Yellow Dog by Martin Amis

I just finished Martin Amis' Yellow Dog, a satiric novel about the "obscenification of everyday life" in the twenty-first century. The first two thirds of it are brilliant. One of the protagonists is a skinhead journalist with a handcuff nosering who makes up stories (and even hires washed-up pro athletes to act them out) for a pornographic tabloid with an all-unemployed male demographic. Another protagonist is the novelist son of a notorious gangster who is savagely beaten in a bar. A third protagonist is the King of England, whose daughter, Princess Victoria, is videotaped in her bathroom. Needless to say, the tabloid journalist takes special notice of the videotape when it is released. Towards the end, the book takes an unexpected turn into the pornography industry; and the entire novel is interlaced with an account of a plane crash.

Structually, the novel is a wreck. Nonetheless the book is worth reading, because even though it is a satire, most of it has the potential to come true. Tabloids currently pay for stories and are heavily fictionalized. British tabloids already have nude photos. Men, particularly young ones, are encouraged to act like animals, to read and watch porn, and to dress like children. It won't take much of a leap to get down to the level described in the book. In a parallel development, the beaten novelist sustains a head injury that makes him more like the goons who beat him and the readers of the tabloids-- a violent, retrograde animalistic figure; Amis says "His condition felt like the twenty-first century: it was something you wanted to wake up from."

There is probably a better novel to be made of these ideas, but this one is pretty good because its ideas are so vivid and so well imagined. Yellow Dog unravels in the last third and ventures into overkill when the novelist takes a trip to a pornography principate in California; and it treads heavily on some pretty seriously offensive taboos (incest in particular); but it is ultimately worth a read if you want to think about where Western culture is headed.