Splinters

This is where one notices the difference. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst in The Observer reverses the direction of Tibor Fischer's demolition ball and praises Yellow Dog, Martin Amis' new novel. It will silence the doubters he exclaims. Well, from this review - itself written in a sub-Amis, sub-James Wood style (all those adjectival strings and generalisations) - it won't silence me, because I no longer doubt.

The reviewer's justifications only confirm my own unease with the elderly enfant terrible. "[L]ike all great writers, [Amis] seems to have guessed what you thought about the world, and then expressed it far better than you ever could." So the novel exists as a vehicle for expressing one's thoughts about the world? Well, that seems to be about it according to Douglas-Fairhurst. After that it's a matter of detailing Amis' undoubtedly brilliant observations: "the neutral madness of a sparrow's eye; the sound of unserious panic coming from a playground; the motion jigsaw of a swimming pool."

Wow, yes. It reminds me of becoming tipsy when first reading Craig Raine's Martian poetry. But once the mots juste have been found, what then?

Yellow Dog is another grotesque comedy that Douglas-Fairhurst frames as the maturing of Amis' career: it shows "a change of emphasis, as it circles mournfully around the idea that as we grow older we lose much more than our teeth or our hair. We also lose our innocence. It is an idea that ran throughout Amis's attempts in Experience to explain the dreadful temptation of adults ? to destroy in children the purity they have lost in themselves ? What we need as we grow older, Amis seems to be arguing, with his usual fizzing intelligence, is not more experience. What we need is more innocence."

This would explain a lot. Most pertinently, why it's on Carey and Taylor's Booker longlist.

Amis' mentor, Saul Bellow, offered advice - via Baudelaire - to younger writers (which meant all living writers!): for an authentic vision, go back to your earliest memories. But why all this need for sensual accuracy? There is something schizoid in this need to create a "net ? to snare the world" as Douglas-Fairhurst characterises it. Perhaps Bellow was also implying that childhood innocence is necessary only for its destruction, without which we'd be destroyed. In fact, we wouldn't know such innocence without the most lacerating, disillusioning experience; so lacerating, in fact, that we need to retreat to novels in order to live. The best novelist, therefore, should not be the infant throwing the most seductive tantrum but one who brings this paradox to life, as Bellow does.