Newspaper Article

A Culture of Obscenity

Benjamin Kunkel. Benjamin Kunkel is a writer in New York

2003

Overview

This must also be the reason that his new novel, his first in five years, has been so eagerly anticipated. Surely [Martin Amis] would reveal himself at last as a grown-up? Instead, \"Yellow Dog,\" set in London, follows and emulates the reversion to thuggery, boorishness and lust of a formerly decent and even feminist man named Xan Meo. A set of improbabilities has lead Xan to insult, by accident, a geriatric crime boss who then sics one of his heavies on Xan. Head- injured, Xan in his convalescence swears in front of his children, does his best to rape his wife, drinks prodigiously and even ogles the body of his 4-year-old daughter. \"Male violence,\" as Amis calls it, has turned Xan into a violent male, restoring his kinship with his monster of a father and rendering him a representative creature of Anglo-American civilization with its culture of rote prurience. Amis sees this culture as having mobilized the drives of aggression and lust to the exclusion of just about everything else. He calls it \"the obscenification of daily life,\" and his book participates with unseemly relish. The complicated and mechanical plot serves mostly to throw his characters into a kind of group grope. We have a porn actress (abused as a child, natch); the ill- favored writer for a pornographic London tabloid (his nose \"a considerable accumulation of flesh, but one uninfluenced by cartilage\"); the cognitively challenged king of England; his teenage daughter, the princess, whose sexual experiments have been intruded upon, filmed and distributed to eager consumers reading with one hand, and so on. There is a suburb called Foulness, an SUV model known as the Avenger, a guy named Semen Figner. Furthermore, Amis allows us to look on as an airliner goes down, the favored last word of passengers and crew alike being that old Anglo-Saxon term for the sexual act. You get the idea - and so, it would seem, does even the natural world: \"In the west a garish, indeed a porno sunset had established itself.\"

• Publisher: Newsday LLC
• Subject: Amis, Martin / Meo, Xan