YELLOW DOG, by Martin Amis, Hyperion, 339 pages, $24.95.
Martin Amis, one of Britain's more controversial/celebrated novelists, has created even more controversy with his latest book, "Yellow Dog."
What seems to upset the English the most about this book is the subject of father-daughter incest — yet that theme is slight and practically mild compared to the scores of pages Amis devotes to pornography.
When Amis writes of porno films, his language is obscene. The description of the lives of porn stars is excruciating. If the pornographic section of this book came first, instead of toward the end, Amis would have few readers. But no, "Yellow Dog" starts off quite beguilingly.
Amis proves what a capable writer he is in the first half of the book. His characters are funny. His phrases are fresh.
One of Amis' best characters is a columnist for the tabloid papers, one Clint Smoker. (His girlfriend's name is Rehab.)
Early in the book, Smoker's editor is rethinking his position on child abuse. He'd come out against child abusers but had seen no increase in readership. Smoker is assigned to defend an accused abuser.
As the novel progresses, Smoker goes from making light of perversion to making light of other crimes, such as larceny and assault. "So some old boiler in Hammersmith got smacked about a bit by a couple of lads while they were relieving her of her pension," Smoker writes.
"Now that's well naughty lads, and don't do it again. But spare us the violins, okay. Spare us the clock-stopping photos of the biddy with the black eye . . . and . . . get well soon, Gran, if you must."
The main character in "Yellow Dog" is a man named Xan Meo. In the first pages, Meo goes out to a pub and ends up beaten and brain-damaged. Before his little outing, Meo was a great guy, a devoted father and husband. After he comes home from the hospital, he's almost as weird and perverse and violent as the society around him.
This is Amis' point, of course. He believes our modern world is sick. He proceeds to drag the reader through so many pages of sick, that pornography eventually becomes boring.
This may be a secondary lesson of "Yellow Dog." If you didn't know it before, Amis proves that pornography is boring — and depressing.
In the end, Meo's brain gets better. He remembers what love feels like and he goes back to his wife. It is a nice ending, and if it had come 150 pages earlier, it might have saved the book.
E-mail: susan@desnews.com