The New Criterion

Martin Amis
House of Meetings.
Knopf, 256 pages, $23

The nameless narrator of Martin Amis’s House of Meetings, a survivor of the Gulag who has become rich and lives in America, spills most of the beans in his italicized preamble, which takes the form of a note to his stepdaughter Venus, a young African-American “as well-prepared as any young Westerner could hope to be, equipped with good diet, lavish health insurance, two degrees, foreign travel and languages, orthodonture, psychotherapy, property, and capital.” (In other words, far, far from the war, the terror, the cold and starvation that he himself got. Perhaps Amis is so conscious of avoiding cliché that clichés have come alive in his mind and recast themselves, for what’s this if not “When I was your age I had to walk four miles to school in the snow?”) The narrator has assembled this book, a “heap of degradation and horror,” as a confessional recitation. His orders that there be a print run of one copy have been ignored. (How else do we ever wind up with such confessionals?)

The prefatory letter ends and the real stuff gets going on page ten. The opening salvo:

My little brother came to camp in 1948 (I was already there), at the height of the war between the brutes and the bitches… .

Now that wouldn’t be a bad opening sentence for the narrative proper, and I am impatient to write it. But not yet. “Not yet, not yet, my precious!” This is what the poet Auden used to say to the lyrics, the sprawling epistles.

This is, perhaps, more than, or at least different from, straightforward unreliability. This brute—he’s very clear about his brutishness—has at his fingertips not just Auden, which stretches credibility despite the pains taken to establish his love of poetry, but detailed, secondary information about Auden. Not just an Auden quote, not a little bit of “About suffering they were never wrong/ The Old Masters: how well they understood/ Its human position; how it takes place anyhow”—how perfect that would be!—but intimate knowledge of Auden’s process, which he seems to relish. This sounds an awful lot like someone who went to Oxford.

Amis has dressed this character in the slightest costume possible. It is tempting to say that’s what Amis does as a rule, but he has attempted fancy dress before. There was Night Train, with its absurd, stilted cop speak: “I am a police.” His side shows have been made of some smashingly successful ventriloquisms: recall 13’s crazed slang in The Information: “A carpet. You know: half a stretch… . A stretch is six months. A carpet is half a stretch. Three hundred quid.” Surely Amis can dress them up if he chooses, and he’s chosen not to. This is more along the lines of dressing up like the Lone Ranger, but eschewing the mask, the hat, the chaps, the horse, and the guns. Amis has simply set a silver bullet on the coffee table and started the monologue.

“There will be war in these pages,” and our narrator knows war, having fought in fifteen battles. He was once wounded when a three-pound iron bolt lodged itself in his inner thigh. “An inch or two further up, as they say, and there would have been no story to tell—because this is a love story.” Not because he’d be dead, but because he’d have been castrated. Which tells you more about this narrator’s vision of love than anything he professes.

The love is a triangular affair involving the narrator, his brother Lev, and a voluptuous Jewess who becomes Lev’s wife—her portrait is both misogynist and pat. She is swarthy, sultry, and buxom. In each description she seems a little more like something painted on the fuselage of a bomber. Sexually voracious, she was rendered barren by a botched abortion in her youth. In other words, she’s perfect. She’s insatiable, yet incapable of hysteria or reproduction. Lev recounts their seventy-two-hour sessions, with breaks for snacks and naps—the kind of sex that sounds fun only to twelve-year-old boys. The brothers call her “the Americas,” not because she represents anything grand but because she’s got a tiny waist, like Panama. That’s what sends Lev up, actually, praising “the Americas.”

It is precisely this sort of thing that makes House of Meetings so hard to untangle. That Lev is imprisoned for praising his girlfriend is a precise and frankly brilliant personalization and encapsulation of the idiocy, brutality, and terrifically rutted clerkdom of the Soviet Union. At the same time, as a set up it is astonishingly puerile and absurdly prurient.

It’s clear that Amis felt the need to dramatize, and therefore make personal, the Stalinist Terror. In 2002, Amis published Koba the Dread, an odd, unflinching, and vivid combination of memoir and history that dealt with the murderous wreck of Communism and the failure of most English and American intellectuals to fully condemn the horror. Some critics of the book have claimed that it contains errors, but Amis’s powers as a writer bring the big picture convincingly into focus. It strikes me as an excellent book, most importantly for its blunt condemnation of Stalinism, Communism, and those who would exculpate or defend them. The whole is profound and moral.

As personal as he made Koba the Dread, it was nonfiction. Therefore it was not an idiohistory, an adventure in psychology, a personalization of external patterns or truths—all the things that novels are. By his own admission, he had read an arm’s length of books about the U.S.S.R. and couldn’t get it out of his head. What better way to process it? What better project than a fictional account of the Gulag to go on the shelf next to Koba the Dread?

The ridiculous savagery and violence and selfishness of which people are capable has always been a fascination for Amis, all of which he easily finds in the Gulag. Unfortunately, it’s not enough for Amis that the Gulag be awful; his heroes must be awful as well, and that causes real problems for House of Meetings. I’m not suggesting that the novel would be better if the central trio were lily-white angel-victims and the whole thing were clearly divided into good and evil. I’m only pointing out the muddle.

In fictionalizing totalitarianism, one runs the serious risk of creating kitsch and so passing along received ideas (thereby, if taken all the way to the absurd end, potentially fostering totalitarianism). One of the rules that Milan Kundera laid down for kitsch detection was the “obvious evil.” In scenarios of the Gulag, evil will be obvious perforce. Attempt to get around that by making the evil sympathetic, and you’re a denier or a forgiver. Attempt to complicate the scene by making your protagonist evil as well, and you cost us the very sympathy that would make a novel about totalitarianism successful.

Let us return to the reason for Lev’s incarceration. In Koba the Dread, Amis wrote “Stalinist terror was deliberately random. Everyone was terrorized, all the way up: everyone except Stalin.” This is a crucial point and when dramatized it’s devastating. When we see what that means in a situation, it becomes real to us. When Amis wrote in Koba the Dread that the bugs of the Gulag were legendary, it lacked the punch of Lev reaching into his shirt and taking out a handful of bugs, and then putting them back in because they weren’t so big. That’s what dramatization is for. Only in dramatization do we feel the bed bugs, and smell the bodies. It is one thing to report that the Gulag was a destroyer in every sense, it’s quite another to read that Venus the stepdaughter was wrong in saying that which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. “It makes you weaker, and kills you later on,” counters the narrator.

In Koba the Dread, Amis observed that “in a place dedicated to death, what you needed in your self was force of life: force of life. Our witnesses are unrepresentative.” Art is one such force. One interned character in House of Meetings recites Eugene Onegin every day. Amis, to tell this story, uses his own voice to carry his brute of a narrator through the gulag. This strikes me as noble and generous. I may be the first person to ever write that about Martin Amis.