Martin Amis's House of Meetings
Marcus, David
HOUSE OF MEETINGS by Martin Amis Knopf, 2007 256 pp $23 MARTIN AMIS'S Koba the Dread was an articulate, postmillennial reminder of the twentieth century's second, more slent, holocaust and a...
...In the opening chapter of Koba, he points to hours spent highlighting and dog-earing: "Credentials: I am a fiftytwoyear-old novelist and critic who has read several yards of books about the Soviet experiment...
...It is content— not artful conception—that gives this novel its weighty intonations...
...But a novel is not merely an aesthetic means for political critique and censure...
...The stories of Einstein's Monsters explore the atomic-bomb age...
...Despite lithe, buoyant prose and unencumbered realism (a first for Amis in years), the novel is sunk by clumsy self-consciousness and inanimate characters...
...HOUSE OF MEETINGS by Martin Amis Knopf, 2007 256 pp $23 MARTIN AMIS'S Koba the Dread was an articulate, postmillennial reminder of the twentieth century's second, more slent, holocaust and a study of its maniacal perpetrator: Joseph Stalin...
...In an afterword to Time's Arrow (the addendum itself points to insecurities), Amis assuages his and critics' 108 n DISSENT / Summer 2007 concerns over his lack of firsthand experience by noting that "my novel would not and could not have been written" without Robert Jay Litton's The Nazi Doctors...
...What water...
...The letter-writing narrator of House of Meetings is a composite of cell mates from Solzhenitsyn...
...The British edition of House of Meetings was originally to include "In the Palace of the End" and "The Last Days of Muhammad Atta...
...The reader is forced to collude in an entirely imagined (though wellresearched) world when he could devote his reading time to the epic Gulag Archipelago, which gathers more than two hundred testimonies from fellow prisoners as well as captures Solzhenitsyn's own eight years in Soviet camps...
...The brothers are troubled with sexual doubt—"that exclusively male burden"—but this tropic anxiety afflicts many of Amis's protagonists (starting with The Rachel Papers's implausibly oversexed Charlie Highway), and one wonders who is doing the worrying: Amis or two Gulag-imprisoned brothers...
...Below this thin surface, however, lie murkier, underdeveloped organs: the mind and heart of clich...
...Told in epistolary monologue, House of Meetings unravels the tortuous guilt of an octogenarian Gulag survivor as he travels by boat to the eastern reaches of Russia...
...They point to the sometimes banal, sometimes conflicted, ever-complex nature of human beings, even great ones...
...Instead, we get Solzhenitsyn knockoff...
...By sandwiching two terrorism stories around a meaty novella of totalitarianism, Amis points toward a similarity that he argues in a September 2006 Guardian essay, "The Age of Horrorism": that incorrigible Islamic fundamentalists— "Islamo-fascists," as he calls them—are not only the world's newest body-count manufacturers but are also guilty of the same authoritarian sadism as their Nazi and Soviet forebears...
...In fact, anachronism abounds...
...No, I mean my readiness to assert and conclude—my appetite for generalizations...
...and Amis's emphasis on Zoya's physique itself demonstrates her lack of development: for both brothers, her shapely top and bottom invoke the Americas with "the giddy disjunction between north and BOOKS south, and then the waist as thin as Panama...
...AMIS'S OEUVRE can be broken into two uneven halves: the funny and the serious...
...The book argued that one of the differential qualities between Nazi and Communist terror was humor...
...Why is he writing a fictionalized slavecamp narrative sixteen years after the cold war ended...
...Not just clichés of the pen but clichés of the mind and clichés of the heart...
...Yet, there is a shift in his later serious fiction...
...bookish Lev is an iteration of the Babel-Mandelstam martyr...
...This is particularly true when depicting the experience of a prison camp inmate...
...However, it is not Amis's lack of authorial experience that undermines House of Meetings...
...London Fields and Night Train depict the gritty, violent landscapes of the modern metropolis...
...And it isn't just the unvarying morbidity of my theme...
...Of course, the serious, in Amis's hands, is also jocular...
...Not much is needed to warm us to "medium-length, arseless" Charles Highway of The Rachel Papers, but Amis wisely mitigates the disagreeable narcissists of Success, Money, and The Information with his sense of wit and language...
...Underlying the narrative is the tepid, unresolved relationship of brothers...
...Even worse is when the narrator pardons Amis's chronic generalizations by claiming they are his own...
...The tortures described by Solzhenitsyn are unendurable...
...Peter Carey, J.M...
...I did...
...I realize you must be jerking back from the page about three times per paragraph...
...Our unnamed narrator begins by explaining how he got to the slave camp...
...It absolves you of what the imam called the 'enormity,' of self-felony" There was a silence...
...When trafficking in others' tragedies, Amis is justifiably uncomfortable...
...Certainly interest in Soviet cruelty is still relevant in a world plagued by despotic rulers and urgent humanitarian crises...
...House of Meetings, the latest of the serious novels, concludes with a lengthy, bibliographic postscript that reads like the syllabus for a Russian history course, citing, among others, Anne Applebaum, Robert Conquest, Janus Bardach, and Eugenia Ginzberg...
...He tortured, not to force you to reveal a fact, but to force you to collude in fiction...
...It preserves me for God, a new technique, begun in Palestine...
...In Koba, Amis took pains to note his discomfort...
...These last asides distend Amis's own unease over his subject matter rather than deflate it...
...However, the novel's evocation has a specious tone, its moments of poignancy tainted by Amis's overreaching ambitions...
...The wry humor and verbal legerdemain that kept his work afloat—even when burdened by history's darker moments—deflates and, in some cases, sinks into painful deadpan...
...Lev, though, is not on the receiving end, and it's a rather disingenuous overture—one that is satisfyingly in line with the current norms of psychoanalysis, where the palliative is voiced guilt, not forgiveness...
...And he gave me the water...
...110 n DISSENT / Summer 2007...
...Coetzee, and Barry Unsworth are all proficient, postmodern practitioners of the well-researched, involved, sometimes academic, historical novel...
...All writing is a campaign against cliché," Amis wrote in The War Against Clich...
...Despite her absence, the two brothers become enmeshed in a "brutally scalene" love triangle...
...Right behind him is his stuttering, spectacled half-brother, Lev—an "Acmeist and Mandelstamian"—who brings news of his marriage to Zoya...
...The stilted dialogue pervades the whole story, where there's a lingering sense of unexecuted humor, a joke without punch line...
...Amis's characters resonate most falsely, however, because one is constantly aware that they were created in service of the writer's more ambitious goal: to critique Soviet totalitarianism...
...House of Meetings certainly conjures the grisly inhumanity of Stalin's slave camp: the interminable hunger, the claustrophobic powerlessness of imprisonment, the degradation of mindless labor, the acquiescence to violence and brutality...
...Our narrator is a recent Russian émigré to America with the English vocabulary of an Oxford don, and his confession is peppered with literary nods and wordplay, a distaste for all that liberal graduate-seminar postcolonial guilt, and a distracting, compulsive self-consciousness...
...The nastier a thing is, the funnier it gets," Charlie Highway points out, and imagine the well-conceived—almost Orwellian— absurdity of "In the Palace of the End...
...Surely this is a symptom of the subject's seriousness and the lack thereof in Amis's early works...
...In fact, the impetus for Koba—that is, the justification for Amis to write such a book—is that his factual testament counters Stalin's totalitarian program...
...While he struggles with his virility, the ever-turning wheels of totalitarian paranoia—"they arrest by quota"—get him sent to Siberia...
...House of Meetings' interest and value relies on its superficial skin of verbal fluency...
...Here's a conversation between two hijackers from "The Last Days of Muhammad Atta": "Did you see your precious imam...
...The book] feels necessary because torture, among its other applications, was part of Stalin's war against truth...
...German fascism, with its industrially efficient genocide, was cold and pitiless...
...while our narrator resides on the short side, Lev and Zoya exchange letters and even arrange a conjugal visit in the "House of Meetings...
...History (and Amis's desire to critique it) is the dynamic force that fuels their development, and their emotional and intellectual makeup reads like affectations—characteristics grafted from other sources...
...Amis's historical reworking duplicates the misanthropic, Hegelian doctrine that history dictates individuals...
...0 NE WONDERS what Amis is truly up to...
...Body doubles of Nadir the Next (the playboy son of a ruling Middle Eastern dictator) roam palatial grounds, keeping up Nadir's tyrannical appearances with regimented amounts of torture and filmed sex...
...Though benevolently intended, House of Meetings participates in this war against truth: it trespasses on others' tragic experiences, turning fact into fiction...
...Other investigations, however, prove more fraught...
...A decorated Red Army combatant in the Second World War ("I raped my way across what would soon be East Germany"), he returns to food-starved Moscow only to find that he's incapable of consummating his love for a shapely, Jewish neighbor named Zoya...
...As a result, the gravitas of House of Meetings is imposed upon the readers—not by a series of profound ideas or emotional struggles— but by profound subject matter...
...Instead of chronic self-absorption— a characteristic forgiven when done with a salving amount of deprecation and cynicism— we get literary put-ons that rely more on Amis's consumption of others' accounts than on his own experiences...
...Amis's later fiction—in which House of Meetings certainly falls—busies itself with more staid matters...
...DAVID MARCUS is online editor of Dissent...
...This reader has endured none of them...
...This is particularly true when it comes to the two most devastating evils of the last century: Nazism and Stalinism...
...GRANTED, AMIs attempts psychological inquiry...
...The creative genius behind their recreations—Carey's The True History of the Kelly Gang, Coetzee's Master of Petersburg, and Unsworth's Losing Nelson—is that they untwine the knotted psyches of mythical historical figures: Ned Kelly, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Horatio Nelson...
...Ziad asked...
...yet "laughter intransigently refuses to absent itself" from the protracted, haphazard violence of Bolshevism...
...Our narrator's letter serves as a confession...
...With this in mind, one expects House of Meetings, Martin Amis's own Gulag novel, to make good on his contention...
...On the larger scale character means nothing," the narrator explains...
...The holy water...
...Whether it's the understated depiction of Jewish fugitives in Cynthia Ozick's The Shawl or the harrowing interrogations of Rubashov in Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon, the issue is not how many yards of literature they read, nor how many interviews DISSENT / Summer 2007 n 109 BOOKS were conducted, but how artfully they evoked their subjects...
...it is the shadows of one's past— not one's future—that provide anxiety...
...They protrude, defensive and self-justifying, bulging reminders of the novel's manufactured artifice...
...Its characters must be allowed to breathe, think, feel, desire amid the suffocating weight of historical catastrophe...
...and I will proceed with caution and unease...
...The chaotic political crises form only part of these intricate psychological portraits...
...Realist fiction, despite its pretensions, has always been as much about its inhibited creation as its loyalty to subject matter...
...It must be potent with the imaginative and, even more important, the complexly human...
...OVELIST AS bibliophile historian doesn't necessarily make for bad fiction...
...The narrator makes statements like "I am not a character in a novel" and "So what am I? You have consumed your Russian novels...
...In the end, what might have rescued the novel is the levity promised in Koba—a sensitive riff on the prison camp genre...
...However, one also detects in the humorless parody a tacit insecurity, one that inhibits him from fully confronting the satirical tendency of his early writing...
...However, House of Meetings lacks the intimate character studies integral to these tomes...
...As if to absolve himself for his licentiously ribald early novels, Amis has taken on graver, more consequential subjects: the Holocaust, nuclear anxiety, urban violence, despotism, terror attacks...
...This contention, however relevant or disputable, disappeared when the novella was trimmed of its short stories, and what remains beneath the din of historical reprobation are hollow, thinly conceived characters...
...The former are extroverted urban satires filled with self-absorbed, neurotic, gentile Woody Allens...
...Like Time's Arrow, Amis's other prison camp tale, this Conradian voyage is into the known, the remembered...
...But this book doesn't make you laugh...
...However, what's lacking in House of Meetings is not the inhumane—Amis is fastidious when it comes to cataloging Gulag cruelty—but his ability to evoke the humane, a quality that makes the experience of reading Imre Kertesz, Primo Levi, and Solzhenitsyn not only palatable but poignant...
...If only Amis had hewed to this aesthetic idealism in his latest attempt at seriousness...
...and in two New Yorker stories, he portrays former Iraqi heir apparent Uday Hussein ("In the Palace of the End") and a lead September 11 hijacker ("The DISSENT / Summer 2007 n 107 BOOKS Last Days of Muhammad Atta...
...Time's Arrow follows a Nazi doctor...
...There's a responsibility to evoke not only the suffering but also the individual's power to prevail, "the intensification of inner life that helped the prisoner find refuge from the emptiness, desolation and spiritual poverty of his existence," as Viktor Frankl put it in his memoir/psychological study of Auschwitz, Man's Search for Meaning...
...There are many novels that successfully fabricate history's horrors...
Vol. 54 • July 2007 • No. 3
