Yellow Dog

Martin Amis

Jonathan Cape, 2003 - Fiction - 340 pages

Amis's first novel since The Information: a post 9/11 comedy When 'dream husband' Xan Meo is vengefully assaulted in the garden of a London pub, he suffers head-injury, and personality-change. Like a spiritual convert, the familial paragon becomes an anti-husband, an anti-father. He submits to an alien moral system - one among many to be found in these pages. We are introduced to the inverted worlds of the 'yellow' journalist, Clint Smoker; the high priest of hardmen, Joseph Andrews; the porno tycoon, Cora Susan; and Kent Price, the corpse in the hold of the stricken airliner, apparently determined, even in death, to bring down the plane that carries his spouse. Meanwhile, we explore the entanglements of Henry England: his incapacitated wife, Pamela; his Chinese mistress, He Zhezun; his fifteen-year-old daughter, Victoria, the victim of a filmed 'intrusion' which rivets the world - because she is the future Queen of England, and her father, Henry IX, is its King. The connections between these characters provide the pattern and drive of Yellow Dog. Novelists have noticed that contemporary reality keeps outdoing their imaginations. Yet there is still the obligation to attempt a readi

Contents

• We will go quietly: 212
• Size zero 1: 231
• CHAPTER EIGHT: 254

About the author

Martin Amis, son of the novelist Kingsley Amis, was born August 25, 1949. His childhood was spent traveling with his famous father. From 1969 to 1971 he attended Exeter College at Oxford University. After graduating, he worked for the Times Literary Supplement and later as special writer for the Observer. Amis published his first novel, The Rachel Papers, in 1973, which received the prestigious Somerset Maugham Award in 1974. Other titles include Dead Babies (1976), Other People: A Mystery Story (1981); London Fields (1989), The Information (1995), and Night Train (1997). Martin Amis has been called the voice of his generation. His novels are controversial, often satiric and dark, concentrating on urban low life. His style has been compared to that of Graham Greene, Philip Larkin and Saul Bellow, among others. He is currently Professor of Creative Writing at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester. In 2008, The Times named him one of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Yellow Dog
• Author: Martin Amis
• Publisher: Jonathan Cape, 2003
• Original from: the University of Michigan
• Digitized: Mar 4, 2008
• ISBN: 0224050613, 9780224050616
• Length: 340 pages
• Subjects: Fiction / General; Fiction / Literary