Yellow Dog By Martin Amis Miramax, 340 pp., $24.95 Buy this book more books most popular most commented Personal Days by Elizabeth Hand The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York by Tom Robbins Welcome to New York Comic Con by Carol Cooper A Voice Poetry Roundup by Alan Gilbert Etgar Keret's Short-Story Overload by Michelle Orange Girls Love Gay Male Porn Pucker Up by Tristan Taormino My Boyfriend's Kink Is Getting Fat. What Do I Do? Savage Love by Dan Savage Sex and the City Spoilers: A Sneak Preview of What Really Happens to Carrie and the Girls by Lynn Yaeger Our Favorite Writers Pick Their Favorite Obscure Books Summer Guide by ALEXANDER NAZARYAN The Barely Legal Empire of Tony Alamo by Maria Luisa Tucker NYPD Inaction Over a Missing Black Woman Found Dead Sparks a Historic Racial-Bias Lawsuit (9) Sean Gardiner Devo-Inspired Art in East Williamsburg (8) Maro The Barely Legal Empire of Tony Alamo (5) Maria Luisa Tucker David Mamet: Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal' (4) David Mamet Runnin' Scared: Deep South of Houston: Is a Soul-Food Restaurant Too Black for Soho? (4) Runnin' Scared: Chloe A. Hilliard

The Cerberus of a plot tracks "so-called 'renaissance man' " Xan Meo, who reverts to Cro-Magnon state after a head injury, and thereafter wrestles with his now unmediated desires; Clint Smoker, an unscrupulous tabloid journalist pursuing an e-lationship with "k8"; and pedomorphic King Henry IX, who tries to nip a scandal involving a sex tape of his teenage daughter, Vicky. During his convalescence, Meo affords some unsettling primal glimpses, e.g., "the pleasure the smell gave him—the smell of shit lite." That shit belongs to Billie, his four-year-old daughter, and the sexual subtext is more than just implied. Father-daughter incest is a hot topic in Yellow Dog, along with "masculine bulk" and patriarchy, themes that grow to John Holmes proportions as a Vicky-inspired skin flick moves the action to Lovetown, California, epicenter of the porn industry. The bared puns and cool descriptions of genres ("Hatefuck," "Cockout") have all the visceral impact of a Facial, a crude utility that turns out to be consistent with the rest of the book; but this is hardly a failure of intent. In Yellow Dog, Amis strips the world of its moral patina and fleshes it out in the post-satiric mode of the pornographic, which he expertly adopts, mocks, and transposes into a naked-lunch poetics. It bears the scars of Amis's getting down to business.