Red Dogs

Martin Amis has a new novel, House of Meetings, in which he once again voices his animus against Stalin, the subject of his 2002 book Koba the Dread. Amis's Stalin fixation is surely one of the oddest preoccupations in contemporary literature. Amis returns to Stalin as if restarting that portion of  his career that produced the execrable novel Yellow Dog ("like finding your favorite uncle masturbating in public," one critic wrote). His new novel is linear and focused in ways Amis hasn't shown in years.

In House the totalitarian giant of Koba and the world he created (or created him, if you prefer) is reimagined as a compelling story about two brothers making their way through the great ideological battles of the twentieth century. One brother, our narrator, rapes every German woman he can get his hands on in the Great Patriotic War, but nevertheless lands in prison back home--not for patriotic sexual assault, but for trumped-up charges of a political nature. His half brother Lev joins him in prison soon afterwards for "praising America"--still a misdemeanor in many European countries, by the way. "America" is actually a voluptuous woman with a waist "as thin as Panama." Amis has always been good at big metaphors, and here the sallow lust of many of his male characters has been sublimated and redirected to whole countries, even continental land masses. The brothers are, fittingly, banished to the coldest part of Mother Russia, where they internalize the murderous ideology of Stalin's Soviet Union. The brothers eventually tumble out of the gulag system when it collapses, and our narrator applies his learned ruthlessness to a picaresque career in electronics repair. After his release from prison he begins repairing TV's before moving on to nuclear missile launchers. Eventually he beds America (the woman) in 1956, emigrates to America (the country), and returns to Putin's neo-Stalinist Russia a wealthy man.

The geo-political scope of the story returns Amis to a realm in which he clearly feels more comfortable. Recently he's picked a public fight with Christopher Hitchens, which is absurdly easy to do, and agreed to answer some readers' questions for the Independent. Amis is churlish as usual, giving prickly answers to questions like "Do you ever worry you have inherited some of your father's misogyny?" and "Why are you such a snob?" Curiously, readers also posed questions like "Would you support an Israeli pre-emptive nuclear strike against Iran?" Either the British expect their novelists to have answers to such questions, or no one else in Britain will talk about such issues, but Amis dutifully gives his opinions: no, Israel shouldn't strike at Iran, and snobbery is due for a comeback.