Taking Aim at the Gulag

...A complement of sorts to Time’s Arrow, a tale that backed its way into the Holocaust, his take on Stalin’s terror has a paradoxically romantic lushness, a lyricism largely absent from his work...

...BUT THE TRUE presiding spirit here is Vladimir Nabokov, and not only because Amis attempts a portrayal in depth of a Russian ?migr...

...He sets grand scenes with apt and stimulating metaphors, as when the ship taking the narrator north into Siberia docks in the town of Dudinka: “The tannoy erupts, and my hangover and I edge down the gangway to the humphing and oomphing of a military march...

...There is reason to be confident we will see that side of Amis soon...

...Lev dies...

...It is uncharacteristically without self-irony, and not a little like Humbert’s paeans to Lolita...

...Recently Amis has found himself in the public eye because of a falling out with an old friend, writer Julian Barnes, whose wife was Amis’ agent before he fired her...

...Then there are those surprising outbursts of lyricism...

...The son’s early books were touted more for their sexual content and nastiness than their evident verbal dexterity...

...Oddly, however, Amis’ own view of the Soviet Union has little of his blissfully dark humor...

...Then there are the precise evocations of incidents that can modulate into grandly sweeping, aphoristic writing: “You can’t see yourself in history, but that’s where you are...

...By now, Amis has produced a long list of impressive fiction and several volumes of nonfiction, among them collections of his incisive reviews and lively journalism...

...Moreover, in a superb introductory essay to the 1993 Everyman’s Library edition of Lolita, he observes that Nabokov’s infamous narrator “is Lo’s stepfather, and three times her age, and for two years he rapes her at least twice a day...

...The book is framed as a manuscript written for the narrator’s stepdaughter...

...Next come the Urkas, a kind of criminal gypsy element, who are kings of the prison yard...

...Tadeusz Konwicki’s riotously extended Polish joke, A Minor Apocalypse...

...Then there was a Peckish attack on his last novel, Yellow Dog, which reviewer Tibor Fischer said made him feel about Amis the way you would feel finding “your favorite uncle being caught in a school playground, masturbating...

...Many years later the three are reunited...

...Zoya, a practitioner of the freest love, after falling for Lev becomes the most committedly monogamous spouse imaginable, waiting chastely, Penelope-like, for eight years to have her one conjugal visit with Lev in Norlag’s “House of Meetings...

...Yet he has been dogged by the minor accouterments of a fame that has less to do with his literary reputation than the fact that his father was the novelist Kingsley Amis...

...At the top are the Pigs, the guards and administrators...

...AS ALWAYS, Amis displays a formidable ability with the tools of the novelist’s trade...

...One could look equally, though, at McEwan’s more recent novel Saturday, with its upper-middle-class professionals pitted against street-smart gangsters, and see that book as harkening back in part at least to the class-conscious hoodlums in Amis’ The Information...

...He followed this with a pleasingly exaggerated fantasy of author as icon: his arrival at Kennedy on the Concorde, screaming fans at the terminal, media helicopters, police protection...

...He is an avowed brutal rapist...

...Similarly Nabokovian is Amis’ narrator’s literary refinement—he references Nabokov, naturally, as well as Marvell, Coleridge, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, and others...

...Anti-Semitism causes Zoya to flee their hometown...

...Perhaps in imagining characters into that world he realized it would be wrong to be straightforwardly funny...

...Amis’ narrator is no less evil than Humbert...

...This new novel, House of Meetings, about the Soviet Gulag system, further demonstrates the author’s lack of squeamishness in pursuing far-flung challenges...

...A characteristic passage from his first, The Rachel Papers (1973), has the narrator’s maneuverings in the initial stages of a make-out session shunt from teenage antics to stark, if amusing, vulgarity: “When I pressed a corduroy kneecap against the point where hers met, though, her legs could not be said to have leapt apart...

...In the meantime House of Meetings, while getting him no closer to the hot hordes of Madonna-like teenybopping fandom, adds something significant to the cooler appeal of its author’s literary stature...

...Lev marries Zoya and a day later is sent to Norlag, where the narrator already resides...

...A few years back, Amis’ nonfiction study of Josef Stalin, Koba the Dread, served to set him publicly against another old friend, Christopher Hitchens...

...In his lyrical flights, romantic plottings and prime historical setting, Amis seems to be traversing territory his compatriot Ian McEwan so successfully crossed in Atonement...

...Reviewed by Mark Kamine Contributor, “TLS,” New York “Times Book Review,” the “Believer” Writing about Madonna for the London Observer in 1992, Martin Amis reported that the pop star ultimately declined to let him interview her because he was “too famous...

...They end up encompassing the world, not unlike those of Amis’ hero Saul Bellow, if with less exuberance, more irony, and a fairly jaundiced air...

...The novel incorporates chillingly brilliant depictions of prison populations, along with an Orwellian gradation of prison power structure...

...He has maintained his early love of bluntness while creating, in such expansive novels as Money, London Fields and The Information, characters with darkly humorous outlooks (“He was in a terrible state—that of consciousness...

...In flashbacks the story of his life emerges, including a triangular love affair involving himself, his half brother Lev, and a beautiful bohemian Jewish girl named Zoya with whom both men are in love...

...In addition, there is his sophisticated, musical phraseology—for example, he speaks of “postcoital tristesse...

...Fittingly, given Amis’ bent, the romanticism emanates from a narrator who is the most brutal of rapists, a onetime war hero and longtime resident of the Siberian work camp at Norlag...

...His protective, bullying, cajoling treatment of Lev in Norlag comes from fraternal, amorous, vengeful, and jealous motives...

...After a brief opening letter, he relates incidents from a Gulag tour he has embarked on...

...One thinks of the riotously funny literature that came out of the hard times of the Soviet Empire.Venedikt Erofeev’s sodden masterpiece, Moscow to the End of the Line...

...He has long professed great admiration for Nabokov...

...It presents a number of Amis’ most roundly human creations...

...Nor, to be honest, did she have so much as one finger up my bum...

...As in Nabokov, such aphorisms are most delectable when most perverse: “When a man conclusively exalts one woman, and one woman only, ‘above all others,’ you can be pretty sure you are dealing with a misogynist...

...And that’s what a port looks like—a mad brass band, with its funnels and curved spouts, its hooters and foghorns, and in the middle distance the kettledrums of the storage vats...

...As the novel begins, he is returning to Russia from the United States, where he has lived for two decades with a woman and her stepdaughter in tranquil retirement from 20th-century horrors he had contributed to as part of the Soviet Army that raped and ravaged its way through Germany at World War II’s end...

...My behavior,” he says, “is perhaps easily explained: In the first three months of 1945, I raped my way across what would soon be East Germany...

...There are Snakes, Leeches, Fascists, and Locusts...

...At one point, a civil war among the Urkas brings suffering all the way down the line...

...A review by Hitchens in the Atlantic Monthly, and a letter he sent to the Guardian in response to prepublication excerpts, created a minor swirl of controversy in the usually quiescent world of literary journalism...

...The narrator’s rapine past does not prevent him from falling deeply for Zoya and restraining his brutal side—for a time...

...Not that House of Meetings is mere pastiche...

...When the narrator imagines a life with Zoya, he thinks of his compulsion to know all about the past lovers of his women, and exclaims, “Oh, what work lay ahead of us, what prodigies of retrieval and categorization, what audits and manifests, what negations, what cancellations...

...He creates a ghostly, distanced effect by placing quote marks around all dialogue except the narrator’s, a man overly aware of his badness and on a trip to his final destination...

...Perhaps he learned too much of the suffering of Russians in writing about Stalin...

...They have a code of behavior, a system of markings (tattoos), and the ability to dole out violence and choose sexual partners at will...

...The narrator leaves the USSR after learning Zoya has remarried...

...Taking Aim at the Gulag House of Meetings By Martin Amis Knopf...

...In Koba the Dread, Amis perceptively observes, “it has always been possible to joke about the Soviet Union, just as it has never been possible to joke about Nazi Germany...

...Absurd, of course...