House of Meetings by Martin Amis

Martin Amis arrived on the scene early in the year with a predictably great novel. House of Meetings is an expansive story set against the tightness of Stalin's Russia. This isn't Amis's first foray into depicting this phase of Russian history. His non-fiction work, Koba the Dread, set the stage for his return to the subject and was hailed as a major contribution to the study of Stalin and his regime. Now with House of Meetings, it's as if we can all exhale. His new book is, as typical with Amis, witty and monumental. It tells the story of brothers who, as disparate as any two siblings can be, are linked both through their individual sentences in a gulag and their love of the same woman. Love is tough under these circumstances and after a climax at the House of Meetings between the main character's brother, Lev, and Zoya, the rest of the novel deals mostly with the reconciliation of the nameless main character with himself. He is, quite honestly, a brute and makes no real apologies to the reader. The weakness in the novel may exist in the fact that so much of the book is devoted to his becoming a more humane individual over the years. The problem is that, at least for me, Amis never quite achieves believability in his saving of the narrator. Despite this element, House of Meetings is a gorgeous and devastating novel and ultimately, Amis fans will love it and new readers will become devoted fans.