A Little Yellow Dog : Featuring an Original Easy Rawlins Short Story "Gray-Eyed Death"

A Little Yellow Dog : Featuring an Original Easy Rawlins Short Story "Gray-Eyed Death"
Average customer rating:

Potent, original, capable, sexually puerile

just like the other guy said..."too convoluted and unlikely."

Too Convoluted & Unlikely

A woman, a murder, a dog

But why is he... I had to keep asking

A Little Yellow Dog : Featuring an Original Easy Rawlins Short Story "Gray-Eyed Death"
Walter Mosley
Manufacturer: Washington Square Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | African American | United States | World Literature | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
Mosley, Walter | African American | United States | World Literature | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
General | Mystery | Mystery & Thrillers | Subjects | Books
Mosley, Walter | ( M ) | Authors, A-Z | Mystery & Thrillers | Subjects | Books
General | Mystery & Thrillers | Subjects | Books
Similar Items:

Black Betty : Featuring an Original Easy Rawlins Short Story "Gator Green"

White Butterfly

Gone Fishin': Featuring an Original Easy Rawlins Short Story "Smoke" (Easy Rawlins Mysteries)

A Red Death : Featuring an Original Easy Rawlins Short Story "Silver Lining"

Six Easy Pieces: Easy Rawlins Stories

ASIN: 0743451805
Release Date: 2002-11-19

Amazon.com

The saga of Easy Rawlins that began in 1990 with Devil in a Blue Dress, continues in A Little Yellow Dog. Working as a janitor at Sojourner Truth Junior High School, Easy is asked to care for a small dog owned by the attractive Idabell Holland, a teacher at the school. When Idabell's husband is murdered, Easy finds himself mixed up with a gang of criminals engaged in looting Los Angeles schools and smuggling heroin from France. Idabell and Easy fall into a sexual liaison, but in the wake of it, Idabell is found stabbed to death in the passenger seat of Easy's car. While at first Easy thinks the murders are a "simple falling out of thieves," a surprising twist on the level of "The Maltese Falcon" reveals the truth.

Book Description

November 1963: Easy's settled into a steady gig as a school custodian. It's a quiet, simple existence -- but a few moments of ecstasy with a sexy teacher will change all that. When the lady vanishes, Easy's stuck with a couple of corpses, the cops on his back, and a little yellow dog who's nobody's best friend. With his not-so-simple past snapping at his heels, and with enemies old and new looking to get even, Easy must kiss his careful little life good-bye -- and step closer to the edge....

Customer Reviews:

Potent, original, capable, sexually puerile .......2006-02-05

Having been knocked a bit sideways by RL's Dream I thought I'd give something else of his a go.

This guy can write. Particularly in the final third as the story builds the intensity is gripping. He capably paints a cast of gritty urban characters, and hurls his protagonist `Easy' through Marlowesque investigation, dangerous engagement with cops and crims, beating and final climactic bloody resolution (in LA, no less). Easy is a good balance of resource and vulnerability and has his virtues. In many ways this is a better than average read. Moreover there are distinctively African-American insights.

Where I hesitated to rate this any higher than a B came from the odd sexual morality. This review in a sense overstates it because it's only a minor aspect of an otherwise solid and occasionally striking book. And I'm really unsure (as an Australian Caucasian) just how to relate this to the significance of the Afro-American context. Is `Easy' meant to be a troubled individual, or is he in some ways meant to be racially emblematic? It feels like Mosley deliberately underpins the book with Negro values that, perhaps, he's happy to have at odds with my own. Or perhaps he wasn't even vaguely trying to write for an audience like me.

OK, what I'm talking about is the way that Easy - in so many ways an in control, mature, far-sighted, sharp, cool guy - seems to be consciously presented as a dumb animal in the opening scene - setting the book up more as soft-porn than a sophisticated crime novel. Easy himself is aware of the incongruity:

I'd been on good behavior for more than two years. I was out of the streets and had my job with the Los Angeles Board of Education. I took care of my kids, cashed my paychecks, stayed away from liquor.
I steered clear of the wrong women too.
Maybe I'd been a little too good. I felt an urge in that classroom, but I wasn't going to make the move.
That's when Idabell Turner kissed me.
Two years of up early and off to work dissolved like a sugar cube under the tap.

It's not merely titillation - but it is, make no mistake, titillation - and even if there's more going on, starting like that is very much a cynical use of voyeurism to get people in early. It just seems such an immature (or different?) view of sex.

Is it just stepping up the flirtations of a Chandler novel: in Farewell, My Lovely Marlowe fairly happily allows himself to play around in the seductive charms of a dangerous woman - is this simply Mosley kicking it up to 90s flirtation (i.e. from a little `foolin' around' to all the romance of instant rutting on a desk)? But I wonder if there's more - if it's simply that teenage thing of presenting a hero who has to show, "Hey, I'm in control, but I'm no prude." He's not writing James Bond farce here, so it's not excusable as daydream absurdity.

I'm skating on very thin ice here - I've got nothing to go on but the pap of the media's presentation of black America (we get plenty of US TV over here) - but is Mosley celebrating this sexual beast as part and parcel of the dormant avatar of the semi-mythical powers of the `streets' - presented here much as a dangerous magical power that can be drawn on but will exact a price. Is he deliberately suggesting that his Negro hero, as a Negro, has latent and at times uncontrollable urges for sex, risk and violence? For a white writer to hint at such animal tendencies would be, I suspect rightly, condemned as libellous racial stereotyping. Again, is this, rather, just something in `Easy', and never meant to be generalised? Sure it's the theme of a million `street' style T & A rap bluster music videos, but I thought Mosley would be somewhere beyond their openly stupid misogyny.

I suspect that Mosley would simply realise that whatever he was saying, I just didn't `get it'.

Whatever, this is one of those well written books that I just can't recommend as highly because I find something too offensive. I mean, it's not as offensive as, say, Fry's The Hippopotamus or Golsdworthy's Wish (again, both gifted writers), but I can't really just ignore the trivialisation of sex; I would have been able to thoroughly enjoy this aspect of the book if instead of sex he had have had Easy merely kiss Idabell (or, later, Bonnie). Moreover, handled well this would have been at least as powerful (and a world less gratuitous). If Easy had have, for example, found himself out of the blue passionately kissing a woman he'd hardly spoken to, when he'd had no other intimate relationship for years and was unsure about commitment, it would be just as valid to continue immediately afterwards:

When I leaned over to kiss her forehead I experienced a feeling that I'd known many times in my life. It was that feeling of elation before I embarked on some kind of risky venture. In the old days it was about the police and criminals and the streets of Watts and South Central LA.
But not this time. Not again. I swallowed hard and gritted my teeth with enough force to crack stone. I'd slipped but I would not fall.

A kiss can mean a lot. It can open up a whole new potentiality in a relationship - and be a risk that a cautious mind might regret having taken. It can also maintain an attractive innocence. I will probably be dismissed by some as being too childish in response to an adult novel. But for Mosley to treat sex like this feels juvenile to me: isn't he old enough to have worked out that commitment and relationship and sex have a bit more going on than this puerile opening daydream?

Like I said, I don't suppose I was the audience he was aiming at with that.

just like the other guy said..."too convoluted and unlikely.".......2005-06-29

"call me fool."

that's what easy rawlins says to us when idabell makes things very informal between them. that is the answer to all the questions you might have about this muddled and somewhat confusingly stupid story about a woman who could have made everything right if not for her love for a little yellow dog. when you read the book and wonder why easy did this and why he did that and how come he didn't do this smart thing or that smart thing, just remember what he tells us early on in the beginning. "call me fool."

two shady twins are dead, one of them found on the grounds of the school easy works for. through some rather unbelievable circumstances, other than because easy is black and the cops are mostly white, easy is a suspect for at least one of the killings. instead of telling the police the truth, which isn't always smart when you're black in the 60's, he lies to them. over and over again. instead of playing dumb, he lies. that's not the smartest move either. so let's just keep going with this story, calling him "fool." this "easy" fable of double homicide turns into something frighteningly worse as the gangsters get meaner, the whites get more evil and the blacks tell worse lies. when idabell asks easy to temporarily care for her "little yellow dog," everything falls to pieces and his nice little model citizen charade goes to crap, literally. before long, easy is about to get killed, about to lose his job, about to go to jail and about to clean up dog feces.

the dog, however, is very funny. he hates easy so much it's crazy. when easy is being beaten up by a bad guy, he sees the dog in the distance and waits for the dog to help out so that he could get a breather. but when the dog attacks him instead, a scene about sheer brutality becomes pretty funny.

with some backstory about several, and i do mean several, key characters, we're off and running with this yellow dog tale that doesn't disappoint nor does it relieve. it's just there. there for the moment, there for the heck of it, but there. in classic mosley fashion, we get a whirlwind of characters that we've mostly forgotten about by page one-hundred, but they return by page two-hundred as important links in this whodunnit chain. you really have to be a fan of these rawlins mysteries to keep up with mainstays like mofass, jewelle, jesus, feather, mouse and jackson. for the most part, these characters never really go away, so as long as you are familiar with the books, the introductions of new characters who are mostly just along for this single story shouldn't be much of a problem. well, usually it's not, but the convoluted plot kept spinning me into a weird place where i didn't know my right from my left, let alone my ups from my downs. not one of walter's better books.

i miss easy the drunk from earlier novels. easy the womanizer, the street runner. now, his words are pretty well-written to compensate for his life changes, but i miss the old easy. he was much more exciting. fool or no, he was right about one thing from the very first page - it was the dog's fault.

Too Convoluted & Unlikely.......2004-11-05

The fifth book in Mosley's Easy Rawlins series finds Easy in 1963, working as a maintenance supervisor for a public school in the Watts area of Los Angeles. For two years he's been living clean, having given up the "street life" and heavy drinking to work a straight job, while taking care of the two children he's taken in. Much is made of his desire to live a low-key, normal life, and yet... when a corpse turns up on the grounds of his school, he instinctively lies to the police, when telling the truth would likely have kept him out of the whole mess. Granted, it's well established in the series that the police are rarely (if ever) to be trusted, and there's always been a tension in the series about the allure of the "street life", however, when balanced against the moaning and groaning about wanting to lead a quiet life and raise his kids, it just doesn't make sense.

Instead, Easy lies--not to protect himself--but on behalf of a beautiful teacher he has a ten minute hookup with and who happens to be the corpse's wife, and even then, there's no clear reason for the lie. Soon, a second corpse shows up, and the lead investigator intuits that Easy's hiding something. Given several chances to come clean, Easy instead opts to plunge back into the streets to try and solve the multiple murders himself, which of course only puts him in a more compromising situation. Yes, it's made abundantly clear why a black man would not want to get involved with the police no matter what in 1963 (and not much has changed in 40 years), but wouldn't the savvy Easy of the previous four books would surely recognize that in this instance, simply being truthful is more likely to placate the police than his surly evasiveness?

From the start, the plot is wildly convoluted, and it grows ever more improbable. Almost as improbable as the transformation of his hell-raising, crazy friend Mouse, who at this point has also settled down with a wife and kid. Yes, one expects characters to transform over the course of a series, but in Mouse's case, the transformation is so utterly at odds with his stated nature that it seems entirely unreasonable. In any event, Easy runs back and forth all over LA, trying to solve the murders for the police he's trying to stay one step ahead of. The pieces of the puzzle are very complicated, and include a series of thefts from the school district, a herion smuggling operation, and of course, a few lovely ladies. The one thing that really keeps the book interesting is Mosley's vivid supporting characters, from low-lifes to bureaucrats, white, Hispanic, Asian, they all come alive on the page. Ultimately, though, one of the weaker books in the series.

A woman, a murder, a dog.......2004-06-25

In Mosley's fifth Ezekiel "Easy" Rawlins mystery it's 1963 and streetwise, brooding Easy has established a "straight" life for himself and his two adopted street children. The supervising custodian of a school in Watts, Los Angeles, he arrives for work to find Mrs. Turner, a young, lovely teacher, distraught because her husband wants to kill her dog.

A couple hours later there's a dead man in the school yard, the teacher has disappeared and Easy's stuck with a yapping mutt while the police fit him - a black man with a shady past and an attitude - for murder.

Rawlins is a man of few words, keeping most of his dialogue interior. Mrs. Turner is beautiful, alluring, available.

"'Call me Idabell,' she said.
Call me fool."

Easy has his weaknesses but understands them. He's proud and as the bodies mount up, he evades the cops and pursues his own investigation - as much for the excitement as to save his own skin.

Mosley's style is all personality - strong, eloquent, streetwise, stubborn, vivid and determined. Easy tracks his quarry with savvy and cynicism - if he doesn't get the murderer, the cops will get him.

Mosley's latest is a tightly plotted, fast-paced and thoughtful read. Pure pleasure.

But why is he... I had to keep asking.......2004-05-23

Here's a guy who is just trying to keep his life clean, after having a questionable past. He is obviously not involved in this killing, yet he continuously puts himself in situations that will get him linked to the case.

All he had to do was tell the truth from the start. Someone who had such a sordid past, and had since managed to straighten out their life, would just keep their eyes down, and be as honest with the police as possible.

At the begining, he keeps repeating that he doesn't want the police to get too interested in him, since he didn't get his job by honest means, and he doesn't want them to find out.

Turns out, he got his job the same way 85% of Americans get their job; A friend put in a good word for him. How he got this new friend was a bit unscrupulous, but their is no amount of investigating that would have uncovered that.

Even so, if he didn't want the police getting too interested, why did he keep putting himself in places and with people that were linked with the crimes.

The whole plot was just way too ridiculous for me to let go and enjoy the story, which, by the way, I thought was written with too choppy a style of writting anyway.

BTW, has anyone else noticed, at least three of the five star ratings are identicle to the word?

The Yellow Dog (Inspector Maigret Mysteries)
Average customer rating:

Quick and Satisfying

Who let the dog out?

The Yellow Dog (Inspector Maigret Mysteries)
Georges Simenon
Manufacturer: Penguin (Non-Classics)
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Mystery | Mystery & Thrillers | Subjects | Books
Simenon, Georges | ( S ) | Authors, A-Z | Mystery & Thrillers | Subjects | Books
General | Mystery & Thrillers | Subjects | Books
Similar Items:

A Man's Head (Inspector Maigret Mysteries)

Lock 14 (Inspector Maigret Mysteries)

The Bar on the Seine (Penguin Mysteries)

The Hotel Majestic (Penguin Mysteries)

Maigret in Holland (Maigret Mystery Series)

ASIN: 0143037315

Customer Reviews:

Quick and Satisfying.......2006-12-23

This is my first Simenon title ever. Yet Inspector Maigret is hardly foreign to my sensibilities, as his independence, brilliance, and taciturn pipe-smoking personality have disseminated throughout countless popular mysteries, films, and TV shows. I found this mystery quite entertaining, even though it follows the well-worn path for such works as throwing out dead-end clues, and assembling a cast of peculiar characters together in a dreamy mysterious setting. Penguin's neat new printings of these classic tales are easy on the eyes. In this particular story, the coastal town of Concarneau is thrown into a frenzy by a series of attacks on its prominenet citizens. A skittish hotel waitress is obviously part of the mystery, as is a large yellow dog who suddenly appears on the scene. Everything is satisfyingly resolved in the end, and Maigret appears to be a genius. This is a quick, neat read, full of atmosphere and literary sensibility. I'll be visiting Simenon again shortly.

Who let the dog out?.......2006-10-26

Georges Simenon was the author of over 100 Inspector Maigret mystery stories. They were immensely popular in the 1930s through the 1960s. Inspector Maigret stories also appeared in film and TV version. Simenon and Maigret seem to have fallen under the radar in recent decades but in recent years he seems to have been rediscovered by a new generation of mystery/detective story fans. Penguin Books has begun to reissue some of those Maigret mysteries and the New York Review of Books Press has reissued some of his `hard stories', stories that did not feature Inspector Maigret. Simenon's Inspector Maigret Mystery, "The Yellow Dog" was a fun book to read and is as good a place to start for anyone wishing t discover (or re-read) Simenon.

The Yellow Dog, written in 1931, is set on a fishing town in Concarneau, France. One of the town's leading citizens has been shot. A series of murders or attempted murders soon follow. At the same time a stray, rather mangy looking yellow dog is wandering around the town. Inspector Maigret is sent to clear up the mess. In so doing he must deal with panicked locals, an irate mayor demanding an end to the affair, and a cast of characters who each, in their way, have done something to make themselves suspicious. The rest of the story involves Maigret's attempt to unravel the chain of events and find the guilty party or guilty parties.

This is a `classic' detective story in the sense that Simenon does not stray for the general formula or boundaries found in classic stories by Conan Doyle or Agatha Christie. There are twists and turns in the plot, red herrings, and fake clues, but eventually justice (or some semblance of justice) is served.

What sets Simenon apart is the character of Maigret and the supporting cast. Maigret was, or seems, ahead of his times in his aversion to `higher authority'. He also seems to have a deep and clearly defined set of moral values that does not necessarily coincide with the values held by his higher ups or by those reporters or office holders that seem to second guess his every move. This personality, this ahead of its time jaundiced eye, may explain the resurgence of interest in his books.

The Yellow Dog is an enjoyable read. Recommended. L. Fleisig

Average customer rating:

We love Mudge!

Henry and Mudge Under the Yellow Moon
Cynthia Rylant
Manufacturer: Aladdin
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Action & Adventure | Literature | Children's Books | Subjects | Books

General | Literature | Children's Books | Subjects | Books

General | Ages 4-8 | Children's Books | Subjects | Books

All 4-for-3 Deals | 4-for-3 Books Store | Stores | Books
Similar Items:

Henry And Mudge In Puddle Trouble
Henry And Mudge And The Forever Sea
Henry And Mudge First Book
Henry And Mudge And The Sneaky Crackers
Henry And Mudge In The Green Time

ASIN: 0689810210

Book Description

Henry and his 180-pound dog Mudge are best friends forever. And in this fourth book of their adventures they share jack-o'-lanterns, ghost stories, and Aunt Sally.

Customer Reviews:

We love Mudge!.......2000-04-09

In this book Henry and his big dog, Mudge, enjoy the escapades of fall. They shake together as Henry's mom tells scary Halloween stories and together they endure the Thanksgiving visit from Aunt Sally. These books are a favorite for my reluctant reader. The love between Henry and his dog Mudge is heart-warming.

Average customer rating:

The Patient Maigret Cuts to the Chase
Maigret is an humanist
Archetypal early Maigret.

Maigret and the Yellow Dog
Georges Simenon
Manufacturer: Harcourt
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

French | World Literature | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

General | Mystery | Mystery & Thrillers | Subjects | Books

General | Mystery & Thrillers | Subjects | Books
Similar Items:

Maigret on the Riviera
Maigret Afraid
Maigret at the Crossroads
Maigret and the Death of a Harbor-Master
Maigret and the Loner

ASIN: 0151555648

Customer Reviews:

The Patient Maigret Cuts to the Chase.......2004-12-27

The English and American schools of crime detective fiction ultimately come from Edgar Allan Poe's "The Purloined Letter" and "Murders in the Rue Morgue," in which the solution of a crime is effected by the application of deductive reasoning from start to finish. These "tales of ratiocination," with Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes being the apotheosis of the reasoning investigator, are still the norm today in the English-speaking world.

Such is not the case in France, where Georges Simenon has created an entirely different kind of detective, Superintendent Jules Maigret. In MAIGRET AND THE YELLOW DOG aka THE PATIENCE OF MAIGRET (1936), a man named Mostaguen has been cut down by a bullet in the Breton seaside town of Concarneau. At the scene of the crime is found a strange ungainly yellow dog. The victim belonged to a informal (and somewhat unpopular) group of businessmen who got together for cards and drinks every night in the bar of the Admiral Hotel.

Superintendent Maigret is called in to investigate, along with Inspector Leroy. No sooner do they arrive, than attacks on the little group begin to ramp up: an attempted poisoning with strychnine, a missing local newspaper writer taken from his car leaving bloodstains behind, and the murder of a notorious philanderer. All these occur more or less under Maigret's nose. As the mayor begins to lose his patience with the big city investigator, the Paris press moves in en masse and camps out in the bar of the Admiral Hotel, kibitzing his every move.

From the start, Maigret and Leroy take divergent paths. While the latter attempts to apply close deductive reasoning, his boss hangs out in the bar and has his attention riveted to the barmaid, Emma, and the yellow dog, who is somehow drawn to her. He instinctively feels that these two are somehow at the heart of the investigation and slowly begins to add to his knowledge of these two until the fog lifts.

For most of the novel, Concarneau is besieged by foul weather; and the town is full of confused, frightened people who inevitably jump to the wrong conclusions and put pressure on Maigret and Leroy to follow up on their suggestions. Maigret not only keeps accumulating evidence but rudely ignores the press, the mayor, and the residents while marching to his own drummer. In the end, Maigret's instinct trumps Leroy's patient data-gathering and the wild surmises of the others, and everything falls together as the bad weather finally breaks, leaving Concarneau and us readers bathed in sunlight.

The brooding quality of the scene, the confusion of the other characters, and the mysterious, almost solipsistic concentration of Maigret are the ingredients that make this a most delectable detective novel. This is the tenth Maigret I've read, and he seems to get better with every book I read.

Maigret is an humanist.......2003-02-02

Even if you dislike police novels, you have to read Maigret's novels (and others Simenon's non Maigret novels) because of the humanism and psychology in these novels. And more over, you have the pleasure to dive in the Simenon's atmosphere : close to impressionism (only few words to restitute an impression ...).
This novel, in particularly, is a good example of Simenon's art.

Archetypal early Maigret........2002-02-02

If I was to initiate anyone into the world of Superintendant Jules Maigret, 1931's 'The Yellow Dog' (a.k.a. 'Face for a Clue') is the book I would recommend. The story is set in the Breton harbour town of Concarneau, and begins with the non-fatal shooting of a prominent citizen one stormy night. His friends, card-playing regulars in the Admiral Hotel cafe, fear they will be next, and sure enough strychnine is soon found in their pernods. Escalating fear in the town is accompanied by a mysterious giant's footsteps and a yellow dog always present at the crime scenes. The Mayor who has sent for Maigret becomes exasperated when the policeman seems casually indifferent to the case, allowing further crimes to occur.

'Yellow Dog' is model Maigret for a number of reasons. It crystallises the Maigret detective method, rejecting Holmesian deduction or modish scientific procedures, the Inspector preferring to silently absorb the atmosphere of a place, the charactetrs and faces of its people. The progress Maigret makes with this infinite patience he keeps to himself, exasperating superiors, colleagues, citizens, even the reader. In these books, crime isn't static, a thing of the past to be frozen and endlessly analysed, as in Agatha Christie et al, but a fluid, ongoing part of the social fabric. The book introduces the young Inspector Leroy, who, throughout the series will become Maigret's most trusted ally. The narrative plays variations on Simenon's favourite themes, most especially the different levels of vice and transgression in French communities, hypocritically categorised by class. His charting the development of public fear into the violence of mob panic is terrifying and prescient.

But 'Yellow Dog' is especially notable for the clarity of what one might term Simenon's tripartite characterisation. First of all, there are the actual human characters, whom Maigret observes, and generously allows the freedom to reveal or hang themselves in their own words, waiting for them to play their petty charades and deceits, before breaking down to the truth. Though Simenon can be sentimental, on the whole, they are not a pretty bunch. Secondly, the meticulous evocation of place, with the vivid description of the harbour; the town divided into the Old, with its ancient, narrow, winding streets, and New, with its markets, gaudy hotels and the ever-recurring clock; the dingy tavern with its oppressive, aquarium-like windows; the persistant presence of dirt and trash, visible emblems of barely concealed social rottenness. And thirdly, the presence of the weather, mostly dark, windswept, beating rain, but breaking into festive plays of light. The story begins with a brilliantly atmospheric, cinematic panorama of the empty town in which the crime is almost incidental; the most forceful set-piece is literally cinematic, as Maigret and Leroy shiver on a roof, spectators looking down through a window-'screen' at a silent lovers' drama they can only partly comprehend.

Average customer rating:

Cloud no. 9

Still a furious barking but the bite is gone...

3 Things about Yellow Dog

There'll Always be an England.

Strong, savage, satirical novel about pornography and violence

Yellow Dog
Martin Amis
Manufacturer: Vintage
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
Literary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
Amis, Martin | ( A ) | Authors, A-Z | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
Similar Items:

The Information

The Moronic Inferno and Other Visits to America

Fury Fury

Night Train

The Rachel Papers

ASIN: 1400077273
Release Date: 2005-01-04

Book Description

Brilliant, painful, dazzling, and funny as hell, Yellow Dog is Martin Amis’ highly anticipated first novel in seven years and a stunning return to the fictional form.

When “dream husband” Xan Meo is vengefully assaulted in the garden of a London pub, he suffers head injury, and personality change. Like a spiritual convert, the familial paragon becomes an anti-husband, an anti-father. He submits to an alien moral system -- one among many to be found in these pages. We are introduced to the inverted worlds of the “yellow” journalist, Clint Smoker; the high priest of hardmen, Joseph Andrews; and the porno tycoon, Cora Susan. Meanwhile, we explore the entanglements of Henry England: his incapacitated wife, Pamela; his Chinese mistress, He Zhezun; his fifteen-year-old daughter, Victoria, the victim of a filmed “intrusion” that rivets the world -- because she is the future Queen of England, and her father, Henry IX, is its King. The connections between these characters provide the pattern and drive of Yellow Dog.

If, in the 21st century, the moral reality is changing, then the novel is changing too, whether it likes it or not. Yellow Dog is a model of how the novel, or more particularly the comic novel, can respond to this transformation.

But Martin Amis is also concerned here with what is changeless and perhaps unchangeable. Patriarchy, and the entire edifice of masculinity; the enormous category-error of violence, arising between man and man; the tortuous alliances between men and women; and the vanished dream (probably always an illusion, but now a clear delusion) that we can protect our future and our progeny.

Meo heard no footsteps; what he heard was the swish, the shingly soft-shoe of the hefted sap. Then the sharp two-finger prod on his shoulder. It wasn’t meant to happen like this. They expected him to turn and he didn’t turn -- he half-turned, then veered and ducked. So the blow intended merely to break his cheekbone or his jawbone was instead received by the cranium, that spacey bulge (in this instance still quite marriageably forested) where so many delicate and important powers are so trustingly encased.

He crashed, he crunched to his knees, in obliterating defeat. . . . -- from Yellow Dog

From the Hardcover edition.

Customer Reviews:

Cloud no. 9.......2007-08-05

I liked Burroughs on heroin, his cut and paste style and all. I dug Bukowski on booze, and all the crazy, tough guy stories. You can't really argue that On the Road isn't a seminal novel, and that's Kerouac on Benzedrine.

But Martin on Crack? At this day and age? He wasn't really lucid before, granted, but he wasn't deliriously incoherent either as in this dog. Word is that he's off it now, and he's having some awful withdrawal symptoms of no less than the Russian Gulag type and writing all about it! The Gulag you say? At this day and age? When it's been said and done ad nauseum? Well, he was researching a book on Stalin and Dog plummeted in sales, so high on the hills of that he plunged into the Gulag...

Just stay away from the crack Martin.

Still a furious barking but the bite is gone..........2007-06-22

Xan Meo--loving husband, devoted family man, minor celebrity--goes to the pub for the annual celebration of his sober reformation. A couple of quiet drinks, alone, with a few cigarettes, and then back home for another year of clean living. Instead of the usual programme, he receives a beating from two men he never saw before in his life. They say it's payback. But payback for what? That's what Xan is trying to figure out as he recuperates from his brain injury. Because he wants revenge and he wants it in the worst way. Because he's not the man he was before his injury. He's the man he was before *that*. And that man was the product of a very disturbing past.

That's how Amis begins this novel which becomes, quite perplexingly, a rather dismally didactic meditation ((you might say lecture or harangue)) on male violence and the awful suffering its perpetuated on the female of the species, not to mention the civilization that was invented largely to protect women from the baser urges of man-not-so-kind. Because that's what's basically happening to Xan--he's forgotten how to live like a higher creature of reason; he's reverting to his caveman roots, as would we all, Amis implies, if given half the chance.

Power--brute physical power manifested in violence--that's what a man can be depended upon to wield in order to compel everything weaker than him to submit--wife, sister, woman-in-the-street, and daughters. Yes, especially daughters. Every father, according to Amis, wants to have sexual relations with his daughter. Why? Because he's bigger. Because he can. Because he made her and she belongs to him. Even to 'protect' her in some perverse way. Incest abounds in *Yellow Dog,* it crisscrosses the novel like a net, holding the whole thing together. It's practically universal. So there it is--plain as black and white: men are bad, women are good. Can anyone possibly call Martin Amis a misogynist *now*?

Well, true enough, Amis' so-called misogyny evaporates and what stands revealed is an entirely different sort of gynephobia. Amis is so clearly and abjectly afraid of living a life without women, so terrified that women may indeed be just as flawed and undependable as he's always portrayed them, that he's come round to making them total victims, their every seeming misdeed pardoned, mitigated by the abuse they've collectively suffered since the dawn of time in this testosterone poisoned world. By the end of *Yellow Dog* Amis sounds as shrill and hysterically one-sided as any blinkered feminist professor preaching a fairy-tale gynetopia to the already converted--the converted, which is to say, as always, those minus the ability to detect the vast spectrum of gradation between black and white. It's an embarrassing thirty pages, those last thirty pages of *Yellow Dog.* It's like watching a man apologizing for an indiscretion with a self-effacing theatricality and desperation that leaves you cringing, like a man begging...begging for what? For mommy's approval, ultimately. "Mommy, please be loving, kind, warm, wonderful. Don't be cruel anymore. Don't be mysterious. Don't leave me by myself. Mommy, I'll be good." This book exposes something about Amis that was there behind the cynical, chest-thumping façade all along: the lost little runaway boy who now wants more than anything to go back home.

For 300 pages, *Yellow Dog* is a brash, unforgiving, funny, thought-provoking novel delivered with the incisive brio and dazzling linguistic fireworks that make Amis one of the best, if not *the* best, artist of the English language wielding a pencil today. But like the crippled passenger jet that limps its way across the background sky of *Yellow Dog*, the novel rapidly loses altitude towards the end and not even as skilled a pilot as Amis can save it from its ignoble nose-dive. Amis lost his nerve, I think. Or just got plain exhausted. He's come down to earth with a crash. Mother Earth, where we all must go, humbled, in ruins.

What do you give a novel that's a clear 5-stars for 300 pages and a 1-star disaster for the last fifty? Three stars, I'm sorry to say, only three, which is a sad thing, for a master of the English language. But in "Yellow Dog" the courageous old yeller has been tamed, it seems. He's wearing a collar, yoked to the backyard spike. He's not rabid anymore. He can't bite. They didn't have to shoot him, after all. He didn't go out with a bang, but a toothless whimper. R.I.P.

3 Things about Yellow Dog.......2007-04-01

1. Yellow Dog is a chore to read - its self-conscious post-modernity, its intentional tangle of narratives and voices, and its glee in confusing the reader make it tiresome from the first sentence.

2. You can call me old-fashioned, but I have a taste for finding humanity in at least one of the characters - in Amis' novel, there are about a dozen characters to keep track of and not a shred of heart among them.

3. I took this book from the library and suffered through it for weeks, enslaved to my own principles of finishing a book you start. But I was absolutely grateful when the library recalled it at about page 200. It's not worth a 50-cent late fee.

There'll Always be an England........2006-07-05

Whenever I find myself getting homesick for dear old England I'll just have to refresh my memory with some Amis. The shockingly awful rags pretending to be newspapers. The random acts of violence and petty crime. The drunken, loutish behaviour that has become socially acceptable. The rampant misogamy. The ridiculous anachronism that is the Royal Family. Amis hits all the targets in YELLOW DOG. It's the UK at its worst and fiction at its best.

Strong, savage, satirical novel about pornography and violence.......2006-06-28

Yellow Dog is very much in the same savagely satirical mode of much of Martin Amis's work, for example Money. It is set in an alternate present-day England, with an importantly different royal house, the last three generations of which feature such controversially named kings as John II, Richard IV, and now Henry IX. Also, a minor plot point is that a comet is heading towards Earth, predicted to miss by only a few thousand miles.

Yellow Dog interleaves several stories, all in the end revolving around pornography. The main character is Xan Meo, a "renaissance man": actor/writer/guitarist, but also the son of a gangster. Xan is nearing 50, and living a reformed life himself: he no longer drinks or smokes, he is a loving and faithful husband, and the loving father of two young daughters. He had previously been in a destructive marriage and had two sons, but after a far from amicable divorce he has changed his ways. But once a year, on the anniversary of his decision to quit, he heads to a pub and has a few drinks and a few cigarettes. But this time, at the pub, he is waylaid by representatives of a crimelord and beaten severely, apparently for "naming" their boss compromisingly, though Meo has no idea how or even who. But Meo's beating, and the subsequent brain damage, drastically affects his relationships with his wife and daughters, and also his careers, and he ends up thrown out of his house, with a former porn star turned producer trying to seduce him, and with a job acting (not as a "participant", though) in a porn movie.

Another key thread follows a vile journalist named Clint Smoker, who works for perhaps the worst of the London tabloids, and who despite his monetary success is an abject and humiliating failure with women. He too ends up on the set of the porn film, though as a journalist researching a story. There is also a thread about the King of England, Henry IX, and a crisis involving a secret pornographic videotape of his popular 15 year old daughter, Victoria. Finally, we end up meeting the gangster who has ordered Xan Meo to be beat up, and we learn much of his personal history, and of his financial and personal involvement with the porn industry.

(There is also a strange thread involving an airplane flying from England to the US carrying the coffin of a recently deceased, very rich, man, and also involving the threat of a crash -- I concede I never really figured out what Amis was after with this thread.)

The novel is very entertaining, full of rather savage and often vulgar wordplay, some gaspingly horrid behaviour (especially on the part of the tabloid folks), and some pretty scary things too, especially the degradation of Xan's character. The plot is somewhat intricate, and resolved cleverly and funnily. There are some details about the porn industry that I'm not sure are actually true, but have a horrible ring of possible truth to them. Except for the airplane thread, which as I said I simply didn't get, I thought it worked very well -- a strong, savage novel, not a great work, nor Amis's best, but, I though, pretty darn good.

Yellow Dogs, Hushpuppies, and Bluetick Hounds: The Official Encyclopedia of Southern Culture Quiz Book

Average customer rating:

Yellow Dogs, Hushpuppies, and Bluetick Hounds: The Official Encyclopedia of Southern Culture Quiz Book
Jennifer Bryant
Manufacturer: University of North Carolina Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Trivia | Puzzles & Games | Entertainment | Subjects | Books

History | Encyclopedias | Reference | Subjects | Books

Trivia | Fun Facts | Reference | Subjects | Books

General | Reference | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 0807845922

Average customer rating:

Getting Started With Yellow Dog Linux
John Worsley
Manufacturer: Opendocs Llc
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Computers & Internet | Subjects | Books

jp-unknown2 | Specialty Stores | Books
ASIN: 0970033036

Where the Southern Cross the Yellow Dog: On Writers And Writing

Average customer rating:

Where the Southern Cross the Yellow Dog: On Writers And Writing
Louis D. Rubin
Manufacturer: University of Missouri Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Fool Hen: The Spruce Grouse on the Yellow Dog Plains

Average customer rating:

Fool Hen: The Spruce Grouse on the Yellow Dog Plains
William Laughlin Robinson
Manufacturer: Univ of Wisconsin Pr
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Birds | Field Guides | Outdoors & Nature | Subjects | Books

General | Birdwatching | Outdoors & Nature | Subjects | Books
ASIN: 0299079600

Rescue on Star Mountain (Adventures of Fraser the Yellow Dog)

Average customer rating:

Rescue on Star Mountain (Adventures of Fraser the Yellow Dog)
Jill Sheeley
Manufacturer: Courtney Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Action & Adventure | Literature | Children's Books | Subjects | Books

Books:

Books Index

Books Home

Recommended Books