Thursday, November 13, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Books: Parallel lives

By John Ziebell

You know how some sons can't seem to get a break because they're never allowed to step out of their fathers' shadows? One of these guys could become president, theoretically, and people would say he failed to earn it...well, that's a bad example. But look at Martin Amis. His father was a British literary institution, and in that odd, backbiting world, his parentage appears to have become his greatest curse.

Kingsley Amis was certainly a giant in his day, but for contemporary audiences, his son is smarter, funnier and infinitely more engaging. Martin Amis is a cultural critic of the first order, satirically insightful but free of the pettiness that taints the work of many of his peers. He's also a lot less boring than most of them. But to see the way his 10th novel, Yellow Dog, was lambasted by the London literati--pack of wolverines that they are--you'd think the man couldn't write a complete sentence.

Amis can write sentences, of course; he does sentences very well. Even his fragments stand up. Amis' description is precise and seamless, though built on the sparest of scaffolds. His characters are brilliantly anomalous, and spew vernacular so credible that their words almost ring in our ears. That a reader must finish the novel to see how it's going to end might say more about the intellectual depth of the author's critics than the book itself.

Yellow Dog is an unraveling of four threads--well, the actual count might vary--that we see initially as connected only by serendipity. Actor, writer and "Renaissance Man" Xan Meo is brutally assaulted at the bar he visits every year to celebrate his sobriety; he survives the attack, but in doing so becomes a stranger to his wife, children and friends. Clint Smoker, a tabloid journalist enslaved by sexual inadequacy, is malevolently sleazy at work but painfully human in his longings. King Henry IX, the current English figurehead, is juggling three burgeoning problems: a wife on life support, the demands of a Chinese mistress named He and the threat that the most private life of his 15-year-old daughter, Princess Victoria, is about to hit the Internet. And then there's the corpse of Royce Traynor, encoffined but moving with deadly intentionality through the baggage compartment of an intercontinental airliner bound from London to Houston.

What cements everything together is not only the threat of impending collisions but a supporting cast of thugs, gofers, ex-wives, kids, mistresses...it's a sizeable list, and even the most meager characters are enviably crafted. The work addresses social themes, Amis being the kind of writer he is; revenge is a big one, as is sex. And sex, pornography, sex, fidelity and its alternatives, incest...another long but, in the end, rewarding list.

Okay, so it's not always an easy book--it does affect a certain obliqueness, and it takes some time for the structure to jell--but what serious reader really privileges convenience over content? Yellow Dog is never without art; we always know it's got some destination in mind, no matter how sinuous a path it follows. Not to mention that it's brutally funny, always insightful and peopled with characters who use dialogue so honed it would make any screenwriter jealous. It's a worthwhile entertainment, but don't buy it because I said so. Buy it to piss off pompous limey dorks like Tibor Fischer.
Yellow Dog

Martin Amis

Miramax Books

340 pages