House of Meetings (review)

Suicide, as A. Alvarez writes in The Savage God, "has permeated Western Culture (since the Romantic Age) like a dye that cannot be washed out." The works of Martin Amis, more persistently and consistently than those of any other contemporary mainstream English writer, bear out the continued truth of Alvarez's assertion. Until the publication of Amis's most recent novel, choosing the best example of this preoccupation has been easy: the 1984 novel Money, subtitled A Suicide Note. Money is crammed with suicidal behavior that culminates bathetically in a botched suicide attempt by John Self, the narrator/author of the extended "note." Amis, who also appears as a character in the novel, includes a prefatory paragraph signed M. A. to point readers to some of the ways in which the suicide note metaphor might be understood, explaining that the note's addressee is not another character in the book, not himself or even Self himself, but "you out there, the dear, the gentle" reader, who ought, Amis directs, to proceed "slowly, on the lookout for clues or give-aways."

Many reviewers not entirely unjustifiably believed that Amis was experimenting with another form of self-murder, career suicide, when he published the novel Yellow Dog in 2003. But with the appearance of House of Meetings, Amis has indisputably shown that reports of his professional death were greatly exaggerated. House is an outgrowth of Amis's 2002 Koba the Dread, a nonfiction meditation on Stalinist horror and his inability to accommodate the perversely sympathetic, obtuse reactions that his father, Kingsley, and his close friend Christopher Hitchens at times have manifested toward Stalin.

The new novel, though strikingly different in a host of ways from much of his earlier fiction, is presented as another extended suicide note, and like its predecessor Money, it deserves and repays careful reading. Like Money as well in its unrelentingly nightmarish atmosphere and its dominant moral squalor, House, however, rarely falls into the obsessive prolixity of Self's drug-fueled binge of language. The linguistic bravado remains, and the expressive urgency, but these qualities are now marshaled by a narrator less a blank tape, recording whatever happens in and around a bizarre consciousness, than a shaper and assessor of the meaning of a life that, suicide or not, must end soon.

In House, the note's author, "in the 'high' eighties" as he writes, is a veteran of Stalin's World War II army and also a survivor of many years' imprisonment in a Siberian Gulag in the late 1940s and '50s. As he composes his note, apparently an extended email being written on a laptop computer, he journeys by air, water, and land from Chicago, where he settled for many years with a woman now dead named Phoenix, to the site of the Arctic work camp in which he and his pacifist, poetic brother, Lev, spent so many years, and then finally to the place where his brother died many years after their release from the camp. He intends for his own life to end by a hospital-administered lethal injection shortly after he finishes his "note," a key part of which, maybe the key part, is a long-unread letter, a note within a note rather than a play within a play, sent to him by Lev just before dying.

House is not addressed, as Money was, to "you, the dear, the gentle." Instead the narrator (who, in one of Amis's rare lapses into a cliché of fictional technique, insists at an early point that he is not a character in a novel) here chooses to address his confession to a young American woman named Venus, apparently his African-American stepdaughter, who is "as well-prepared as any young Westerner could hope to be, equipped with good diet, lavish health insurance, two degrees, foreign travel and languages, orthodonture, psychotherapy, property, and capital." He also believes that she cares for him and will honor his wishes regarding publication of his confessional "love story," as he insists on calling it...