A man behaving badly wags this 'Dog' tale

Duane Davis, Special to the News

Friday, November 21, 2003

Yellow Dog, as is often the case with Martin Amis, seems to have more testosterone than ink on the page.

Using what he himself calls "31/2 plots," Amis examines the devastating effects of violence, physical and emotional, on a set of characters you might not want to spend an evening with, but probably wouldn’t mind listening in on during their dinner conversation.

Most importantly, we have Xan Meo, his second wife, Russia, and his first wife, Pearl. Xan, an actor, short-story writer and rhythm guitarist, is, as Amis writes, "steadily recuperating from his first marriage. But he knew he would never be over his divorce."

This plot thread is, then, a wedding song of disaster. Having failed in his first, Xan is determined to succeed in his second marriage. What this means, in Amis’s world, is that he works at it.

Amis gives us the back story: In his first marriage, Xan was a pig (of the male chauvinist variety) and a terrible husband.

This in turn helped create a terrible wife: Pearl. They busied themselves with the insults, large and small, that marriage is prey to: humiliation, sadism, infidelity, the infinite varieties of interpersonal cruelty. Xan and Pearl finally separate when their children go on a hunger strike to protest the marriage.

As the book opens, Xan appears to be making a go of it with his second trip to the altar. He has become a dependable father and a considerate husband. The care with which he maps out his activities in these roles takes a lot of the romance out of the relationship, but there is stability and a kind of harmony, if not happiness, in the home.

All this is put in jeopardy when Xan is attacked by the appropriately named Mal Bale. A head injury knocks the pins out from under Xan’s hard-won marriage discipline: He starts to oink a little at the hospital and by the time he gets home to his wife and kids, he is a complete swine.

How he struggles back from this Circe’s spell is the true heart of the book. It is not a completely convincing journey. Amis is much better at showing men behaving badly than he is at creating a living, breathing, sympathetic male. (I understand his dilemma: It is undoubtedly more fun to run with the devil — and of course there is the simple fact that, men being men and all, there is so much more evidence available to condemn us than there is to acquit us.)

Xan’s story — along with a savage, scurrilous caricature of romance in the person of tabloid journalist Clint Smoker (whose best sex was always practiced on women who have passed out from an excess of alcohol), and an unsteady if intermittently affecting portrait of a fictional king, Henry IX (whose wife, the queen, is in a coma following a riding accident and whose teenage daughter has been caught on videotape in a compromising situation) — forms a braid of narrative that is not always strong enough to carry the book, especially when compared with some of Amis’s earlier works.

Still, the raw fury of his prose and the sharp, harassing invective of his bleak jibes and black insolence regarding the frailties of our society are a warning that we must all beware the seductive lures of behaving badly, of behaving, well, like men.

Duane Davis is a freelance writer living in Littleton.