The Times dumps on the dog

[an excerpt from "Tiring old tricks," by Erica Wagner, the Times (London), 3 September 2003, Features Times2 18; posted on the Martin Amis Discussion Web by "Transfigured Sammy Snead," 3 September 2003, 4:07 p.m.]

What happens to a young novelist when he is no longer young? For "young novelist" isn't, necessarily, simply about age. When WG Sebald died, a writer I know remarked sadly that the loss was particularly great, as Sebald was clearly born to be an older novelist: a very perceptive remark. Of Martin Amis, though, one might say quite the opposite. His concerns, from the beginning of his career to this latest effort, YELLOW DOG, have been those of youth: youth wishes to shock, wishes to impress with style, is concerned with the world to the extent that it impinges on the consciousness of the self---this last trait expecially evident in his last two books, EXPERIENCE and KOBA THE DREAD. He is not, as a writer, any more in the shadow of his father; he stands rather in the shade of his younger self.

YELLOW DOG begins with a bow to Dickens: "But I go to Hollywood but I go to hospital, but you are first but you are last, but he is tall but she is small..." It does indeed seem to be the worst of times, somewhere in the 21st century, when actor/writer Xan Meo gets assaulted outside a pub because it's assumed that a reference in his acclaimed short-story collection, LUCOZADE, slights one Joseph Andrews, career criminal---to whom, it must be said, Meo's own shady family is not unconnected. But Xan has left behind wicked past, bad marriage, set himself up again as a good husband and father, a fine upstanding North London type. A cosh to the head effects, however, a personality change and Xan is back in the sink of himself, rutting and sweating, sucked down so far that his behaviour with his little daughter Billie becomes, as the saying goes, inappropriate. He becomes involved in pornography---"I don't watch pornography", Xan claims, to the rebuttal: "You mean you say you don't watch pornography"---and indeed, it would be hard to avoid in the world of graphic image which Amis depicts.

So graphic image is piled on graphic image: Meo's world intersects with that of Clint Smoker, sleazy tabloid hack, columnist for the loathsome Morning Lark and man who never ceases to worry about the size of his penis; threaded through too is the image of Princess Victoria, daughter of King Henry IX (it's the real world, reader, but not as we know it) who's been caught on camera doing something in the bath. Meanwhile, in an aeroplane high above these folk, the corpse of one Royce Traynor is capable, even in death, of causing disaster.

Story, here, is not the point. You don't read Amis for story. He has little truck with readers who look for characters to "believe" in; that's not his game and it never has been. Language is his game, and the holding of a mirror up to the anti-nature we seem to find ourselves living in. So the trouble with YELLOW DOG has two sources. The first is that there's only so far a certain kind of language can go. I stopped on the first page of this novel: "'Ooh', she said, pronouncing it like the French for where." How else would that be pronounced? Such games, for the sake of it, pall---unless, as in MONEY, the games introduce us to a voice that is not the voice of the author. Here are the "moist studs of the stars", a baby's highchair like a pair of medieval underpants bolted to a table---but why?

Why arises from the second source of this novel's trouble; in part it's not Amis's fault. What can shock us anymore? We see everything; we don't care. This is what haunts Amis: if there is or was a barrier, he himself has already broken through it. TIME'S ARROW took on the Holocaust and, as a novel, just about survived. Xan Meo's name echoes John Self's, and much in this novel reflects or refracts the world of MONEY (put Fielding Goodney next to Joseph Andrews, for instance). But Self's narration, in MONEY, makes the reader complicit: there's the shock. In YELLOW DOG, the narration keeps the reader at arm's length. It's not that the reader doesn't care---Amis wouldn't care about that---it's that the reader can't be bothered. Thick with language, thick with self and literary reference, the novel is stuffed to bursting: yet there's something ersatz about it all, forced and straining. It claims to be a comic novel; but comedy must feel effortless. This is anything but.

So where does the once-enfant-terrible of English letters go from here? One is not looking, in Amis, for what he has called "the literature of ingratiation". But all writers need to make themselves new, and there are no new tricks in this YELLOW DOG. Amis has given us the noise of the 21st century; but he gave it to us way back before the 20th century was over. In essays he has addressed the difficulty of writing novels after the events of September 11; at the same time he has recognised that the artist's voice will always make itself heard, if it is worthy to be heard. As the world changes, so must the writer: one sees little sign, in YELLOW DOG, of any change in Martin Amis.