangster semiretired to the U.S. Meanwhile, the royal family (a new element in Amisland; he has learned what sells) is threatened with blackmail when King Henry IX receives an anonymous screen grab of his 15-year-old daughter in the nude. Across the pond, the Sextown Sniper is terrorizing a California municipality set up under legal loopholes as a haven for the porn industry.

Simultaneously, sleazy Clint Smoker, who writes a misogynistic column called Yellow Dog for a Fleet Street tabloid of dazzling tastelessness, is hurtling across several plotlines toward a romantic rendezvous with violent potential.

What holds all this together? Alas, not much more than glue and stitching. Yellow Dog, sad to say, is a novelist's breakfast. Chapters on California's porn industry read as if Amis were recycling his 2001 Talk magazine article on that subject. A darkly hilarious story line about a corpse jostled from its coffin and wreaking havoc in the hold of a transatlantic jetliner deserves a novel of its own, but it doesn't belong in this one.

Yet Amis' manic prose keeps Yellow Dog trotting along briskly. In Henry IX's office, "every plane had been harassed with ornament," and that describes Amis' style. Where other men see jets in the sky, Amis sees "contrails in various stages of dissolution, some, way up, as solid-looking as pipe cleaners, others like white stockings, discarded, flung in the air, or light bedding after beauty sleep." When the King visits his Chinese mistress He Zizhen, "He touched him, and he touched He." But make no mistake. Amis is after more than just surface glitz: "After a while, marriage is a sibling relationship — marked by occasional, and rather regrettable, episodes of incest." And: "Women wouldn't mind pornography if reproduction took place by some other means: by sneezing, say, or telepathy." Like a meaner, funnier Updike, his talent finds its fullest expression in sentences so perfect they'll keep you stuck on a single page. It's in the task of making all those dazzling sentences add up to a novel that he sometimes goes astray.

Some of the sharpest words concern Clint Smoker's odious tabloid, the Lark. What was in a terrorist group's "dirty bomb?"an editor asks. "Radioactive medical waste, Chief, plus ringworm, West Nile virus, liquid gangrene and a cladding of mad cow." The bombing story is squeezed out by news of a man injured outside a kiddies' swimming pool when he is caught watching too closely and flees with his pants round his ankles. Headline: Pervs Him Right.

Yellow Dog isn't just about language; it's also about Amis, and the predicament of being famous in a celebrity-obsessed age. Like the real royal family, he has seen details of his personal life — failed marriage, broken friendships, dental problems — chewed over obsessively by the jaundiced curs of the British press. Now it's payback time. Yellow Dog may not be the deepest, most Booker-worthy novel Amis ever wrote, but it's such nasty, inventive, satisfying fun that his critics will be panting with envy.