"The postmark says Philadelphia, where Trader was attending a two-day
conference on 'The Mind and Physical Laws.' It's almost embarrassing: I can
hardly bring myself to quote from it. 'Already the eastern side of every
moment of mine is lit by you and the thought of tomorrow ...'
I love
you. I miss you. No. Jennifer Rockwell didn't have a problem with this
boyfriend. He's perfect. He's everything we all want." (p. 83)
2) Amis exlicitly mentions Nabokov in an interview about his forthcoming novel Yellow Dog:
"A laughter for our times" 03 July 2003 (http://www.thebookseller.com/?pid=84&did=7501
accessed on 4 July 2003)
In his first full-length novel since
The Information, Martin Amis tells the story of Xan Meo, an actor and writer,
whose newly happy life with his second wife and two young daughters is suddenly
interrupted by a blow to the head from a seemingly random attacker in a London
street.
Xan is badly affected by his injury; his moral sense
disintegrates and his sexual impulses become aggressive. He comes close to
attacking his much-loved wife, as well as--in a horrifying episode for the
reader--to molesting his four-year-old daughter.
Xan's story is
interwoven with that of a floridly comic English royal family, in which an
effete King Henry watches helplessly as his daughter, 15-year-old Princess
Victoria, becomes the subject of a pornographic film through covertly recorded
footage. Another narrative strand concerns a violent gangster, Joseph Andrews.
Meanwhile, Amis' latest great comic creation is Clint Smoker, a muck-raking hack
on the superbly sleazy Morning Lark, who compensates for his minuscule genitals
with a series of misogynist tirades under the byline "Yellow Dog".
In
a comment he made during the writing of the novel, Amis referred to it as a
"post-September 11th comedy".
"I started this book quite a time ago,
and put it aside to write the two memoirs [Experience and Koba the Dread]. Just
as I was getting going again, September 11th happened. I thought, 'Is this the
time to be writing a comic novel?' But after feeling stunned for some time, your
fighting spirit gets going, and you think, 'This will be a comic novel--that was
one of the values that was attacked on September 11th: the idea, the possibility
of comedy.'
"During the Cold War you knew where you were; there was a
genuine apocalypse in the shadows. Then came the fool's paradise of 1991-2001,
and now there has been an injection of such randomness and irrationality, and
anti-morality really, that I thought you'd need a new kind of humour to deal
with this--slightly wilder than I felt I was used to.
"It's about
laughing at amorality. Nabokov wrote once that in the novel you punish bad
behaviour with laughter. So if you've got your gangster sitting at his enormous
desk, you don't punish him by having a conspirator tiptoe up behind him with a
handgun, you punish him by watching him delving into his ear or nostril and
inspecting its contents on his fingertip. People dread being laughed at as much
as they dread physical chastisement--it's particularly a male terror.
"I couldn't go at it by creating Charlie Chaplin terrorists, so my
novel is more about inverted worlds. After Xan Meo is hit on the head, his moral
world is upset; there's the Joseph Andrews character with his belief system so
at odds with our own; and the morality of the Morning Lark newspaper is again a
kind of inverted world. Even the royals are in an inverted world, although of a
gentler kind--gentle in a way, but very distorting.
"I wrote a piece
last year about the royals, as a way of researching them, and I found myself
mildly pro the royal family. But when I went at it as a novelist, I found I
rejected it, because of its denial of freedom to the next generation. After I
finished the book, I read a piece about Prince William which said that he
absolutely dreaded the idea of moving into this straitened, prescribed life that
was waiting for him. It sounds as though they've worked on him and he's a bit
more dutiful now. But that's the key to it--in this media age, it's just an
intolerable position to be in. So the novel is republican--I found out while
writing it what I really felt about it all.
"A writer always adores
all his characters. John Updike said, 'Why do we like characters who aren't very
nice? Indeed, why do we particularly like them?' Like Becky Sharp in Thackeray.
He said what we like is life, and if a character is very alive, we like them. I
don't think Clint deserves the fate he receives in the novel--it's a fairly
gothic punishment for being a glorified wanker with a very disturbed sexuality.
But masculinity and its foibles has always been what I write about--its foibles
and its outrages. Clint is out on the fringe of a certain sort of confused,
unresolved sexuality--and that's where, as we all know, a great deal of trouble
arises.
"Xan is definitely nearer to my voice than anyone else. It
seemed to me for a while that this would be a difficulty in the novel, that he
dominated the book and everyone else was viewed at a greater distance. But
something very extreme happens to him, so the disparity with the other
characters is not so great in the end. Xan's head injury is an extreme situation
which reveals the limits partly of civilisation and partly, as he puts it, of
his talent for love. He becomes atavistic and primitive.
"When
September 11th happened, I wrote a piece where I conjectured that the horrible
feeling it disseminated had to do with shattering the illusion that you can
protect your children. It was always an illusion, but September 11th pointed
that out to us. I felt surprised that that conjecture settled in me and was what
stayed with me throughout the novel.
"It's terribly painful being a
parent. I think being a parent of girls makes that even harder. You are always
telling your boys, 'Stiff upper lip, take it like a man', but it never occurs to
you to say that to your girls. That ancient feeling of protecting the gentler
sex.
"Innocence has always been the thing I value most, and it's a
diminishing quality in the modern world, as children grow up quicker. You can't
shield them from what I call the obscenification of modern life. So that period
of innocence is reduced, and as the planet gets older by definition it becomes
less innocent because it's been through it all before. And this rubs off on
every successive generation."
Martin Amis, Yellow Dog (Jonathan Cape, 4th September, £16.99, 0224050613)