Customer Reviews

House of Meetings

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Amis is a fine writer, and I think he lets his skill get in the way of his book. If he had been more concerned with writing a good book than writing well, it might have been better. House of Meetings contains much gripping material, especially in the first half that focuses on life in the Gulag, but I found the characters not too credible.

The material about life in the camps is harrowing, and Amis' skill is well used here. His phrase about the cold "grabbing you and frisking you," will stay with me through all my thoughts and reading about the Gulag. His passages about erotic and violent encounters can pack quite a wallop, no question. But I found the characters in the love triangle to be rather too familiar, and I really couldn't muster much interest in how their lives would turn out. The narrator talks like a, well, like a litterateur...how did he get that way after such a brutal life? No clue. His brother, a man of iron principles...why? No clue. The love interest, a Venus of Wittemberg type, all earth, sex, sensuality. (And it's all written to his step daughter, Venus, a typical American girl - the irony is a bit too thick.)

The sentences in the book can be marvelous, the descriptions haunting, but they don't seem like the sort of thing that would come out of the character who's telling the story. They seem more like Amis trying to sound like an intellectual Gulag survivor. Not bad, but once they get out of the camp, not too compelling. The plot is supposed to be tragic and weirdly contorted, but it just seems contrived to me. Would anyone really talk about their lives as these people do?

I've been a big fan of Martin Amis' work since I discovered "Money", which forced me to devour all his previous and subsequent books. And I have read with dread fascination a lot of the history of the Soviet Union, including many of the books used by Amis to prepare "House of Meetings" and the great earlier historical essay Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million Amis is a natural with the English language; it's like watching Steve Young throw touchdowns. His earlier, darkly comic novels were a lot of nasty fun, but he went through something of a slump in the last decade. It seemed he was searching for larger tragic themes for his fiction. He may have found them. I think "House of Meetings" is his best book since "London Fields" and may just be his finest book yet. It's like one of those massive Russian novels compacted into a brisk 240 pages; imagine Dostoevsky crossed with Nabokov. In "House of Meetings" he is able to combine a harrowing historical novel about Soviet Russia and serve his own preoccupations with black comedy, human destructiveness, and tragedy. It's a novel about the cruelties of ideology and the annihilating power of twisted sexual obsession.

This is a very rare novel by a major Western writer about the Gulag; perhaps it will begin to correct the increasingly embarrassing absence of attention this subject has gotten from Western literary intellectuals. The basic triangular situation of the characters is a familiar Amis situation, but one he has adapted to the tortured history of the times. The nameless narrator is a vital barbarian who grows more sensitive and intelligent with the more and more torment Amis puts him through (although not sensitive enough perhaps to save him in the end.) His brother Lev is not so handsome or assured. He is in fact very passive and inadequate, but because he is a poet he manages to wed Zoya. She is one of Amis' earthly goddesses who becomes the catalyst for the brothers' destruction. During World War II the narrator "rapes his way across eastern Germany" in the Red Army. (That Amis is able to keep us involved with such a morally compromised character is a measure of his great talent.) After the war the brothers end up in Norlag, near the Arctic Circle, "sold into slavery" in the huge concentration camps of Siberia. Amis presents a horrifying but compelling and convincing portrait of those times and places, layered with actual events gleaned from the best histories (like Solzhenitsyn, and Anne Applebaum's definitive Gulag : A History.) After ten years the brothers are set free but discover that freedom is not granted, but struggled after with hideous cost. The epigraph of this novel could be from Shakespeare: "There's a destiny which shapes our ends, rough-hew them as we will." Amis' narrator comes to believe there is a damnation set aside for each of us. But we come to see how unreliable he is. There is an assignation in the so-called "house of meetings" in the camp, used for conjugal visits, which haunts the book like a ghost and the nature of which is revealed only at the end after a series of events which leads to disaster for all. Amis is famous for his bleak surprise endings, and this one gave me chills. Because it is so cruel and yet so in keeping with what has gone before. If you enjoy fine literary fiction and are interested in the terrible history of the 20th century, like me, you must read "House of Meetings."

Fans of Martin Amis will recognize a narrative dynamic in HOUSE OF MEETINGS. This is fraternal competition, which manifests in the novels SUCCESS, MONEY, and THE INFORMATION as the hilarious but sad interplay between dependent men.

But in HOUSE OF MEETINGS, Mart gives his fans a twist. This time, he takes this same dynamic and imagines its expression between two brothers in Soviet Russia, the older a soldier brutalized by his experiences in World War II. In HOUSE OF MEETINGS, Mart explores how this dynamic, which drove the lives of his characters in 1980's London and New York, would withstand years of slave labor in Stalin's Gulag.

One Amazon.co.uk wag (the review has disappeared) called this book ONE DAY IN THE LIFE OF MARTIN AMISOVITCH. Mart's fans who read HOUSE OF MEETINGS will see this comment is spot-on, since this novel explores such familiar Amis themes as male competition, loveless sex, retribution, and bad teeth, this time in heavy-handed Soviet society. It's fascinating stuff and the writing, especially in the first and last sections, is brilliant.

One word of warning: The experience of reading this book is similar to reading EVERYMAN, the latest from Philip Roth. I'd call each novel a short and mesmerizing page turner. But neither book is happy reading, even with the guilt plagued narrator of HOUSE OF MEETINGS finally earning profound but ironic praise from his younger brother.

If you're a fan of Martin Amis' writing, then you probably know what you'll get here. First-rate prose, sharp psychological insights, and devastating (and funny) commentary on life and humanity that strikes some readers as cold and clinical, but is in fact quite compassionate and at times even poignant.

As an essayist and reviewer, Amis is unmatched--his talents are perfectly suited to those forms. And his novels are great reading as well: both profound and enjoyable. Yet House of Meetings shares the one significant flaw that marks all the Amis novels I've read (and which another reviewer here touches on): his characters inevitably speak (or in this case, write) like Martin Amis the essayist. And just like the mismatched half-brothers of Success, the half-brothers who meet again in a Soviet gulag in House of Meetings regularly make Amis-like insights on their lives and the people they know. That one flaw in Amis' fiction doesn't stop me from enjoying, or recommending, his novels, including this one. The author's wit and insight and the quality of the writing more than pay back your reading time, flaws and all.

For years I've been ambivalent about Martin Amis. He is even better than his father at depicting physical and moral decrepitude, and just as talented a humorist. For these and other reasons, I love his previous fiction. However: (1) almost invariably around 4/5ths of the way into his novels he fails to resolve the narrative tension in a convincing or readable manner, and (tied to the first one), (2) when the moral concerns of the author intrude (usually when the novels are being resolved) there is no longer sufficient distance between author and narrator, leading the books to become either muddled or unconvincing. [note: If you are a believer in the anxiety of influence, then there is a compelling explanation for this. Martin Amis is one of the few people that reads his father correctly as being one of the truly great moralists in the Western literary tradition,-and here I refer only to his Kingsley Amis' fiction.]

Thus, for years Martin Amis been one of my favorite authors. However, I couldn't point to one of his books and say that it was on my list of favorite books.

"House of Meetings" should be on anybody's list of favorite books. I could go on like all of the reviewers and talk up its historical and moral virtues. This worries me though, because lots of books have great historical virtues (e.g. Colleen McCullough's excellent series on the fall of the Roman Republic) without being truly magnificent novels. And Amis' description of Russia is fantastic. . . However, independent of the history, "House of Meetings" is one of the most psychologically and ethically astute novels I've ever read. That is, if Soviet Communism had never happened, and Amis' book was a work of pure counterfactual history, it would still be in the top tier of novels.

The narrator's old age reflections on his often morally repugnant life, the narrator's advice to his daughter (reflecting the awful wisdom he has gained from said life), the narrator's presentation of his brother and brother's wife (and the narrator's brother's letter), the narrator's description of the different kinds of prisoners, the narrator's thoughts on what is happening in Russia today. . . not one sentence of it rings psychologically false. Moreover, it's all interesting; both the world presented and the writing style make it an impossible book to put down.

Now for the moral aspect of the novel. Yes, communism was horrible, and people need to understand it. However, Martin Amis' non-fiction book on Stalin helped in that task. This novel does that but much more. Bertrand Russell said the main task of philosophy now is to help people to learn to live in a world without certainty without themselves being paralyzed. I think moral literature helps us learn to live in a world of such massive injustice, cruelty, and ignorance without succumbing to it ourselves. Somehow, in creating a fictional world around real monstrous injustices and cruelties, Amis has succeeded in this as well as any novelist.

Martin Amis's new novel is House of Meetings. Obviously making use of some of the research associated with his previous non-fiction book, Koba the Dread, which was about Stalin (though he also acknowledges his debt to some later books than his own) he has written a novel about a "survivor" of the Gulag. But of course the novel is in great part about the ways in which this man didn't really survive the Gulag.

The narrator is a Russian born in 1919. He is telling his story, in what seems to be a long letter, to his stepdaughter, an American girl, sometime in 2004 or so. In the present he is taking a trip back to the location of the slave labor camp in which he spent ten years from about 1946 to 1956. He is also agonizing about the botched hostage situation in North Ossetia, ongooing as he writes. It becomes clear he intends to die soon, and this narrative is a confessional, as well as a lament for his native country.

The fulcrum of the story is a love triangle, involving the narrator, his ten years younger brother Lev, and a beautiful young Jewish girl named Zoya. Just after the War (in which the narrator, in his words, raped his way across East Germany -- in company, to be sure, with the rest of the Russian Army), Zoya moved into their neighborhood in Moscow, and immediately established a reputation as a woman of little character. But a very beautiful woman. The narrator, a war hero of sorts, handsome, used to having his way with women, becomes obsessed with her, but is rejected. And ends up being sent away to a labor camp. And he is astonished to learn that his rather ugly younger brother has taken up with Zoya, and indeed married her. But then Lev too is sent to the camps -- the same camp. And the two men spend several years there -- though Lev is a pacifist, and refuses to become involved in fights against the camp bullies, or the administrators. Which leads to something of a rift between the two men -- a rift exacerbated in the narrator's mind by his jealousy. But something changes horrendously when Zoya is allowed to make a conjugal visit -- in the "House of Meetings". And when soon after that, the camp is closed and the inmates freed.

The later life of the three is also described. The narrator is fairly successful, in Russian terms, eventually emigrating to the U.S., while Lev's marriage disintegrates, and he marries another woman, and has a son, destined to die in Afghanistan. But all is leading to a final confrontation between the narrator and Zoya, and to a final revelation in a long buried letter from Lev to the narrator. All this incident is skillfully unfolded, if to be honest the final letter isn't quite the explosion we have been led to expect.

Much of the interest in the novel is in the quite compelling descriptions of life in the labor camp. Besides being a portrayal of slave camp life, and a portrayal of a ruined man, it is to some extent a pained depiction of a dying country. It is very well written. A bit less "bravura" in prosody than earlier Amis books, though still often arresting. And very moving, quite believable, quite profound. One of Martin Amis's best novels, for certain.

Does another novel exist by a non-Russian about the gulag? Not that I'm aware of, and for that reason alone I've upped the rating by a star. Unlike the Nazis and the Holocaust, the Bolsheviks and the gulag have always been comparatively hidden in the shadows, as the Soviet "experiment" has met with many reactions of "yes, but" or "what if" or simply passed over in silence. This novel may mark the beginning of a greater understanding in the West of the brutality of the Soviet system.

That said, this is only indirectly "about" the camps, as it is entirely a memoir of a fictional survivor of a "tenner." And although this survivor is in his mid-eighties at the time he writes, the book is all Eros and Thanatos--on most pages, it's all sex, or death, or sex and death. The preoccupations, in short, of a middle-aged man (or author). I can relate--up to a point.

Many of the criticisms made elsewhere here strike me as entirely valid: the characters are emotionally flat, the final revelation is anticlimactic, the writing is often essayistic, and so on. Still, I would say that Amis succeeds in revealing the tragedy of present-day Russia through his focus on the main character's history and obsessions. The legacy of the gulag is that of what Amis calls "the Russian cross": the convergence, in 1992, of a rising death rate with a declining birth rate--with a sharp climb in the former and a sharp drop in the latter in the 15 years since.

As the narrator concludes, "Russia is dying. And I am glad." Readers will not be glad, but it is hard to disagree with this conclusion.

In THE HOUSE OF MEETINGS, Martin Amis journeys retrospectively through the horrors of modern Soviet history, from the gulags of Stalin through the Cold War of Khrushchev and Brezhnev to the gradual, late 20th Century opening of Russian society with its attendant tragedy of the hostaged schoolchildren in Beslan. The trip itself takes the form of a memoir, written by a nameless old man - a gulag survivor - and occasionally addressed to his decidedly 21st Century California (step?)daughter Venus. Along the way, the author entangles his anonymous protaganist (one can hardly call him a hero) in what he describes as a scalene love triangle, that is, a triangle of three unequal length sides. The other two sides are provided by the memoirist's unhandsome brother, Lev, and a lascivious Jewish woman named Zoya. The narrator has already established himself cautiously in one of the middle-upper rungs of this survivalist society when Lev arrives. Lev's remains persistently unwilling to conform to gulag society, holding himself out as a principled pacificist who allows his brother to do the dirty work to protect him. It is here, in the prison's House of Meetings, where Lev and Zoya carry out the tryst that binds them, and haunts the narrator, for much of the rest of their lives.

Amis's prose is, as always, borderline pyrotechnic, and he is at his most effective (and affective) when describing life in the Siberian gulag of Norlag. The anonymous memoirist and his younger brother somewhat improbably land in the same prison, an above-ground Inferno with a caste system that runs from Mafia-like bosses to the lowliest of the low who survive by eating dregs on all fours. Amis presents the struggle for survival powerfully - getting enough to eat, climbing the sleeping hierarchy from floor to lower bunk to upper bunk, dealing with dirt, disease, and infestation (one character says, "I reach into my shirt for a handful of lice and if they're only little ones I think [forget] it and put them back."). Of course, this world has been portrayed many times before, most notably (and with proper allusion to Dante's circles of hell) by Alexander Solzhenytsin . It is always dangerous to follow in the footsteps of a giant, and Amis, while effective in his own right, demonstrates that he is not up to the challenge of the great master. His depiction is strong, but in the end, his gulag lessons are obvious: life there is vicious and elemental, human dignity is degraded to the point of disappearance, and survivors are forever scarred by the experience.

Curiously, for all this physical and emotional horror, Lev, Zoya, and the memoirist writer come across as emotionally flat. Women characters, in particular, suffer at Amis's hands, there to be used and abused while the Russian cavemen pound each other with heavy wooden clubs. Zoya comes across as a sort of mystical sex kitten who ultimately attaches herself to a man many years her senior. Venus, growing up free in California, sounds little better off for not being in Russia. The overall situation for these characters is rich in potential, but their stories leave the reader coldly indifferent, as if Amis was more interested in the writing than in the characters. The nameless protagonist is singularly unlikable, a user and abuser of others and now a wealthy but crotchety old man who gives large tips to service people as compensation (and self-rationalized justification) for his cranky irritability. He confesses to Venus that his first sexual experience took place during the war, raping a woman in Silesia. By his own words, he indirectly confesses that he has really never stopped raping women.

Not since I read Shirley Hazzard's THE GREAT FIRE (also a post-World War II story, set in Japan) have I encountered a story, and characters, whose emotional power was so severely stunted by the author's style (Brendan Bernhard wrote in the Village Voice that, "...too often, Amis's almost sadistically polished prose feels glaringly inappropriate, like a virtuoso pianist preening before and audience of starving prisoners."). Another critic, Sam Anderson, wrote in New York Magazine that, "The gamble at the heart of every Amis novel is that the prose itself will be so orgasmically dazzling you'll forgive the fact that he's omitted 80 percent of what makes fiction actually work. This leads to certain deficiencies - most seriously, that his characters are all just Amis himself with a fake mustache...."

THE HOUSE OF MEETINGS is a challenging but worthwhile read, both for what it is as well as what it fails to be. Amis offers spot-on turns of phrase (a discomfiting handshake is "like holding a greased rubber glove half full of tepid water") and a great writer's power of small observations. Yet in the final analysis, the whole is rather less than the sum of its parts. My own strong preference among Amis's past works is the extraordinary TIME'S ARROW, a stunning tour de force of time turned backward on itself.

. . . and this book shows it! Lots "inspired" by Janusz Bardach's Man is Wolf to Man (he even seems to appear anachronistically as a character in the book) and pieces from Grossman's epic novel Life and Fate, and other classics of the Gulag canon and Soviet literature in general. Still and all, Amis is a beautiful writer and some lovely bits come through. Well worth a read -- Gulag addicts won't be able to resist a finely crafted novel by one of the best novelists out there, and it's a good intorduction for literate types and Amis fans who don't know much about the archipelago. Those interested in Stalin, by the way, would greatly enjoy Amis's wonderfully entertaining Koba the Dread, which mixes memoir and history to great effect.

In this beautifully written and mesmerizing book Amis creates the autobiography of a Russian man, a Jew, who has had the enormous misfortune to be born in the late 1920s: old enough to have endured Stalin's purges, old enough to have served as a soldier in WWII (with enough harrowing memories to merit an entire book of its own), old enough to be sentenced to a Siberian camp in the late 1940s as a political prisoner (again, almost a book in itself), and old enough to return to the "new Russia" and amass a fortune. In other words, the history of Russia over the past 75 years, through the eyes of a bitter survivor.

The narrative is in the form of a letter to the writer's niece, who has escaped Russia to live comfortably in Chicago. He is trying to explain what makes Russia so different from the rest of the world, and why its people are so deformed when judged by Western standards. In recent years I've dabbled in reading about contemporary Russia, which requires some knowledge of its history, and I found this tale to be chillingly and compellingly true. I've come to see Russia as a unique entity: large enough to have absorbed both Western and Asian influences to become an amalgam of the two cultures and thus a mystery to the rest of world, earning Churchill's famous sobriquet.

This book is not for the faint of heart; some of the scenes are truly nightmarish. Near the end the narrator tells us that in 1992 the Russian death rate eclipsed the birth rate and it became a dying country, doomed to nonexistence within 50 years. Some 70% of all pregnancies end in abortions and the childbirth and childhood mortality rates rivals the worst of Third-World countries. The will to live, belief in a future, is gone.

In its bleakness, however, one finds through the anonymous -- and perhaps sometimes unreliable -- narrator a love of life, and determination to shape that life whatever the obstacles. His anonymity makes him a Russian everyman, for good and bad. This is an amazing book in its ability to both tell the epochal story of contemporary Russia as well as that of one man trying to survive some of the 20th century's greatest horrors.