THE PINUP REMAINS EVER AFTER IMMORTAL AS ALL AROUND DIES: Fascinating Slate review of Martin Amis’s new book, Yellow Dog:

…These plot lines are all set rolling by the same tragic flaw: the unsustainability of sexual equilibrium for your average male. …

It is Amis’ point that with the digital proliferation (and the widening cultural acceptance) of pornography, sexual equilibrium has become even more elusive. …

[quoting Yellow Dog:] He knew that the distance between himself and the world of women was getting greater. Each night, as he entered the Borgesian metropolis of electronic pornography–with its infinities, its immortalities–Clint was, in a sense, travelling towards women. But he was also travelling away from them.

As readers of Time’s Arrow will remember, Amis is at his most brilliant when exploiting paradoxes like these, those moments when life seems to make as much sense if it’s run backward or turned inside out. …

…Yellow Dog is likely to be least endurable to those most sympathetic to Amis’ anguish. Since, in the world Amis creates, casual exposure to pornographic images puts people on a steep and slippery slope, one wonders what he thinks he’s doing in forcing such imagery on the reader. Amis’ subject matter so raises the stakes that this must be either a moral book or a dirty one. It winds up being both. The book is the equivalent of one of those partial-birth-abortion posters waved around at political conventions. It unleashes more than most intelligent readers can be expected to assimilate–and certainly more than any self-respecting reader should be asked to endure.

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