Yellow Dog

A brilliant, painful, dazzling, and funny as hell novel about a family man who is attacked in a garden and suddenly becomes an anti-husband and anti-father, from "one of the greatest novelists of his generation" (TIME)

“Amis is a stone-solid genius...a dazzling star of wit and insight.” —The Wall Street Journal


When “dream husband” Xan Meo is vengefully assaulted in the garden of a London pub, he suffers head injury, and personality change. He submits to an alien moral systemone 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; and the porno tycoon, Cora Susan.

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” that 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.

If, in the 21st century, the moral reality is changing, then the novel is changing too, whether it likes it or not. Yellow Dog is a model of how the novel, or more particularly the comic novel, can respond to this transformation.

But Martin Amis is also concerned here with what is changeless and perhaps unchangeable. Patriarchy, and the entire edifice of masculinity; the enormous category-error of violence, arising between man and man; the tortuous alliances between men and women; and the vanished dream (probably always an illusion, but now a clear delusion) that we can protect our future and our progeny.
“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

“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

“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 is the author of fourteen previous novels, the memoir Experience, two collections of stories, and seven nonfiction books. He lives in Brooklyn. View titles by Martin Amis

About

A brilliant, painful, dazzling, and funny as hell novel about a family man who is attacked in a garden and suddenly becomes an anti-husband and anti-father, from "one of the greatest novelists of his generation" (TIME)

“Amis is a stone-solid genius...a dazzling star of wit and insight.” —The Wall Street Journal


When “dream husband” Xan Meo is vengefully assaulted in the garden of a London pub, he suffers head injury, and personality change. He submits to an alien moral systemone 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; and the porno tycoon, Cora Susan.

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” that 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.

If, in the 21st century, the moral reality is changing, then the novel is changing too, whether it likes it or not. Yellow Dog is a model of how the novel, or more particularly the comic novel, can respond to this transformation.

But Martin Amis is also concerned here with what is changeless and perhaps unchangeable. Patriarchy, and the entire edifice of masculinity; the enormous category-error of violence, arising between man and man; the tortuous alliances between men and women; and the vanished dream (probably always an illusion, but now a clear delusion) that we can protect our future and our progeny.

Reviews

“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

“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

“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

Author

MARTIN AMIS is the author of fourteen previous novels, the memoir Experience, two collections of stories, and seven nonfiction books. He lives in Brooklyn. View titles by Martin Amis