With wit-whittled woe and more bons mots than bonhomie, Martin Amis' sardonic and misanthropic tales of misery and imagination often smack of a postmodern Algonquin and malice in a wonderland of cranky perversity and stinging, nihilistic cynicism. Get warm and fuzzy somewhere else; down these novelistic rabbit holes lies a rabidly unwholesome world where a Nabokovian love of language reigns supreme over sometimes sketchy stories and even sketchier characters, often by design.
"If the prose isn't there," this long-standing and influential UK bad boy once noted in setting forth his priorities, "then you're reduced to what are merely secondary interests, like story, plot, characterization, psychological insight and form."
Still, whether Amis is considered a comic genius or a past-his-prime "malevolent harpie," his previous eleven fictional works of dry Brit lit writ wry and satiric are fit for a Kingsley, and back up the style with a good dose of substance. Dazzling verbal pyrotechnics and pretty poison prose not only couch some intriguing ideas and new twists on old ones, but also complement those pesky, "mere" incidentals like structure, action and maybe even a good guy or two discernible in the wordplay, and sometimes irritating but mostly rewarding fun-zone narratives.
For all its tangents and entanglements in a picaresque, apocalyptic, party-over-oops 1999 slit-wrist setting, 1989's bitter and ambitious London Fields remains a multilayered and successfully sustained social satire merging a mystic murder mystery with the ecological and spiritual concerns that exist in a world that feels "more and more nugatory." Methinks he doth roman a clef too much, but the smaller-scale and savvy story of midlife angst and literary rivalry and scheming that lies at heart of The Information (1995) constitutes a barbed commentary on contemporary culture, and presents the main character's contrariness that may serve as an apt summation of the Amis challenge to readers who will work for food for thought: "He didn't want to please the readers. He wanted to stretch them until they twanged."
But despite his best efforts, Amis was at his most stretch-free pleasing in The Night Train (1997), a slim, undernourished, noirish anti-police procedural with matching anti-climax that is nonetheless a Chandler-esque and moody diversion replete with the requisite "jumpers, stumpers, dumpers, dunkers, bleeders, floaters, poppers, bursters."
With the discombobulated and disjointed novel, Yellow Dog, the ever-experimental Amis goes amiss and pulls off an off-putting put-on. With carefree linearity unbeholden to permeating cause and effect, it is disheartening to behold something so pervasively caustic and affected, pointed but pointless, unredeemed by much in the way of compelling, realized themes or entertainment value. Bursting with scattershot sendups and wide-ranging ruminations on marriage, violence, airline terror, Hollywood, pornography, incest, tabloid journalism and a bizarro-world royal family, the rudderless arbitrariness and the sound and fury and all that that signifies is encapsulated early on in one character's plaint: "He sniffed the essential wrongness of the air, with its fucked-up undertaste, as if all the sequiturs had been vacuumed out of it. A yellow-world of faith and fear, and paltry ingenuity. And all of us just flying blind."
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