The Guardian reported on reviews from several British publications that had rated the novel out of five: Mail on Sunday gave it a four, Sunday Telegraph gave it a three, Evening Standard and Times gave it a two, Independent on Sunday, Sunday Times, Daily Telegraph gave it a one.[2] The tone of criticism overall was described as "near universal derision".[3] Tibor Fischer made one of the most quoted statements in a book review of modern times[3][4][5] saying in The Daily Telegraph "Yellow Dog isn't bad as in not very good or slightly disappointing. It's not-knowing-where-to-look bad. I was reading my copy on the Tube and I was terrified someone would look over my shoulder (not only because of the embargo, but because someone might think I was enjoying what was on the page). It's like your favourite uncle being caught in a school playground, masturbating."[6] The Spectator said "excellent flourishes rise like buried treasure from the mud [but] far too much of Yellow Dog is filled with weak reruns of old material, implausible and unengagingly laborious working-out, and promising narratives which come to embarrassingly weak conclusions – the last 40 pages are a sequence of feeble punchlines, almost as if the author is by now as bored by his own material as is the reader.[7] The Independent said "unimaginative and un-entertaining [...] Over-written, overcrowded and underpowered, Yellow Dog is a joyless, boring long-haul flight to nowhere [...] you'll find more humour – and sophistication – in a single issue of The Beano."[8] Globally, the work was received not well with Complete Review saying on the consensus " No consensus, but the majority think it disappointing (and quite a few think it a complete failure)".[9]
The Guardian's reviewer, Alan Hollinghurst, found "Yellow Dog a disturbing book, but its opening pages create a mood of excited reassurance: Martin Amis at his best, in all his shifting registers, his drolleries and ferocities, his unsparing comic drive, his aesthetic dawdlings and beguilements, his wry, confident relish of his own astonishing effects [...] Everything Amis writes is highly structured, but Yellow Dog gives signs of quite bristling organisation, in its three parts and its subdivided and subheaded chapters. They create a vague sense of anxious coercion, of asserted significance, of the author insisting on his terms and inventions."[10]
The Times said "Yellow Dog marks a further plummeting in his literary trajectory [...] Interweaving all [the plot strands] into a compelling or indeed coherent novel proves beyond Amis's capabilities [...] Wonkily put together, his book is also copiously second-hand. Most of the material in it has been used by Amis before."[11]
The New York Times gave a more favourable assessment: "aside from the novel's jagged formlessness and Amis's wearisome fondness for comic euphemism, the writing is still agile and exact, the hyperbole driven and punishing and the characters – when he lets them be – charismatically repulsive. The problem is Amis's intellectualism, which sticks out like a parson at an orgy and shrinks and shrivels whatever it goes near."[12]
