House of Blues

"Also the invidiousness, and the awful pedantry. You yourself got a taste of this when I had that worryingly prolonged laughing fit, and you called Tanenbaum: I had just come across the locution "he had the cheek of taking my photograph" in Lolita. Still, I would claim that Anglophilia is not irrational. For this reason. You see, Venus, Russian literature is sometimes thought to be our recompense for a gruesome history. So strong, so real, grown on that mulch of blood and shit. But the English example shows that literature gains no legitimacy from the gruesome. In making claims for world domination, the English novel must look anxiously to the French, the Americans and, yes, the Russians."

If you've been reading the reviews of Martin Amis' new novel House of Meetings, you've undoubtedly come across the name Nabokov sprinkled liberally throughout. It’s as if it were the height of highbrow embarrassment to go one paragraph without mentioning this stylistic touchstone in the Amis oeuvre. Indeed, the ludic émigré who learned English at Cambridge and then went on to write it better than native speakers has been expropriated by the enfant terrible of postmodern British fiction. When Amis hasn’t been mouthing Joyce (Money: "If I stare into his face I can make out the areas of waste and fatigue, the moonspots and bone shadow you're bound to get if you hang out in the twentieth century"), he's been mouthing Nabokov (House of Meetings: "A fold of pudge, very low slung, like a prolapsus or a modern money-belt, between navel and groin; a bald patch, perfectly circular, resembling a beanie of pink suede." Don’t feel bad for looking up prolapsus.).

Also, he’s been spending too much time in the twentieth century, performing “moralistic” vivisections of male pathology all under the misleading subhead, Anti-Totalitarian Studies. Amis excelled with Time’s Arrow, a sophisticated continuum hop through the Holocaust, but he stumbled with Koba the Dread, which read like an incredulous homework assignment on the high crimes of Stalinism. Keith Gessen of n+1 hits a common criticism of the latest fare:

Amis might have adopted, as several reviewers have noted, some annoying Nabokovian tics, but the master's pedantry does not interest him; he does not pretend to be translating Russian into English, for example, when transcribing Russian speech, and for that matter he does not even pretend that Russian is his narrator's native tongue—of the old Russian distance marker verst, he writes that "given Russian distances, and the general arduousness of Russian life, you'd expect a verst to be the equivalent of—I don't know—thirty-nine miles. In fact it's barely more than a kilometer." This is funny, but it's not the sort of joke you'd make if you cared very much for your reader to think your character was real.

In fact, the person our purportedly Russian narrator most resembles is not any Russian or any character from Russian fiction but the rambunctious, drunken advertising executive John Self—Amis' greatest creation—who took readers on an extended, delirious tour of his own private hell in Money. "I am a vile-tempered and foul-mouthed old man," says the Self-like narrator of House of Meetings. Life has made him, naturally enough, a misanthrope: "Oh, and just to get this out of the way. It's not the USSR I don't like. What I don't like is the northern Eurasian plain." It is not impossible for a Western writer to create a work whose very verisimilitude is part of its power: Ken Kalfus' excellent short story collection Pu-239, for example, is remarkable for having the eyes of a Russian writer and the sensibility of a comic American Postmodern Jewish one. Amis is not that kind of writer, and he never has been.

First of all, John Self was a bovine antihero incapable of writing his own story, a fact wryly suggested by Amis’ own appearance as a deus ex machina in Money. (Amis once observed the same protagonist/narrator divide in Augie March, so there is some indication this formalistic trick is both studied and willful.)

The old man behind House of Meetings, however, is no fool. He’s just a brutal killer and a rapist like a lot of Amis characters have been brutal killers and rapists (John Self earns the latter distinction, even if it must be prefixed by the term “attempted.”)

But how implausible, not to say disconcerting, is it for this sort of character to pop up yet again, and this time in Russia, in the work of an author who’s specialized in the XYY syndrome of the super-masculine sociopath? Not very when you consider that the Red Army graduated plenty of killers and rapists, some of whom may have gone on to peruse Mandelstam and Hardy and Larkin years later.

Why is it, critics like Gessen ask, that Martin Amis thinks he can give a former denizen of the gulag the breadth of literary knowledge typically possessed by people like… Martin Amis? This, too, isn’t unprecedented. When he was arrested for “parasitism” and sent for 18 months to a labor camp in the Siberian region of Archangelsk, Joseph Brodsky devoured Auden and decided that one could found a religion on the Englishman’s poetry. (This technically put Brodsky, like Solzhenitsyn, in the “True Believers” sodality of born-again Soviet inmates. Old Isherwood joke about Auden’s high Anglicanism: “He eventually dropped the Anglican but kept the height.” You see how Russophilic such a disposition can be.)

Yet the milky prose and cliché-crinkling moral meditations are only the half of it with Amis. The extract I quoted at the start indicates his artfulness with form as much as with language. Again, “Martin Amis” punctuated the scene in Money as an intentional act of self-parody. And if the wizened old thug who offers his intellectually overweening tale n House of Meetings is unreliable as a Russian, that may be because he’s unreliable as a narrator, too. This book cannot be trusted as a faithful depiction of one man’s experience in the arctic hell of Norlag any more than it can be trusted as a faithful biography of his half-brother Lev or the beauteous imago and apex of the brothers’ love triangle, Zoya.

De te fabula narratur. The joke’s on you. Here is Amis on Lolita:

I wonder how many readers survive the novel without realizing that its heroine is, so to speak, dead on arrival, like her child. Their brief obituaries are tucked away in the 'editor's' Foreword, in nonchalant, school-newsletter form.

I wonder how many readers survive House of Meetings realizing that from page one the narrator’s manuscript has not been in the hands of the narrator: it's been in the hands of Venus, his stepdaughter. As with The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, the memoir we get has been vetted, edited and footnoted by another character first, someone for whom the gruesome history of the wolfhound age, and the rogue’s gallery of blood-boltered sons that age turned out, is supposed to appear "shocking." Yet Venus can't have really been that shocked, not if she saw fit to include casual explanations of what a Stakhanovite was, or who Yezhov and Beria were. Either she’s done her homework for us (and as expiation for the Amis of Koba), or she’s fucking with us about her ex-guardian’s sordid past.