Growing Up All Wrong (Page 3)

Martin Amis is the most condescended-to novelist of his time. He is also one of the most literate, funny, quotable and (this the condescenders never neglect to mention) talented. He is the author of a few clunkers and a very strange book on Stalin, Koba the Dread, but also of two classics of contemporary satire--Money and The Information. "Be more funny!" Homer Simpson yells at the television, and it's no use. But then, no writer has loused up his fiction with such a transparent misunderstanding of what literature should aspire to in our time.

To have watched Amis these past five years, since approximately the short-story collection Heavy Water, is to have borne uncomfortable witness to a sort of extended creative meltdown. In that time he has published a memoir, Experience, in which some funny and very warm reminiscences of his father, the novelist Kingsley Amis, are interspersed with passages of embarrassing, misplaced bathos; Koba, in which some funny and warm reminiscences of Kingsley are interspersed with passages of embarrassing, misplaced historical score-settling; and now Yellow Dog, a novel of embarrassingly transparent and misplaced moral grandstanding in which Kingsley, alas, does not appear.

He is replaced in Yellow Dog by a rogues' gallery of disappointing predictability. There is Xan Meo, the reformed London roughhouser turned good family man who takes a hard knock on the head and reverts to his old ways; there is Clint Smoker, author of the nasty, rape-cheering "Yellow Dog" column for a sex tabloid, the Morning Lark; King Henry IX, a particularly vapid monarch; and Joseph Andrews, a crusty old criminal overlord. The characters' trajectories are only loosely, vaguely connected, and their names do not signify (Xan is not Asian, his wife, Russia, not Russian). If the book has a subject it's the war of the sexes and, loosely, vaguely, what pornography might have to do with it. In any case, it hardly matters. Yellow Dog is shorter than it appears, because it's written largely in dialogue, and though the first part of it is readable enough, by the second half Amis has resorted to stealing whole sentences from his journalism, and the novel has fallen apart.

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