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Overview
Martin Amis’s brilliant and controversial new novel, already hailed in the British press as “Dickens with a snarl” and a “great comic extravagance.”
After Xan Meo is brutally attacked in the garden of a London pub and suffers a severe head trauma, his wife and daughters find they are living with a stranger—unpredictable, violent, vengeful, lost: “His condition felt like the twenty-first century: it was something you wanted to wake up from.”
While it may alarm his family, Xan’s new personality is a good match for the city and the age in which he lives. For this is the vicious London of tabloid journalist Clint Smoker, whose daily reports of illicit sex and outrageous scandal are every bit as fake (and artful) as the noose tattooed around his neck. This is a world where the King of England keeps a Chinese mistress in Paris and tries to suppress a video-taped, bathtub “intrusion” of his fifteen- year-old daughter from reaching the internet. A world of hit men, pornographers, tycoons, and displaced royalty. A world where brilliant people perform unspeakable acts and bodyguards provide no protection.
Yellow Dog is Martin Amis at his dazzling best—comic, fierce, gritty, and profound. Amis explores what is changeless and perhaps unchangeable: patriarchy and the entire edifice of masculinity; the violence arising between man and man; the tortuous alliances between men and women; and the vanished dream that we can protect our future and our progeny.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
MARTIN AMIS’s most recent book was Koba the Dread. He lives in London
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9781101910276 |
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Publisher: | Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group |
Publication date: | 09/17/2014 |
Series: | Vintage International |
Sold by: | Random House |
Format: | eBook |
Pages: | 352 |
Sales rank: | 790,411 |
File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Hometown:
Oxford, EnglandDate of Birth:
August 25, 1949Place of Birth:
Oxford, EnglandEducation:
B.A., Exeter College, OxfordRead an Excerpt
CHAPTER ONE
1. Renaissance Man
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, but you stay up but you go down, but we are rich but we are poor, but they find peace but they find . . .
Xan Meo went to Hollywood. And, minutes later, with urgent speed, and accompanied by choric howls of electrified distress, Xan Meo went to hospital. Male violence did it.
'I'm off out, me,' he told his American wife Russia.
'Ooh,' she said, pronouncing it like the French for where.
'Won't be long. I'll bath them. And I'll read to them too. Then I'll make dinner. Then I'll load the dishwasher. Then I'll give you a long backrub. Okay?'
'Can I come?' said Russia.
'I sort of wanted to be alone.'
'You mean you sort of wanted to be alone with your girl-friend.
' Xan knew that this was not a serious accusation. But he adopted an ill-used expression (a thickening of the forehead), and said, not for the first time, and truthfully so far as he knew, 'I've got no secrets from you, kid.'
'. . . Mm,' she said, and offered him her cheek.
'Don't you know the date?'
'Oh. Of course.'
The couple stood embracing in a high-ceilinged hallway. Now the husband with a movement of the arm caused his keys to sound in their pocket. His half-conscious intention was to signal an impatience to be out. Xan would not publicly agree, but women naturally like to prolong routine departures. It is the obverse of their fondness for keeping people waiting. Men shouldn't mind this. Being kept waiting is a moderate reparation for their five million years in power . . . Now Xan sighed softly as the stairs above him softly creaked. A complex figure was descending, normal up to the waist, but two-headed and four-armed: Meo's baby daughter, Sophie, cleaving to the side of her Brazilian nanny, Imaculada. Behind them, at a distance both dreamy and self-sufficient, loomed the four-year-old: Billie.
Russia took the baby and said, 'Would you like a lovely yoghurt for your tea?'
'No!' said the baby.
'Would you like a bath with all your floaty toys?'
'No!' said the baby, and yawned: the first lower teeth like twin grains of rice.
'Billie. Do the monkeys for Daddy.'
'There were too many monkeys jumping on the bed. One fell down and broke his head. They took him to the doctor and the doctor said: No more monkeys jumping on the BED.'
Xan Meo gave his elder daughter due praise.
'Daddy'll read to you when he comes back,' said Russia.
'I was reading to her earlier,' he said. He had the front door open now. 'She made me read the same book five times.'
'Which book?'
'Which book? Christ. The one about those stupid chickens who think the sky is falling. Cocky Locky. Goosey Lucy. And they all copped it from the fox, didn't they, Billie.'
'Like the frogs,' said the girl, alluding to some other tale. 'The whole family died. The mummy. The daddy. The nanny. And all the trildren.'
'I'm off out.' He kissed Sophie 's head (a faint circus smell); she responded by skidding a wet thumb across her cheek and into her mouth. And then he crouched to kiss Billie.
Table of Contents
Part I | ||
Chapter 1 | ||
1. | Renaissance Man | 3 |
2. | Hal Nine | 15 |
3. | Clint Smoker | 22 |
101 Heavy | 32 | |
Chapter 2 | ||
1. | The transfer to Trauma | 33 |
2. | Doing Beryl | 40 |
3. | On the Royal Train | 50 |
101 Heavy | 59 | |
Chapter 3 | ||
1. | The publicity of knowledge | 62 |
2. | The high-IQ moron | 69 |
3. | Excalibur | 78 |
101 Heavy | 88 | |
Chapter 4 | ||
1. | The thing which is called world | 89 |
2. | His Voluminousness | 102 |
3. | Cold Blow Lane | 115 |
101 Heavy | 130 | |
Chapter 5 | ||
1. | In the master bedroom | 132 |
2. | Storm in a teacup | 145 |
3. | Car-sweat | 158 |
101 Heavy | 174 | |
Part II | ||
Chapter 6 | ||
1. | The Decembrist | 179 |
2. | Cora Susan | 183 |
3. | Denizen | 188 |
4. | At Ewelme | 190 |
5. | 101 Heavy | 192 |
6. | Apologia--1 | 194 |
7. | We two | 200 |
8. | Use Your Head | 203 |
9. | Epithalamium | 207 |
Chapter 7 | ||
1. | We will go quietly | 212 |
2. | Weird sister | 217 |
3. | King Bastard | 220 |
4. | Cora's call on Pearl | 223 |
5. | It's Not Unusual | 226 |
6. | Size zero--1 | 231 |
7. | Size zero--2 | 238 |
8. | Not knowing again | 245 |
9. | To Otherville | 248 |
Chapter 8 | ||
1. | 101 Heavy | 254 |
2. | The face has holes in it | 255 |
3. | Apologia--2: Keith the Snake | 260 |
4. | Yellow Tongue | 266 |
5. | Cur moment | 275 |
6. | 101 Heavy | 279 |
Part III | ||
Chapter 9 | ||
1. | The syrups of the sky | 285 |
2. | Sickout at Dolorosa Drive | 290 |
3. | The principle of lullabies | 293 |
4. | Anger of the just | 299 |
5. | The Sextown Sniper | 304 |
6. | Men in power | 306 |
Chapter 10 | ||
1. | 101 Heavy | 309 |
2. | Clint prepares | 310 |
3. | Waking in the cold | 311 |
4. | Leather on willow | 312 |
5. | 101 Heavy | 313 |
6. | What do princesses want? | 314 |
7. | Simon Finger | 316 |
8. | The vestal follow | 317 |
9. | 101 Heavy | 321 |
Last Chapter | ||
1. | Courtly love | 323 |
2. | k8 | 326 |
3. | The edge of the earth | 328 |
4. | 101 Heavy | 330 |
5. | Yellow dog | 332 |
6. | When they were small | 338 |