Martin Amis has never been shy about his talents as a prose stylist. The New York Times has called him the "prince of hip," a compliment not so spangling since both labels come with a sell-by-date. Accordingly, his previous novel, 2003's Yellow Dog, read like an attempt to reclaim this expiring honorific, but ended up feeling like a dogdraw from a writer who refused to bowdlerize his funboy excesses. By his own admission, cleverness and a speedy turn-of-phrase have always been a stock virtue in his metabolism:
"I would certainly sacrifice any psychological or realistic truth for a phrase, for a paragraph that has a spin on it: that sounds whorish but I think it's the higher consideration. Mere psychological truth in a novel doesn't seem to me all that valuable a commodity. I would sooner let the words prompt me, rather than what I am actually representing."
"I would certainly sacrifice any psychological or realistic truth for a phrase, for a paragraph that has a spin on it: that sounds whorish but I think it's the higher consideration. Mere psychological truth in a novel doesn't seem to me all that valuable a commodity. I would sooner let the words prompt me, rather than what I am actually representing."
So, what's striking about his slim new novel The House of Meetings, is the assembly of wit bolted together with "psychological truth," and what harmony an Amis novel can be when the two are paired. In three years, Amis will be sixty: He is no longer a prince and he certainly isn't a hip. The House of Meetings proves what wonderful axiomatic realities these are.
It is a dehumanization novel. A Russian novel, a Gulag novel, a recovery of humanity novel. Traveling in time between Stalin's death force and the 21st century's bitter ironies, the unnamed narrator sets down his memoir to his step-daughter, revealing his own crimes (as a young Russian soldier raping his way through Germany) and also the crimes committed against him - chiefly, the crime of his brother Lev marrying the woman our narrator had once loved at, and also failed with. Zoya is an exceptional woman, a mystery, and with her Jewishness, a rarity. In the face of dehumanization, The House of Meetings is also a love-triangle novel, with revenge as its appendage. The narrator writes, "To me, by now, violence was a neutral instrument." By the end, blood covers the stage, all over the place - and all wrong. Dry blood, without alarm. Russian blood that neither shocks nor stares at the living in its wake. Just a bald fact.
It is a dehumanization novel. A Russian novel, a Gulag novel, a recovery of humanity novel. Traveling in time between Stalin's death force and the 21st century's bitter ironies, the unnamed narrator sets down his memoir to his step-daughter, revealing his own crimes (as a young Russian soldier raping his way through Germany) and also the crimes committed against him - chiefly, the crime of his brother Lev marrying the woman our narrator had once loved at, and also failed with. Zoya is an exceptional woman, a mystery, and with her Jewishness, a rarity. In the face of dehumanization, The House of Meetings is also a love-triangle novel, with revenge as its appendage. The narrator writes, "To me, by now, violence was a neutral instrument." By the end, blood covers the stage, all over the place - and all wrong. Dry blood, without alarm. Russian blood that neither shocks nor stares at the living in its wake. Just a bald fact.
The novel's title refers to the site of reunion, a kind of run-down conjugal shack, between narrator's brother Lev and Zoya, after an eight year separation while the former served in the Gulag. The title also strikes a rich note of the reunion between the narrator's own lonely life and the ghosts that populate his conscience, his nerve. The recording of his past to his step-daughter is less a memoir and more a minnesong into their ranks of the victims, the raped, the lost loves. And he yearns to join them. In fact, his campaign is represented by his lack of quotation marks in his dialogue - and his alone; it's as if he's resurrecting them while erasing himself from his own history, his own life's story, an eternal quotation mark.
Occasionally, the sacrifices of Amis' standby prolixity read as variety theatre Bellow, where guilt-free sentences are weighted down with bon-bon adjectives: There's the "pleading rictus" and the "mirthless rictus," a "scrofulous rabbi;" the coitus and post-coitus described as "messy intercrural compromises, and snuffling aftermaths;" men walking "at a donnish pace." Even so, The House of Meetings is worthy of the author's gifts. Amis' previous wrestle with the 20th century's other dehumanizing campaign, the historical in-reverse Holocaust novel, 1991's Time's Arrow, was met with premature hostility. What critics missed was the writer's sensitivity to his both history and source material. In The House of Meetings Amis has trumped that previous achievement, and his imaginative powers invigorate not only horror but also the dumb innocence of historical placement.
