Yellow Dog

finds Martin Amis unable to make up his mind--he can't decide if he wants to be P.G. Wodehouse, Guy Ritchie or Irvine Welsh. So we get all that

the proverbial kitchen sink: a Chinese fire drill from Britfic's Central Casting. The dotty monarch and his sexually repressed servants make the scene, and so do standard-issue East End super-criminals, scummy tabloid journalists, a frickin' Chinese concubine, even amateur mendicants. Briefly, reformed gangster Xan Meo (Amis saddles all his characters with stupid names) gets stomped in a pub for mysterious reasons. His head injury strips the thin veneer of civilization from his inner caveman, and soon he's demanding sex at odd hours and leering at his 10-year-old. What, we're all blood-hungry, cock-crazed apes deep down? Go on, man, testify! Intensely complicated machinations involving the Royal Family (even more doltish here than the real thing), a pitiably endowed newspaper hack, an alcoholic footballer, a doomed airplane and...surely we're forgetting something...create a huge fuss in the margins of this

conceit. It all could be fun, in the vein of

, and you can almost feel a snappy little satiric thriller struggling to escape. Unfortunately, it's entombed in a grim tower of groaning, grinding, lead-fingered "literary" prose. In

, a failed marriage is "an attempted universe," people say things "conversationally," and every sunrise, traffic jam and dirty sock is invested with some dubious metaphorical significance. This

has already received a healthy kicking in the press, but in a sad way, that's more than it deserves. Amis fails to do anything remarkable here, including fail. In short, this is all just very average.

by Martin Amis

(Miramax/ Hyperion, 340 pages, $24.95 hardcover)

WWeek 2015