ABSTRACT
While Keulks offers a negative response to Yellow Dog, which he thinks betrays Amis’s discomfort with sanitized postmodernism, and prefers Night Train, he ends up finding a number of similarities between Night Train and Yellow Dog. Both novels “exhibit his efforts to assimilate realist humanism and depth within metafictional and reflexive postmodern frameworks [. . .] Both attempt to sanitize extremist postmodernism, whether radical (Night Train) or vulgar (Yellow Dog)” (Keulks 2006: 175). Keulks ends up suggesting that, rather than representing a decline in Amis’s powers, both novels “exhibit his efforts to assimilate realist humanism and depth within metafictional and reflexive postmodern frameworks” (Keulks 2006: 176). Less thoroughly postmodern than Money or London Fields, they nevertheless retain many of the features associated with postmodernism: indeterminacy, contingency, self-reflexivity, hyperreality, intertextuality, and polyphonic discourse. Yet, “both works resolve their epistemological crises through a resurrected moralism that struggles to cleanse and redeem. Their swerve into sanctimoniousness may reveal Amis’s latest attempt to shock readers out of postmodern irony, detachment, and complacency” (Keulks 2006: 176). Keulks concludes by attributing their relative weakness to their attempt to reach a new accommodation with the conventions of postmodernism. “That these novels do not rank as masterpieces only confirms the difficulty of evolving a voice that can articulate realist, post-ironic constructs of identity, love, agency, and family while preserving subjectivist postmodernist critiques of media, textuality, contingency, and motivation” (Keulks 2006: 176).
