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| Off The Shelves Reviewed by Bookstaff January 2004 FICTION Dog Eat Dog, by Jon Mooallem  Martin Amis, Yellow Dog (Miramax Books, 2003)Yellow Dog has taken a stern beating. Tibor Fischer thoroughly crushed Martin Amis’s new novel in advance of its UK publication this summer, setting off a round of literary squabbling in the British press. Fischer, writing in the Telegraph, asserted that Golden Boy Amis, at middle age, is washed up, and watching it all unfold in print is, "like your favourite uncle being caught in a school playground, masturbating." But Fischer also flagrantly mentioned that his own novel was due to hit shelves the same day as Yellow Dog— and boy was he relieved. After all, "No one wants a masterpiece knocking around when your own book is looking for attention." Fischer’s piece is not without its legitimate criticisms (and it was followed by similarly disparaging reviews in the States). Yet his exaggerated attack, taken with his conflict of interest, is ironic. Yellow Dog is in large part a treatise on male power and the violence its pursuit necessitates, on the Alpha Male and that unappeasable other— him with a zero safety pinned to his chest, fecklessly sprinting ahead. Thus it’s tough to tell whether Fischer was reviewing the book, or enacting it. Amis’s first new novel in six years is a roaring hulk of a book, with its legion of protagonists and plot lines. Like his other London-set novels it is inventive, witty, and unrelentingly bleak. Xan Meo, respectable London "Renaissance Man" and husband, is bludgeoned by mysterious hit men. As he recovers from the head wound, he regresses into a brute. He’s crass, he’s depraved, and his American wife, Russia, doesn’t want him around their daughters. Joseph Andrews, the expatriate geriatric crime lord who may be behind the attack, is now plotting something a lot larger. Mal, his hired muscle, is developing a conscience. Meanwhile, Clint Smoker, ace porn journalist, keeps London wanking. And the King of England (surname England) is a wreck— his wife is in a coma and his daughter has been surreptitiously videotaped in the bath. A strange species of extortion ensues. Bugger, a royal advisor, is working to uncover the perpetrator, and is smitten with the underage heiress. Fucktown, a porn industry enclave in Southern California, is doing what it does best. A plane with a corpse in its hull is going down; it’s the corpse’s fault. And, oh yeah, a comet the size of Los Angeles is screeching toward earth like "a terrible old man on a terrible old errand." It’s all good enough fun, though only two thirds into Yellow Dog does Amis really seem to have all of these various plates up in the air and spinning. And this sense of narrative proficiency— and, consequently, of substantiated reader-ly trust— wavers somewhat in the novel’s final third when Amis must go about resolving them all. Given the somewhat raggedy plot structure, Amis may intend Yellow Dog’s unifying factor to be its musings on male violence. It may be, to its detriment, first and foremost a novel of ideas. So many characters are sunk in the desperate power politics of what it is to be male and— more prickly yet, and more revolting— what it is to be half of the male-female equation, where sex and violence are often conflated. (Sex is simply what everyone in Yellow Dog has in common— from the readers of Clint’s paper, all the way up to the Royal Palace, where even Bugger must "attend to the ordeal of his own arousal.") Pedophilia, porn, and semen are among Yellow Dog’s major fixations, often intersecting with palpable icky-ness. ("What would a baby look like, made of that stuff?" asks Clint, after spending himself in a prostitute’s hair.) Ultimately, the book speculates that the shrapnel from all this male aggression inevitably nicks the kids. Some of Amis’s most striking, most eerie passages depict Xan beginning to fear himself and what horrible sexual things he may or may not do to his young daughter. The book closes with a haunting flashback to Xan’s own violent childhood. Even Tibor Fischer concedes that Amis’s prose is as hard-hitting and graceful as ever, a pleasure to read regardless of the book’s weaknesses. Yellow Dog sparks with Amis’s well-spun, remarkable perspicacity. On weather: "The weather was of the type that was still politely described as blustery. A ragged and bestial turbulence, in fact, a rodeo of wind— the earth trying to throw its riders." On emergency landing: "One scorching ricochet, one hurt, wounded rearing-up with slats and panels flying off it, then touchdown, the resilient gathering of its rigidity, and on it powered beyond the cauldron of its wake." But yes, Mr. Fischer, we’re left with the sense that there is simply too much in this book, too many leitmotifs half-heartedly begging analysis. (Even Amis seems to lose interest in the teenage panhandler pretending to be homeless and hearing about it from his middle class mum.) In a novel where even a few of the central characters seem to be individuated solely by superficial attributes or situations or verbal tics— sketched in to emblematize one or another virtue like the Saints— it’s tough to sort out what’s meant to be veracious human drama and what’s there solely for the sake of profundity. At first, the comet seems like one such case. This backdrop of impending, absolute destruction is a device Amis has used before. (In London Fields, perhaps his best novel, the role was played by strange weather.) But what’s peculiar about the comet is that no one in Yellow Dog seems to be all that bothered about it— a mention here, a mention eighty pages later. Folks toss it in casually when conversation lulls— "So when’s the comet due then?" Even one of Amis’s characters, porn star Karla White, finally has to wonder: "Don’t you think we’re all being incredibly cool about the comet?" But Karla eventually answers her own question: "Nobody cares about the comet because it’s not our fault." Amis has said that on September 12, 2001 the "comic novel" he was writing became exponentially weightier— that every novelist in the world suddenly regarded his role as a professional maker-upper otiose and self-centered. Amis himself has published a good deal of searing political pieces since, and Yellow Dog wears its preoccupation with current events on its sleeve. (Xan Meo, when attacked, hits the pavement rigidly like "the statue of a fallen tyrant.") Yellow Dog may suggest that in the multi-faceted horror of our world, we can barely keep up with that for which we’re explicitly culpable: the hurt levied by the basest of our base instincts and the negligent hurt—that which still manages to seep out from behind our "developed set of rational contemporary attitudes," as Russia puts it. Overburdened with our own muddle, we falter. Yellow Dog points out the problem well enough, but it also suffers from it. Jon Mooallem is a writer based in Brooklyn. FICTION World War II Flashbacks, by Jana Prikryl  Kaylie Jones, Speak Now (Akashic Books, 2003)Speak Now, Kaylie Jones’s fifth novel, is a kind of historical fiction by proxy. Playing with that genre’s rearview-mirror warning, that objects behind you "may be larger than they appear," Jones offers two storylines— one up close, the other far off but ever-present. The core story will be familiar to anyone who has seen Sandra Bullock’s rehab tribulations in the movie 28 Days: the year is 1995, and a young woman named Clara Sverdlow, addicted to alcohol and drugs, with a no-good stalker ex-boyfriend named Niko, tries to make a go of it with her new husband Mark, a rising New York art star (also a former addict) and their infant daughter. Fair enough. But Jones adds a back-story, and that back-story is the Holocaust. Clara’s father Viktor is a camp survivor (and now a linguistics professor in Connecticut). Her mother (one of Viktor’s American students) died during childbirth, and Clara has been raised with the help of Anya, another survivor whose life Viktor saved at Auschwitz. Clara’s current existence in New York City as a social worker is constantly interrupted with flashbacks to the 1970s, when she was a teenager whose alcoholic father was racked by memories of the war. This juxtaposition between Clara’s addiction and Viktor’s past is the book’s real theme. At the end, after struggles with her stalker and her sobriety, Clara understands that all her private troubles had a very public, political cause: "She realized now that she’d never had a clear boundary drawn between what was acceptable and what was not. What was sane behavior and what was not. Now she knew. Now she knew and she could draw the line." Our heroine has finally awoken from the nightmare of history and can put the booze and quaaludes behind her. The first thing anyone mentions about Kaylie Jones is her pedigree: she is James Jones’s daughter, and even with five books to her name, his novels about the Second World War (including From Here to Eternity) continue to eclipse her byline. It seems natural that father-daughter relationships and a sort of doomed, WWII-tinged machismo should figure big in Jones fille’s fiction— and that she might have something new to say on these matters. But in this latest book, Jones struggles with language, at times crashing into awkward metaphors as she bends to get inside her characters. When Clara meets Mark at the rehab center, their budding love affair sounds literally fishy: "During meals in the too-bright Stillwell cafeteria, her eyes and Mark’s would lock across the crowd of bustling heads and they would be drawn like two mackerels flopping toward each other from opposite sides of a fishing boat’s bloody deck." It’s also possible to keep a running tally of "heart" references in the text: "Mark’s heart felt like it had received an electric shock," "they made her heart soar," "His heart is thundering," "Mark’s heart constricted in his chest," and so on. You begin to anticipate coronary events whenever the story turns introspective. The rest of the time, the prose is efficient to a fault, breezing through contemporary events and memories as though the novel were its own plot summary— or, perhaps, its own screenplay. Scenes are set with an eye for film noir and camera focus, rather than for wordplay or idea-germination: "Blackstone chose a table by a large window. Rain dripped down the outside of the glass, obscuring the street. Blurry red and white lights glided past." The moodiness of detail does create an oppressive atmosphere, as well as a certain Grisham-like tension, but there’s nothing urgently new about this genre of suspense. Jones’s ability to structure the various timelines and flashbacks stands out as the book’s most solid achievement. Plenty of careful research went into these pages, and Jones’s emotional and moral commitment to her story is clear. Some of the details are also nicely crafted: Mark’s firefighting brother Lionel has cashed in on his life-saving profession by selling cookbooks and branding himself the "Firefighter Chef." Still, even this bit of color feels imported from a more "contemporary" novel, something lighter and edgier and more satirical. Competent without being challenging, Speak Now raises ethical questions that have been better handled by books like Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow. Even when Amis’s novel came out ten years ago to critical praise, a review in The Washington Post began with the line, "Martin Amis has the Aryan cheek to be sporting with the Holocaust." But Jones’s touch is too heavy to sport with anything, and precisely because she fails to add new or transformative insights to the Holocaust discourse, she risks being accused of exploiting the event. Speak Now features a 30-something in the 1990s, who blames her drug habit on a ripple-effect that began with the persecution of Jews in the 1930s: no doubt there’s some way to make that premise convincing, but this novel hasn’t found it, and in its absence you wonder whether a less loaded topic might have lent equal traction to Clara’s story. Jana Prikryl is a writer based in Manhattan. |
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The Rail invites you to a reading with Jason Flores-Williams and Brian Carreira, along with musical guest Steve Strunsky of the Lonesome Prairie Dogs. Thurs., Sept. 22, 8:30 p.m. Vox Pop--Flatbush, Brooklyn www.voxpop.net |
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OFF THE RAIL FALL 2005 at the Central Branch of the Brooklyn Public Library - Grand Army Plaza |
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The Independent Press Association-NY recently honored The Brooklyn Rail with the following awards: |