Yellow Dog
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Review
"[Yellow Dog" "is]" "raucously funny, relentlessly fast-paced, delightfully intricate. . . . A marvelous novel, a powerful book, a work of pain and madness and love . . . a work of seriousness. A work of beauty." -"Baltimore Sun"
"Amis is a force unto himself. . . . There is, quite simply, no one else like him." -"The Washington Post Book World"
"Fizzingly intelligent . . . . mind-tinglingly good . . . Like all great writers, [Amis] seems to have guessed what you thought about the world, and then expressed it far better than you ever could. . . . As he probes a human world increasingly disconnected from itself, Amis has found a subject to match the tessellated polish of his style. Here it all adds up." "-The Observer"
"Viciously funny . . . zingingly vivid." -"The Spectator"
"Brilliant and hilarious, and the insights into contemporary culture are disturbingly prescient. . . . A novel of many pleasures-and a novel to be reckoned with." -"Publishers Weekly"
"Martin Amis [has] come back kicking and screaming." -"San Francisco Chronicle"
"Martin Amis at his best, in all his shifting registers, his drolleries and ferocities, his unsparing comic drive, his aesthetic dawdlings and beguilements, his wry, confident relish of his own astonishing effects." -"The Guardian"
"Amis is a force unto himself. . . . There is, quite simply, no one else like him." -"The Washington Post Book World"
"Fizzingly intelligent . . . . mind-tinglingly good . . . Like all great writers, [Amis] seems to have guessed what you thought about the world, and then expressed it far better than you ever could. . . . As he probes a human world increasingly disconnected from itself, Amis has found a subject to match the tessellated polish of his style. Here it all adds up." "-The Observer"
"Viciously funny . . . zingingly vivid." -"The Spectator"
"Brilliant and hilarious, and the insights into contemporary culture are disturbingly prescient. . . . A novel of many pleasures-and a novel to be reckoned with." -"Publishers Weekly"
"Martin Amis [has] come back kicking and screaming." -"San Francisco Chronicle"
"Martin Amis at his best, in all his shifting registers, his drolleries and ferocities, his unsparing comic drive, his aesthetic dawdlings and beguilements, his wry, confident relish of his own astonishing effects." -"The Guardian"
Book Description
Amis's first novel since The Information: a post 9/11 comedy.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
13 of 13 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
'Yellow Dog' is not Amis's greatest book, but it's definitely not 'Tibor Fischer's Uncle' bad. I enjoyed reading it, and it is a welcome return to the dark urban setting of 'Money', 'London Fields' and 'The Information', my favourite Amis books. It has the same bleakly comic feel, the same Dickensian characters, and the same sense of horror at the state of modern life. At points, Amis's language reaches the dizzying descriptive heights of his earlier books, but for the most part the descriptive language is oddly flat. For example, although it's a good image, the description of a 'firefighting sunset' towards the start of the book seems to be an oddly lazy description if you recall some of the memorable linguistic shimmies, nutmegs and stepovers of which this author is capable.
As usual with Martin Amis, the language, the humiliating situations, and the gleefully created characters are the most important thing, while the plot chugs away in the background, almost as an afterthought. The tabloid hack, Clint Smoker, is a classic Amis character, complete with a wonderful name, but he carries too many echoes of previous characters, such as Keith Talent ('London Fields') to get the reader too excited. The sense I got from this book was of an enjoyable pastiche of the Martin Amis that wrote 'Money', by a younger writer who is too in thrall to the senior writer to do something different.
The plot involves a number of interrelated stories populated by lovingly portrayed grotesques, from royals to gangsters. The much anticipated 'post 9/11' dimension of the story is not explicitly realised, but merely hinted at with strangely menacing descriptions of airplanes, and the raging desire for retribution felt by the main character, Xan Meo, after he is attacked. The world depicted here is definitely the world of horrid moral confusion of 9/11, war and tabloid cruelty, but the book doesn't seem to have many wise words to say about the situation.
If you are a fan of Martin Amis, you're likely to enjoy this book, but it probably won't linger in your mind as much as his other novels.
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
I'm as big an Amis fan as they come. Money and London Fields are genius. Is there a more compelling character in modern lit than John Self and his Fiasco? Or Keith Talent ("the sincerity of the dart")? Or Nicola Six? ("Six (6)") Well, Xan Meo ain't among them. Not sure what happened here. I just never grabbed the thread. The incendiary language wasn't there, neither were the train wreck characters. The thing with Meo's daughters seemed pointlessly creepy and the rest of cast seemed shallow and insubstantial. The porno bits were mildly amusing, clearly inspired by Amis's (much better) journalism on the same. The best stuff was the paraphrasing of the American airline pilots' banalities, a credited rip of Black Boxes (a fave read of mine even before Y Dog).
25 of 29 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Amis' new novel - his first full-length fiction since "Night Train" in 1997 - has provoked considerable response in the UK press. As usual, the controversy has less to do with the book itself, than with the rather tawdry infighting so redolent of the London literary scene. Little attention has been paid to the actual novel, which does in fact demonstrate Amis writing (almost) to the peak of his considerable powers.
The themes and characters are familiar Amis tropes - low life crooks, the upper classes, pornography, and the "category-error" of rampant male violence. But "Yellow Dog" does see Amis branching out in the form to an extent not seen since 1991's "Time's Arrow". While the prose is versatile, endlessly inventive and cuttingly precise, Amis opts here for a fragmented form, stuttering and abrupt, that brilliantly reflects his central concerns. This is very much a 21st century novel, and it is permeated with a feeling of discontinuity and dull paranoia. It is also, as we have come to expect, very, very funny.
Occasionally this style doesn't quite pull together, and the ending (as is usual for an Amis book) isn't quite satisfactory, but there is no one else in the country who is producing literature as edgy and stylised as this. Amis is a modern master, and "Yellow Dog", while not being the best introduction for new readers, is absolutely essential for anyone who wants an early reading of what this century is going to be like. And in an unusual twist for the Amis canon, the book does attempt a redemptive conclusion. Perhaps Amis' dark and cynical imagination is beginning to move out into the light.
The themes and characters are familiar Amis tropes - low life crooks, the upper classes, pornography, and the "category-error" of rampant male violence. But "Yellow Dog" does see Amis branching out in the form to an extent not seen since 1991's "Time's Arrow". While the prose is versatile, endlessly inventive and cuttingly precise, Amis opts here for a fragmented form, stuttering and abrupt, that brilliantly reflects his central concerns. This is very much a 21st century novel, and it is permeated with a feeling of discontinuity and dull paranoia. It is also, as we have come to expect, very, very funny.
Occasionally this style doesn't quite pull together, and the ending (as is usual for an Amis book) isn't quite satisfactory, but there is no one else in the country who is producing literature as edgy and stylised as this. Amis is a modern master, and "Yellow Dog", while not being the best introduction for new readers, is absolutely essential for anyone who wants an early reading of what this century is going to be like. And in an unusual twist for the Amis canon, the book does attempt a redemptive conclusion. Perhaps Amis' dark and cynical imagination is beginning to move out into the light.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
A review from the continent
As a reviewer from the continent, I am blissfully unaware of what has made Martin Amis (MA) such a controversial person in his homeland. Read more
Published on 20 Feb 2010 by P. A. Doornbos
WE ARE NOT AMUSED
Juvenal called his book of satires a `farrago', and the word fits Yellow Dog very well. It's satire, it's a farrago of many different themes and plots, and it's a very clever... Read more
Published on 4 Feb 2009 by DAVID BRYSON
Yellow Dog? Dog's dinner
Amis's first novel proper since 1996's The Information is a profound disappointment. The "great stylist" seems to have started believing his press and delivered a book that is all... Read more
Published on 2 Aug 2004 by Thirsty Dog
Decidedly average
This is the first book by Martin Amis that I've read, and if its indicative of the quality his other books, then I think it will be my last. Read more
Published on 28 July 2004 by J. Poulton
crash, bang, where's me cheesy wotsit
It's silly to worry about Yellow Dog. If you live in England and watch the telly and get haughty then you'll have nothing to worry about. You won't understand it. You'll enjoy it. Read more
Published on 25 July 2004 by 2cleverbyhalf
A difficult Amis
First of all, Amis' writing in Yellow Dog has never been bettered - there are passages of absolutely blatant showboating, wonderful flights of language, and at least two of his... Read more
Published on 25 May 2004 by Peter Fenelon
A difficult Amis
First of all, Amis' writing in Yellow Dog has never been bettered - there are passages of absolutely blatant bravura writing, and at least two of his characters are immortals -... Read more
Published on 25 May 2004 by Peter Fenelon
Heavy-Handed Satire of Porn, Sexual Relations and Pretension
Do you ever feel like you cannot escape someone trying to sell you unwanted pornography, sexual aids, "dating services", information about "celebrities" and ridiculous ideas for... Read more
Published on 5 May 2004 by Donald Mitchell
Don't believe the anti-hype
Structurally tight, balanced, accurate, and most importantly, very funny, Yellow Dog is nothing like the book that was inexplicably panned by some critics. Read more
Published on 5 Feb 2004
Neither as good nor as bad as you've heard
Spasmodically funny, clever and inventive it may be, but there's nothing here to engage the reader emotionally, and the intellectual bite of the novel isn't enough to justify such... Read more
Published on 17 Nov 2003
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