Rating: 
Summary: Yellow Dog lover.
Review: Readers will either love or hate London writer, Martin Amis's tenth novel, YELLOW DOG, a satire on the "obscenification of everyday life" in the twenty-first century. Amis's principal character, Xan Meo (a "heroic multitasker" and "Renaissance Man"), suffers a head injury when he is violently attacked in the book's opening sentences, an injury which transforms him from "a dream husband" (a "big, calm, slow-moving, encouraging, approving, protective, affectrionate man," p. 209) into a sexy, sadistic beast. In one subplot, Clint Smoker (aka "Yellow Dog"), a tabloid journalist with a small penis, pursues his fetish for "e-love, e-eros, e-amour" on the internet, while making up erotic letters for the "wankers" who read his smutty columns in the "Morning Lark." In another subplot, all the eyes of the the world are focused on scandalous photos of 15-year-old Princess Victoria, the future Queen of England. Meanwhile, both a transatlantic airliner and a meteor are on a collision course with earth. As one might expect, Amis's storyline gets rather complex. I read this terrific novel in a single, snowy day in Boulder. As a caveat emptor, YELLOW DOG is a naughty DOG, and not your ordinary breed. While it is clever, bizarre, and laugh-out-loud funny, YELLOW DOG also tends to run wild over the course of 339 pages, occasionally even getting away its reader. While some may find this pursuit of Amis's strange DOG a bit frustrating, others, like me, will consider themselves YELLOW DOG lovers in the end. G. Merritt
Rating: 
Summary: This is A Dog, try a Baby Instead.
Review: The title's right: this book is a DOG. I couldn't make out much of a story at all, but that's ok, as sometimes style makes up for it. It doesn't. The only thing Amis does well is characters. Try Dead Babies, an earlier Amis piece. It's shorter and punchier.
Rating:
Summary: More Like a Bunch of Short Stories
Review: There are a lot of short stories going on here and each is linked to the other...is the premise...yet finding these connections is difficult or the connection is confusing...I found reading each interesting yet was quite unfullfilled from the connection. The confusion with why is this relevant continues to occur even with re-reading. I finished the book and still cannot tell you what happened in the last chapter...was it literal or not? And mostly the very beginning, I am still confused as to why Meo was attacked at all...we are supposed to believe it is because he used a man's name in print? A fictionous name that is the same as a violent man [with a relatively generic name] would track him down to strike him down? It just doesn't make sense...and the blackmail plot...doesn't make sense...why do it? Seems unnecessary for the means, etc. etc. Save your money unless you are already a fan of his...then you may get it...
Rating: 
Summary: Finish it, then forget it
Review: This is a disappointing work when compared to Money and London Fields and even Amis's shorter works such as Night Train and Other People. The book is all over the place really, but tangled up in the mess are dazzling threads of Amis's sublime wordsmithery. The behaviour of the characters strains credibility to breaking point and by the time you get near the end, you just want them all to f*** off. But maybe that's the point...
Rating: 
Summary: The Descent of Xan
Review: This novel's multi-layered plot defies the short summary. At the most fundamental level Yellow Dog is about the descent and subsequent return of Xan Meo, the novel's central character. The proximate cause of his fall from grace is a violent blow to the head intentionally inflicted as an act of revent in response to an inadvertent revelation in Xan's book, Lucozade. Xan's descent is evolutionary: from modern husband/father to a lower rung on the evolutionary societal ladder (but one tied to his past). This is a world, alas, not entirely foreign to today's readers. Still it is a long way from paradise. Here, for Xan, and manny of the people he encounters, incest tempts, tempers erupt and ordinary cognitive capabilities seem out of reach. We are cruising the primitive backwaters here -- petty, violent thugs, porn stars (a remarkably likeable lot in these pages), voyeurs and extortionists. Yellow Dog can at times seem frustratingly disorganized; yet Amis pulls the puzzle pieces together by the novel's end. Readers would do well to pay attention to the opening pages -- indeed the opening passage of this novel; it will begin to surface again, albeit in reversed form as Xan begins to regain his footing. In fact, the appearance of a plot in disarray is entirely deceptive. This novel is remarkably self-contained, including an explanation of its limitations: "You don't think it's shocking anymore?...look at the future .. we're not frightened." Yellow Dog does assume an audience capable of being "shocked," of distinguishing normalcy from the moral void, right from wrong.
Rating:
Summary: Interesting ideas + Characters, but why should I care?
Review: When I read a newspaper review of this book, I thought, "Wow, this sounds weird and quirky, just how I like books to be." And so I waited patiently for it to arrive at the library.
Little did I know that I'd have it for way past the due date because it took FOREVER for me to finish it, and normally I go through books fast. The reasons for this are thus: Though the characters have interesting traits and I wondered what was going to happen to them...I didn't CARE what was going to happen to them. They didn't have enough personality. No matter how bizarre the circumstances became, I didn't plug along asking myself, "What is going to happen to ____?!" Other things that annoyed me in this book are the attempts to be confusing, by naming certain characters with pronouns or common words like And, He, and so on. This just distracted me from the story, and when you're a good writer, you should want people to become immersed in your world, not have them trying to figure out what the hell you mean. So I made myself finish this novel because I kept hoping it would improve. When I got to the end, the first thing I said, out loud, to a room of people was, "Well, that was a waste of time." Not the best first impression, Martin Amis.
Rating:
Summary: Interesting ideas + Characters, but why should I care?
Review: When I read a newspaper review of this book, I thought, "Wow, this sounds weird and quirky, just how I like books to be." And so I waited patiently for it to arrive at the library.
Little did I know that I'd have it for way past the due date because it took FOREVER for me to finish it, and normally I go through books fast. The reasons for this are thus: Though the characters have interesting traits and I wondered what was going to happen to them...I didn't CARE what was going to happen to them. They didn't have enough personality. No matter how bizarre the circumstances became, I didn't plug along asking myself, "What is going to happen to ____?!" Other things that annoyed me in this book are the attempts to be confusing, by naming certain characters with pronouns or common words like And, He, and so on. This just distracted me from the story, and when you're a good writer, you should want people to become immersed in your world, not have them trying to figure out what the hell you mean. So I made myself finish this novel because I kept hoping it would improve. When I got to the end, the first thing I said, out loud, to a room of people was, "Well, that was a waste of time." Not the best first impression, Martin Amis.
|
