On Martin Amis and Yellow Dog...

"This is millennialism in high ironical style, something that the grave Amis of Einstein’s Monsters might have hated—and it seems to me a symptom of the gated imperialism of the British literary world. The white guys are for high irony—haughty, diagnostic, dismissive, politically indifferent—while the heartfelt stuff is presumed the province of immigrants and minorities. Thus, Zadie Smith’s White Teeth is hailed as an emotive epic of immigration and assimilation, despite the stylistic, schematic and substantive debt it owes Amis. Meanwhile, D.B.C. Pierre’s Booker Prize-winning Vernon God Little receives praise not for being the violent, ballsy scream of a book it is, but instead as insightful, heady satire, which it isn’t.

Amis once said that his Britain was living through something of an anti-climax: that Britons had their revolution and then they got on with it. Amis, however, has stuck with his eschatology. He is a millennialist who knows the world is ending in the way that only the once-ascoted, rather princely son of a booze-swilling cynic can know the world is ending (that is, with a snarky laugh). With Yellow Dog, his style—gluttonous, didactic—is going out like imperialism. He’s not done, just repeating himself, and rather indecently."

My friend Dave was fated to share two out of three names with David Foster Wallace and two out of two names with baseball player/autobiographer David Wells. He has three names, one hyphen. I leave the rest to your own ingenuity.

Dave made it his task in recent months to read the complete works of Martin Amis. For those of us who have been simultaneously awed and disaffected by Amis, Dave has now compiled a public analysis of this very personal undertaking via the popular medium of a College Hill Independent book review.

For further exposure to excellent descriptives like "once-ascoted" go here.