NPPF Nabokov mention

[Otto]

For a British Novelist, Tornadoes in August
By Sarah Lyall, August 26, 2003

In a recent article in The Daily Telegraph titled "Someone Needs to Have a
Word With Amis," the British novelist Tibor Fischer described furtively
reading an advance copy of Martin Amis's forthcoming novel, "Yellow Dog," on
the subway and worrying that strangers would assume incorrectly that he was
enjoying himself.
He wasn't.
" `Yellow Dog' isn't bad as in not very good or slightly disappointing," Mr.
Fischer wrote. "It's not-knowing-where-to-look bad." Shimmering with fury at
what he portrayed as betrayal by a literary hero he once idolized to the
point of memorizing passages from his work, Mr. Fischer added that reading
the book was "like your favorite uncle being caught in a school playground,
masturbating."
(...)
"Yellow Dog," a satire that takes on, among other things, the pornography
industry, British royalty and the tabloid press, is either an embarrassment
or a masterpiece, depending on which critics you listen to; whether they
have rivalrous relationships with Mr. Amis; and whether they admire his
pungent, lacerating prose.
(...)
Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, a fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, who gave
"Yellow Dog" a glowing review in The Observer of London on Sunday, said that
given Mr. Amis's fictional and other musings on the subject of envy, perhaps
Mr. Fischer meant his remarks to be a part of an elaborate literary in-joke,
like that in Vladimir Nabokov's novel "Pale Fire."

In the hall-of-mirrors narrative of "Pale Fire," an increasingly insane
editor comments in increasingly eccentric terms about the posthumous poem of
a recently deceased fictional American poet. (In this scenario, Mr. Fischer
would be playing the part of the insane editor.)

"You read this and say, `Is this someone who's read "Pale Fire" and is
adding themselves, as a shared joke, in Amis's ongoing interest in envy?' "
Mr. Douglas-Fairhurst said. "Or is it that he hasn't read `Pale Fire' - or
not closely enough - and is unaware that he's suffering from the same sort
of envy that Amis has been able to dissect and examine so brilliantly?"
(...)
The book is not without flaws, Mr. Carey said in an interview, but is still
"a great comic extravagance" comparable to the works of Jonathan Swift.
"People take, and did take, exception to Swift's depiction of the human race
in the same way," he said. "It's enormously crude and ugly, but it's meant
to be, because it's satirizing crudeness and ugliness."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/26/books/26AMIS.html?8hpib=&pagewanted=print&
position