BACKSTORYMartin Amis wrote House of Meetings while living with his family in the Uruguayan resort town of José Ignacio. “I had to convince myself I was writing morally about the Gulags while living in Uruguay with my beautiful wife and beautiful children,” he said. Interestingly, Amis has never been to Russia, though he’d already extensively researched the country for his nonfiction work about Stalinist-era atrocities, Koba the Dread. After almost three years in South America, Amis returned to England this past September, despite being “horrified at the prospect of going back to London.” One can understand his apprehension: “What’s got into Martin Amis?” asked the cover of the London Review of Books by way of promoting its review of his new book.
Amis remains, for my money, the world’s best writer of vivid, zippy prose-bursts. His natural unit of thought seems to be the comic riff, an approach that lends itself to some genres better than others. His career-spanning collection of book reviews, The War Against Cliché, is a masterpiece, and probably his most satisfying single book. But his talent translates less easily to the novel, where he tends to look like a sprinter running a marathon, trying to compensate for muscle fibers and long-term racing strategies he doesn’t actually have. It feels like he’s trying to write entire books out of first sentences. It doesn’t help that he takes a defiantly narrow, self-handicapping view of the genre. He has called plot a “secondary” concern, along with (incredibly) “characters, psychological insight, and form.” He’s obsessed, above all, with style: 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 obvious deficiencies—most seriously, that his characters are all just Amis himself with a fake mustache or boobs; like him, they tend to quote Auden three times a page and speak in fluent Nabokovian sentences. (Amis is king of the Nabokov knockoffs.) He’s so devoted to Voice he doesn’t care about the nuances of actual voices. In House of Meetings, the narrator writing his memoir sounds exactly like his brother speaking aloud, who sounds exactly like his wife, who sounds exactly like the narrator’s American stepdaughter adding footnotes to his memoir after his death. You might say that Amis doesn’t actually write novels at all, he writes brilliantly stylish essays about fictional situations. His phrases are his real characters; his sentences are his plots. Reading even the best Amis novel is like watching a highlight reel: It’s breathtaking, but soon you start to miss the mundane drama of the actual game.
Even mediocre Amis, however, is better than most writers, and House of Meetings has plenty of great moments. His metaphors are still dazzling: A primitive Soviet TV looks “like an especially disgraceful deep-sea fish,” a disgusting handshake is “like holding a greased rubber glove half full of tepid water,” and the narrator’s aging brother develops “a bald patch, perfectly circular, resembling a beanie of pink suede.” There are several convincing stat-filled mini-essays about the decline of Russia—plunging life spans, climbing syphilis rates—and he powerfully distills the ironies of totalitarianism: “Something strange was happening in the Soviet Union, after the war against fascism: fascism.” But, tragically, even style is beginning to desert him. It often feels like he’s working from an Amis template: And there was x, with its y and its z, its q, its r, and its s. “And there we were, Lev and me, with our books and our thick periodicals, our basic German, English, French, our heavy chess pieces, our maps and charts.” He strains to jerry-rig profundity out of gimmicks: italics, ellipses, and faux-poetic repetition. (“I too had crossed over into the other half of my life: the better half. He crossed over and I crossed over. We crossed.”) Two thirds of the way through House of Meetings, the narrator warns his reader to “keep an ear out for my clucks of satisfaction—the little snorts and gurglings of near-perfect felicity.” We didn’t need the heads-up. At this point, the music of Amis’s prose is almost entirely drowned out by self-satisfied snorts and gurgles.
“By the time you have perfected any style of writing,” George Orwell wrote, “you have always outgrown it.” By this standard, Martin Amis outgrew his style at the age of 22, when he emerged as a literary prodigy out of Oxford. Unfortunately, he’s still writing that way 35 years later. House of Meetings is an average little weird disposable novel—not terrible, not great—and Amis has taught us to expect more from him: if not the huge victory, then at least the stunning collapse. Decent writing, or even merely good writing, is by his standards a total failure.
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