Thoughts on Clint Smoker
I dig the writing of Martin Amis quite a lot. Up until the beginning of this month, though, I'd read far more of his nonfiction and criticism than his fiction. (The only novel I'd read? London Fields, recommended by one of my cohorts here.) During my recent trip overseas, I read his recent Yellow Dog, and picked up the British edition of Money in Prague. I'm going to focus on Yellow Dog here, and zero in on one particular aspect of it. Yellow Dog is divided into a number of parallel plotlines, some of which converge as the book progresses.
Am I insane for thinking that the parts of the novel that focus on Clint Smoker, a tabloid journalist, be read as a fairly biting parody/piss-take on the work of Michel Houellebecq?
Clint Smoker is, by a longshot, the least appealing of a number of relatively unsavory major characters in Yellow Dog. He's materialistic, amoral, proudly xenophobic, and unable to maintain any sort of healthy romantic relationship. Over the course of the novel, he begins to court a reader of the newspaper, a young woman who seems equally disillusioned with the current state of gender relations. There is a payoff to all of this, and it's a startlingly bizarre and unexpected one.
Smoker's politics, his jaded attitude towards modern life, his detachment are all reminiscent of the protagonists of Houellebecq's The Elementary Particles and Platform. And yet there's one clear difference: Smoker is ultimately a loathsome figure, while Houellebecq's protagonists are far more complex. But were I to sit and write a parody of one of these characters, I suspect they wouldn't look all that different from Clint Smoker.
The other item in Yellow Dog that sets my mind to wondering whether or not it's a response to Houellebecq comes late in the book, when one character delivers a lengthy speech about the peculiarities of the adult film industry. And -- without getting too explicit, lest this site begin attracting traffic that's not seeking out literary discourse -- this speech singles out one act in particular as rarely existing outside adult films. It's this act for which -- unless my memory's imploding -- Bruno in The Elementary Particles finds himself practically on a quest. And if Amis is implying that this has no place in a realistic novel....
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I have no idea whether or not Martin Amis has read any of Houellebecq's work. (For the record, I'm a fan of both.) But while reading the Clint Smoker sections of Yellow Dog, I couldn't help but think that Houellebecq was being taken down a notch or two. Perhaps, though, I'm reading too much into things.
Am I insane for thinking that the parts of the novel that focus on Clint Smoker, a tabloid journalist, be read as a fairly biting parody/piss-take on the work of Michel Houellebecq?
Clint Smoker is, by a longshot, the least appealing of a number of relatively unsavory major characters in Yellow Dog. He's materialistic, amoral, proudly xenophobic, and unable to maintain any sort of healthy romantic relationship. Over the course of the novel, he begins to court a reader of the newspaper, a young woman who seems equally disillusioned with the current state of gender relations. There is a payoff to all of this, and it's a startlingly bizarre and unexpected one.
Smoker's politics, his jaded attitude towards modern life, his detachment are all reminiscent of the protagonists of Houellebecq's The Elementary Particles and Platform. And yet there's one clear difference: Smoker is ultimately a loathsome figure, while Houellebecq's protagonists are far more complex. But were I to sit and write a parody of one of these characters, I suspect they wouldn't look all that different from Clint Smoker.
The other item in Yellow Dog that sets my mind to wondering whether or not it's a response to Houellebecq comes late in the book, when one character delivers a lengthy speech about the peculiarities of the adult film industry. And -- without getting too explicit, lest this site begin attracting traffic that's not seeking out literary discourse -- this speech singles out one act in particular as rarely existing outside adult films. It's this act for which -- unless my memory's imploding -- Bruno in The Elementary Particles finds himself practically on a quest. And if Amis is implying that this has no place in a realistic novel....
****
I have no idea whether or not Martin Amis has read any of Houellebecq's work. (For the record, I'm a fan of both.) But while reading the Clint Smoker sections of Yellow Dog, I couldn't help but think that Houellebecq was being taken down a notch or two. Perhaps, though, I'm reading too much into things.
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