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House of Meetings

3.43 of 5 stars 3.43 · rating details · 1,306 ratings · 183 reviews

An extraordinary, harrowing, endlessly surprising novel from a literary master.

In 1946, two brothers and a Jewish girl fall into alignment in pogrom-poised Moscow. The fraternal conflict then marinates in Norlag, a slave-labor camp above the Arctic Circle, where a tryst in the coveted House of Meetings will haunt all three lovers long after the brothers are released. And...more

Hardcover, 241 pages

Published January 16th 2007 by Knopf (first published January 1st 2006)

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May 13, 2013 Megan rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: own, historical-fiction, wwii

Often I want to grab people who possess "big vocabularies" by the shoulders and shake them. Yes, you are wordy and intelligent, that does not mean you need to spew forth a litany of synonyms in place of words that would have worked much better when writing a novel. Then again, I feel that if Amis had written a bit more plainly, the novel would've been much shorter. I've seen many people on here say that Martin Amis has a certain flow and cadence with the written word, and I would have to disagre...more

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Jul 10, 2011 Janet rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: russia

So far, well-written but not my favorite Amis (Money, Time's Arrow), even with the Russian subject matter (the gulag 1950s, Stalin's death, love and the camps...) For some strange reason it reminds me of Andrew Weiner's The Marriage Artist, love and jealousy in times of atrocity... though that book had a lot more soul. Maybe I'm just too deep into my Russia book not to judge it in terms of what I like in a novel, what I would do--we call that 'the narcissism of minor differences.' While I find i...more

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Oct 12, 2007 R. rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2007

Selected notes from my review of Martin Amis' reading at the Seattle Town Hall in January:

Five Things Regarding the Writing of House of Meetings:

1. "I'm very reliant on the unconscious mind to write, but it wouldn't do a damn thing for me. The book was imploring me to write it. I don't think I could suffer the Gulag. Instead, I suffered the study."

2. "I was gratified when a Russian lady expressed incredulity that I hadn't been (to Russia)."

3. "It was murder getting to the point where I felt I h...more

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Sep 09, 2007 Alicia rated it 5 of 5 stars

My, what a pretty, pretty book.

When I refer to House of Meetings as a pretty book I am not referring to the subject matter, plot or style of the book. I am instead referring to the lovely way that Martin Amis can string words together to make beautiful lyrical sentences, succinct and inventive turns of phrase and amazing descriptive passages.

Now on to the plot, which is one of the oldest, about two brothers and their love (or lust) of the same woman. Set in a Russian prison, both brothers are se...more

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Mar 31, 2013 Mark rated it 5 of 5 stars

For one reason or another, I missed this the first time round and because of the bleak subject matter - Modern Russia, the gulag - I avoided it, despite being (generally) an Amis completist.

That was a mistake - the book is a masterpiece.

A Russian slave-labourer, one of the Stakhanovites of the post war era, writes a memoir, in the form of a confessional, to his daughter in America recollecting a love triangle between the narrator, his younger brother and a beautiful woman, Zoya, who hypnotises...more

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Jul 19, 2012 John Swift rated it 1 of 5 stars

The is the second, and last, I think, Martin Amis book I shall read. He does not write books that anyone would like to read(again, only a sample of 2). He seems to delight in amazing us with his prodigious vocabulary but totally overlooks the idea that what he says should seem believable, or tell a story. If you need to know what the gulag was like, read Solzhenitysn, who could actually also tell a story. This story is supposed to be a long email to his step-daughter, apologizing for being a bru...more

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Nov 28, 2010 Jenny Shank rated it 3 of 5 stars

http://www.rockymountainnews.com/news...

Amis regains footing
'House' is engrossing tale of an ill-fated love triangle, set in the Soviet gulag
Jenny Shank, Special to the News
Published January 26, 2007 at midnight

Martin Amis' brief, deft new novel House of Meetings, features a love triangle involving brothers who are political prisoners in the Soviet Union after World War II. Each evening as I took up the book again, I would think, "back to the gulag." It's to Amis' credit that I looked forward to...more

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Nov 14, 2010 Kirstie rated it 4 of 5 stars

It's always difficult for me to read books where I don't like the protagonist, especially when the novel is written in first person perspective. This one is sort of like that..I mean, the protagonist actually admits to raping all of these women and being brutish to others while put in a prison camp in Russia. He's tough and yet he's quite human too. This is the end of his life and he's looking back on it for perspective and relating all of this to his daughter as he's hungover and readying himse...more It's always difficult for me to read books where I don't like the protagonist, especially when the novel is written in first person perspective. This one is sort of like that..I mean, the protagonist actually admits to raping all of these women and being brutish to others while put in a prison camp in Russia. He's tough and yet he's quite human too. This is the end of his life and he's looking back on it for perspective and relating all of this to his daughter as he's hungover and readying himself for death. It's an epic journey he takes us on, even if the length of the book is only a mere 240 pages long. It walks you through memories of a much more distant era of Stalin into the more present day hold up at Middle School Number One because of the conflict between Chechnya and Russia.

I also really love the writing style itself. Some of the metaphors and language overall is very effective..

Some quotes I like:

pg 13-14 "When you are old, noise comes to you as pain. Cold comes to you as pain. It wasn't like that when I was young. The wake-up: that hurt, and went on hurting more and more. But the cold didn't hurt. By the way, try crying and swearing above the Arctic Circle in winter. All your tears will freeze fast, and even your obscenities will turn to droplets of ice and tinkle to your feet. It weakened us, it profoundly undermined us, but it didn't come to us as pain. It answered something. It was like a searchlight playing over the universe of our hate."

pg 92 "Never mind for now about famine, flood, pestilence, and war: If God really cared about us, he would have never given us religion. But this loose syllogism is easily exploded, and all questions of theodicy simply disappear-if God is a Russian."

pg 98 "Boredom is no longer the absence of emotion. It is itself an emotion , and a violent one. A silent tantrum of boredom."

pg. 122 "The massacre of the laughing men. I knew then that massacres want to happen. Massacres want there to be massacres."

pg.143 "You know, I can't find a Russian who believes it: "We wanted the best but it turned out as always." I can't find a Russian who believes that. They didn't want the best or so every Russian believes. They wanted what they got. They wanted the worst."

pg 207 "The planet has a bald patch and its central point is the Kombinat. There are no living trees in any direction for over a hundred versts. But some of the dead ones are still standing. Typically, two leafless, twigless branches remain; they point, not upward or outward, but downward, and meet at the trunk. Seen from a distance, the trees look like survivors of a concentration camp, wandering out to be counted, and shielding their shame with their hands. Above them, the watchtowers of the cableless pylons."

pg 238-239 "I had reached the end of philosophy: I knew how to die. And men don't know how to do that. It might even be that all the really staggering male exertions, both great and base, are brought on by this single incapacity. No other animal is asked to form an attitude to its own extinction. This is horribly difficult for us, and may be thought to mitigate our general notoriety...You need mass emotion-to know how to die." (less)

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Dec 07, 2009 Charles Matthews rated it 3 of 5 stars

With its Dostoevskian anti-hero and its willingness to explore the essence of humanity in the depths of degradation, Martin Amis’ House of Meetings may be the best Russian novel ever written by an Englishman.

In 2002, Amis published a slim non-fiction volume, Koba the Dread, in which he took liberal intellectuals to task for mostly downplaying Stalin’s tyranny in comparison to Hitler’s. It’s a comparison that still weighs on Amis’ mind in his new novel.
The narrator, a Russian gulag survivor, re...more With its Dostoevskian anti-hero and its willingness to explore the essence of humanity in the depths of degradation, Martin Amis’ House of Meetings may be the best Russian novel ever written by an Englishman.

In 2002, Amis published a slim non-fiction volume, Koba the Dread, in which he took liberal intellectuals to task for mostly downplaying Stalin’s tyranny in comparison to Hitler’s. It’s a comparison that still weighs on Amis’ mind in his new novel.
The narrator, a Russian gulag survivor, recalls a discussion he had with his daughter about a paper she was writing for college. The question: “in the thirties and forties of the twentieth century, who was more disgusting, Russia or Germany? They were, I said. Much more disgusting. … Still, they recovered and we did not. Germany isn’t withering away, as Russia is. Rigorous atonement … reduces the weight of the offense. … In 2004, the German offense is a very slightly lighter thing than it was. The Russian offense, in 2004, is still the same offense.”

The narrator himself has much to atone for. Born in 1919, he is now “a vile-tempered and foul-mouthed old man – huge and shaggy, my hair not the downy white of the unprotesting dotard but a jagged and bitter gray.” He fought in World War II and, he tells us, “in the first three months of 1945, I raped my way across what would soon be East Germany.” But though he was a Communist Party member, he was sent to the gulag, north of the Arctic Circle, as a “socially hostile element” – meaning he had too much experience of the West to be trusted. Released in 1958, he enriched himself in the underground economy. “I had drive,” he says, “and all Russians hate that.”

The novel is cast as a memoir addressed to the narrator’s daughter. In it, he revisits the site of his 14-year imprisonment, this time as a tourist – he overhears a stewardess referring to him as “the Gulag bore in 2B.” He discovers that the place where the prison camp stood has metamorphosed into a different kind of hell, an industrialized nightmare of unchecked pollution where packs of wild dogs roam the streets. “Already uninhabitable by any sane standard, Predposylov has gone on to become perhaps the dirtiest place on earth. In the hotel there are incredulous environmentalists from Finland, from Japan, from Canada. Yet still the citizens swirl, and the smokestacks of the Kombinat puke proudly on.”

Obviously, the narrator hasn’t gone there to sightsee. Instead, it’s part of a quest to resolve a mystery left over from his days as a prisoner. In the gulag, he was reunited with his half-brother, Lev, who was almost his antitype: short, slight, pacifist, where the narrator is burly and driven. What they have most in common is their infatuation with the voluptuous Zoya, Lev’s wife.

Much of the novel deals with the ways in which the brothers survive the horrors of the gulag. But the key event happens in the thaw after Stalin’s death, when prisoners are allowed conjugal visits in a place called the House of Meetings. There, something happens between Lev and Zoya that Lev won’t speak about, but promises to reveal one day to the narrator.

This secret is hardly enough to propel the novel, and it’s possible to fault the book for a lack of authenticity: Amis’ wit, his tendency to go for the wry and very British epigrammatic insight, sometimes works against his attempt to feign a Russian sensibility. As the narrator puts it, “this is not a country of nuance.” But the power of Amis’ imagination makes up for most of the novel’s deficiencies. He has done his homework – his sources are cited in the acknowledgements. And Amis has understood that his characters are more than puppets in a work of fiction.

“I am not a character in a novel … ,” the narrator asserts. “Like many millions of others I and my brother are characters in a work of social history from below, in the age of the titanic nonentities.” Amis has brought his characters into emotional focus, to evoke the burden that history has imposed on Russia and the Russians. “Russia learned how to crawl, and she learned how to run,” the narrator says. “But she never learned how to walk.”

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Mar 09, 2011 Baseni rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: roman

"Die Dreiecksbeziehung zwischen einer Frau und zweier Halbbrüdern wird hier beschrieben. Die Brüder könnten unterschiedlicher nicht sein. Der Ältere, nebenbei auch der Ich-Erzähler des Buches, aggressiv, Machotyp und durch den II. Weltkrieg zusätzlich verroht, der Jüngere, Intellektueller und in der weiteren Handlung bekennender Pazifist. Die Frau, eine Schönheit, und Männern zugetan, verweigert sich dem ersten und heiratet, wenn auch nur heimlich durch einem Rabbiner getraut, den letzteren.
Dies...more "Die Dreiecksbeziehung zwischen einer Frau und zweier Halbbrüdern wird hier beschrieben. Die Brüder könnten unterschiedlicher nicht sein. Der Ältere, nebenbei auch der Ich-Erzähler des Buches, aggressiv, Machotyp und durch den II. Weltkrieg zusätzlich verroht, der Jüngere, Intellektueller und in der weiteren Handlung bekennender Pazifist. Die Frau, eine Schönheit, und Männern zugetan, verweigert sich dem ersten und heiratet, wenn auch nur heimlich durch einem Rabbiner getraut, den letzteren.
Dies ist die Ausgangssituation ihres, der Brüder, erneuten Zusammentreffen. Es findet in einem Lager des GULags am Jenissei in Sibirien Ende der 40er Jahre statt. Beide zu längeren Freiheitsstrafen verurteilt, erleben das Lager sehr unterschiedlich, während sich der ältere Bruder in und mit der Lagerhierarchie arrangiert hat, erlebt der jüngere die Schrecken hautnah. Nur durch das Eingreifen, mit Rat und der sprichwörtlichen Tat, seines Bruders kann sein Überleben gesichert werden. Nach dem Tode Stalins und der Geheimrede Chruschtschows weicht das Lagerregime etwas auf, das Haus der Begegnungen wird außerhalb der Zone eingerichtet. Hier kommt es zum Zusammentreffen der Eheleute und gleichzeitig zur Belastung der Bruderbeziehung. Der abgewiesene Bruder will unbedingt erfahren, was in dieser Nacht geschah. Der weitere Ablauf wird durch die Suche nach der Antwort bestimmt. Irgendwann löst sich das Lagersystem auf, eine Rehabilitierung erfolgt nicht und muß später „käuflich“ erworben werden. Man setzt sich „einfach“, sofern man einen Platz ergattert, in einen der Züge. Die weitere Handlung des Buches ist bestimmt durch die Beschreibung der familiären Beziehungen und ihrer Problematiken.
Der Bruder-Frau-Konflikt wurde, wohl auch durch die damit einhergehende Ausnahmesituation, anfangs ins stalinistische Rußland verlegt. Allerdings kommt es hier zu leicht verfälschten Darstellungen. So ist die Lagerhierarchie anders beschrieben als z.B. bei Solschenizyn oder Kopelew, die Verurteilung ist ungenau, der stereotype Paragraph 58, antisowjetische Umtriebe kommt nur am Rande vor, Sibirien tritt als Eurasische Platte auf und die Stachanow-Bewegung und ihre Vorgänger werden als „Schockarbeit“ bezeichnet. Dies kann auch ein Übersetzungsproblem sein, richtig wäre Stoßarbeit.
Als Familiendrama gut erzählt, als GULag-Beschreibung mit Schwächen behaftet."
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Feb 05, 2009 Bookmarks Magazine added it

Martin Amis has long been frustrated by the lack of outrage at the atrocities committed by the Stalinist regime, which he equates with the Third Reich. (He explored Soviet Communism in 2002's Koba the Dread.) Building on extensive research, Amis attempts to bring the era to light in this ambitious tale of one man's life, in his own words, as a representation of the suffering of millions. Most reviewers found the story engrossing, but, according to the Boston Globe, "Amis has taken on more than h

...more

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Oct 28, 2011 Yair Bezalel rated it 4 of 5 stars

I didn't think a book as slim and quick to read as this one could be as powerful and epic as this. Condensing the turmoil and strife of Russian history with a parallel love triangle doomed to the same pain and repeated collapsings, Amis tells a masterful story with a narrative completely free of superfluity, sentimentalism, cliche, and woodenness.

The story runs fast and cuts deep with little recourse to clean cut resolution or apology. Horrific tragedy and the facelessness of state power are sh...more

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Apr 17, 2008 Lisa rated it 5 of 5 stars

This is an exceptional book. Written in the first person, as a series of memories and letters to his "daughter", an elderly man in simple, sometimes brutal, terms reveals parts of his life as a Russian male. Spanning the early parts of 20th century Russia to present, as a frame for his life, it's a pithy, witty, sometimes brutal, never ponderous book. I couldn't put it down.

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Sep 26, 2011 Sebastián rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommended to Sebastián by: Andrea Carolina

Shelves: novela, union-sovietica, reino-unido

Es lo primero que leo de Amis y sé que es un autor que me va a encantar, y que es un autor que tiene una particular forma de mirar-revisar-indignarse-mostrar las situaciones históricas como algo enorme pero que hace parte del carácter de una nación y por eso mismo conllevan una responsabilidad colectiva que muchas veces se pasa por alto. Porque esto es algo importantísimo en La casa de los encuentros: cómo, tal vez inconscientemente, el pueblo ruso es de alguna manera responsable por los horrore...more

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Dec 30, 2010 Daniel Cunha rated it 4 of 5 stars

Not your usual Amis, and the fact that he does so well outisde his natural settings is one of this books strenghts. The theme itself - life in Stalinist USSR and its Gulags - is one I have a personal obssession with, and have done much reading on. Amis holds his own, presents a brutal description of what life was like for these characters made brutal by the daily struggles to survive - in and out of the gulag itself. Into this he inserts the tragedy of a love triangle between two brothers, both...more

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Dec 19, 2012 Janice rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: literary-fiction

About two brothers who survive Russian labor camp. Explores their differing characters and their relationships. Love between Lev, the "good" brother and a beautiful woman, Zoya, imparts an interesting perspective on deep love and attraction, as Lev is markedly less attractive than Zoya and she rejects the brother, who is ruthless, not principled, violent, but who proves not to be stronger than Lev. Lev works hard and appears to survive camp, but it has broken his ability to "play" and to take pl...more

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Sep 29, 2011 Steve Rosenstein rated it 2 of 5 stars

I suppose this is some sort of continuation of Amis' fascination with Russia under Stalin that started with 'Koba the Dread', and further proof that a reader would be better served by seeking out the source material that Amis perused, rather than either of the books mentioned here. 'Koba' is an entertaining introduction to Stalin's lunacy for the uninformed but adds little to the volumes of existing literature, and 'House of Meetings' serves best as a mild diversion for anyone, like me, who need...more

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Sep 14, 2011 Frank rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: contemporary-british

Simply put, House of Meetings is about a love triangle, set against a background of the Soviet Gulag in the 1940s and ‘50s. That two sides of the triangle are brothers only adds to the depth of emotions Amis explores. The eponymous building was, incongruously enough, a small cottage set aside for conjugal visits to the slave labour camp. Such a concept is so outrageous, it must have been true, and one can see how the author, stumbling across such a fact, might be inspired to research it further....more

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Apr 08, 2012 James rated it 4 of 5 stars

A poignant, but sadistic story of war and the Russian gulag. This is a disturbing quarry into the mind of a Russian soldier denounced under Stalin portrays the nightmare that is Russia - a nightmare that Martin suggests has never ended and may never end. I believe Politkovskaya would have agreed with that assessment.

I do not recommend this book to those who are sensitive to violence against women. Martin's intent was clearly to show the heinousness of such violence. The protagonist is somewhat i...more

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Jul 28, 2011 Connie rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This has served as my introduction to Amis. First point: Profound respect for a British writer of a Russian novel. Halfway through I found myself thinking I was reading a quasi-Solzhenitsyn work. Second: The length was not too bad for a first person narrative. Third: Parallels made with the Beslan tragedy was a touch of genius. Even the addressee makes for interesting parallel.

However, I find myself missing the Dostoevsky style (which the narrator dislikes) of pain-loving characters or Solzhenit...more

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Jan 14, 2010 Andrew Peyrie rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I class Amis as one of the best living authors. From my point of view a work of art should always be about more than its central subject matter, and Amis is the master of the unexpected and exciting digression. House of Meetings is ostensively about a Russian gulag in which two brothers have been imprisoned, but could more properly be called a story about the nature of violence (and revenge), love (and envy), and memory (and its unresolved attributes). I read this on a short vacation to Hangzhou...more

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May 02, 2011 La Stamberga dei Lettori rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: polyfilo

'La casa degli incontri' è il nome che i detenuti del gulag di Norlag hanno affibbiato a una baracca poco più confortevole delle normali camerate, destinata a ospitare gli incontri tra i prigionieri e le loro mogli o compagne. A quegli incontri è riservato un trattamento di lusso rispetto alle normali condizioni di vita del gulag: cibo caldo, alcune comodità e un po' di riservatezza.

Nel caso di Lev e Zoya, per i quali quell'incontro coincide con la luna di miele, la casa degli incontri però ha u...more

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Mar 29, 2010 Grady Ormsby rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: patient adults

"House of Meetings" is a jet-powered roller coaster ride. By the third chapter Amis had reached out and grabbed me by the throat. The subject matter is modern Russian politics and the self-sabotage of the Soviet government. This is not an easy book to read; war, casual violence, gulags, betrayal on many levels, government operated industrial slavery, unspeakable acts of cruelty. Nevertheless, one must read with full attention in order to engage the brilliance of Amis's style. Like the characters...more

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Dec 28, 2010 Scott Lupo rated it 4 of 5 stars

This is the first book by Amis that I have read. I got his name after reading several references to him by Christopher Hitchens. You might have to get your dictionary ready as Amis uses his extensive command of the English vernacular. As an example, just now I randomly opened the book and scanned the paragraphs to get invidiousness, frivolity, recompense, and locution. The storyline itself is about two Russian brothers and the profound effect that Russian pogroms, specifically Stalin's slave lab...more

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Sep 11, 2010 MJ Nicholls rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: novels, sassysassenachs, the-art-of-loathing

This is the last Martin Amis novel I will ever read. Utter pants. I blame Christopher Allen for giving this one five stars and making me curious. Thanks mate.

What is it about? Who cares. Whether writing about amnesiac women, porn moguls, talentless writers, or life in a Gulag, the end product is always Martin Amis. The protagonist (a sixty-four-year-old Russian) is Martin Amis. Amis, Amis, fucking Amis.

I give up. Dude cannot write anymore. I give up, I give up, I give up. The Information is the...more

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Sep 07, 2007 Matthew rated it 4 of 5 stars

this is the russian novel that dostoevsky and solzhenitsyn always wanted to write, but never quite managed to

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Oct 30, 2011 Russio rated it 5 of 5 stars

Thought-provoking tae of two brothers embroiled in a love triangle set against the last 60 years of Russian history. As a window on Russia it is unrelentingly bleak and Amis keeps up his usual quotient of saying things that others are going to find unpalatable. While part of me wants to deride him for this, this is actually much more human and certainly more unflinching than most of his modern counterparts. I no longer felt, as I did with, say, The Information, that he was just trying to say the...more

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Mar 11, 2008 Marianne rated it 1 of 5 stars

Just awful and pretentious. To be avoided at all cost.

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Feb 14, 2013 Col added it

Shelves: 2012, a

Blurb.....

There were conjugal visits in the slave camps of the USSR. Valiant women would travel continental distances, over weeks and months, in the hope of spending a night, with their particular enemy of the people, in the House of Meetings. The consequences of these liaisons were almost invariably tragic. House of Meetings is about one such liaison. It is a triangular romance: two brothers fall in love with the same girl, a nineteen-year-old Jewess, in Moscow, which is poised for pogrom in th...more

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Jul 09, 2011 Dan Kearns rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: serious-fiction, serious-fiction-sub-history

I disagree with people who think Mr. Amis' best work was in the 1980s and that he has been in decline since. They have missed the profound inventions and importance of his "history novels" like "Time's Arrow" and this one. I do think that, yes, "Money" and "London Fields" are better and more successful books, but the history novels are after something much bigger than those two were. Instead of looking at the contemporary west in the traditional critical mode that is the bread and butter of writ...more I disagree with people who think Mr. Amis' best work was in the 1980s and that he has been in decline since. They have missed the profound inventions and importance of his "history novels" like "Time's Arrow" and this one. I do think that, yes, "Money" and "London Fields" are better and more successful books, but the history novels are after something much bigger than those two were. Instead of looking at the contemporary west in the traditional critical mode that is the bread and butter of writers everywhere(and, damn, did he ever succeed when he did do that!), he is reaching towards a bigger goal. He wants to take on the philosopher and historian both and show how "the poet" gets at deep truths that they cant. He might not nail it down like he did with his 1980s masterpieces, but the reach is so much more important! I'm trained as a historian myself, and I would say that Mr. Amis illuminates the nature of history better here, in "House of Meetings," than in 99% of what I read in grad school.

And Mr. Amis has caught on that if one wants to use history to examine the deepest questions of human nature and morality then there is no more totalizing crucible than 20th century Russia. He had already successfully anatomized the oh-so-familiar decadence of late-stage capitalism and its familiar anomie, and so he moved to the polar opposite: the evil that has absolutely no room for boredoom, decline, and spiritual emptiness. "House of Meetings," like "Time's Arrow" is after the big stuff: the roots of right and wrong, the self against the machinery of evil, the urge to rise above history's force.

The key move he makes is dropping all the intellectual and ideological stuff, and seeing that relationships and love (and thus sex) are the root of what truly matters. He sees that human connections hold the best and the worst of everything. So, he works with personal stories and he works over the course of whole lifetimes. I admit that, in so doing, he drops the unity needed to be as successful as with something like "Money" because he cant maintain the tension of the gulag when the action moves away, but working with whole lifetimes is the only way that love and relationships can be properly explored.

What do relationships in the crucible of totalitarianism teach? That one cannot let history win by becoming another part of the zeitgeist. One resists. One is a self, and NOT a being lost in his time. Agency, not mindless drive from historical forces, is what makes for true human connection. So, you cant count losses. You cant even question blessings. And you MUST see what is represented by children-- sincerity and authenticity and the death of the cycnicism that destroys. And where do children come from? Sex.

Alas, though, with sex, Mr. Amis cant see past his own obsessions. Instead of sex being the deep connection that creates family, children, and the history-resisting self, he, as always, is trapped by his ideal of the beautiful female that loves sex like a man, the nymphomaniac that can scramble a man forever. So, he gets that relationships and sex and children are connected, but he continually gets caught up in re-ifying sex out of that natural nexus. With no metaphysics, except an innate sense of the failure of philosophical materialism, he gropes blindly about trying to push sex to the pinnacle of human connection. It makes for great reading (for a man, at least) to have such female characters as Mr. Amis creates, but they also lead him astray. Sex throws him because he cant give up the notion that it does not require a lifetime's responsibility. He comes so close to pulling it all together when he has female sexual power lead to male insecurity over sexual pasts, but he throws it all away, as always, by having no sense of permanence to relationships. Sex doesnt ground into a lifetime's connection, but instead leads to the different relationship and marriage permutations that just cant carry the weight that a lifetime connection would. Thats why, as with "The Pregant Widow" the later courses of the characters' lives feel so different, so much emptier. Without some sense of permanence in relationships, and with sex being a fissioning force rather than a fusioning force, Mr. Amis flails with the second half of characters' lives.

In the end, though, whatever my disagreements, Mr. Amis reaches bravely beyond where most other contemporaries are working. He is taking on the big things, and he is doing it with that spectacular writing ability that puts him in his own class. I think that his whole oevure is one of the most important of the last generation, and this one deserves a solid place in it.(less)

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About Martin Amis

Martin Amis is an English novelist, essayist and short story writer. His works include the novels Money, London Fields and The Information.

The Guardian writes that "all his critics have noted what Kingsley Amis [his father] complained of as a 'terrible compulsive vividness in his style... that constant demonstrating of his command of English'; and it's true that the Amis-ness of Amis will be recog...more

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