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The Amis PapersWhere is Martin Amis headed next?

By Keith Gessen
Posted Tuesday, Feb. 6, 2007, at 7:10 AM ET

(Continued from page 1)

I submit the following: That those of us (myself included) who've written about Amis' recent, unquestionably annoying moralizing by pining for the Mean Amis of old have done so a little disingenuously. Because even in Money one felt, I think, that Amis was being disapproving—in a way that wasn't convincingly disapproving. I mean that he lacked a point of view, a moral center, with which to anchor his anger. Even Celine, who is often held up as the quintessential 20th-century amoralist, was actually—and explicitly, in Journey to the End of the Night—a doctor who was horrified by the wanton killing he had witnessed in the First World War. Amis has diagnosed a problem with his writing, and he's been working on it. He should take his lumps for it, but we should admit that this is what he's up to.

Reading House of Meetings, one begins to think that the biggest trouble with Amis' recent work may have been that he was attacking his subjects too directly. Yellow Dog, his last novel, was, after all, a social satire; it's just that his targets were so obvious that they were effectively outside the proper range of satire. This time, Amis approaches his subject obliquely; he circles toward it. He may begin in the Gulag, but gradually you see him feeling his way toward contemporaneity—a comment here on Western teenage piercing habits, a thought there for contemporary Russian politics. During the narrator's trip, he catches news bulletins of the horrible situation in the town of Beslan, where Chechen terrorists have captured a school, and Russian forces are poised to start bombarding it. In House of Meetings, Amis returns again and again to the demographic cataclysm now engulfing Russia—its strangely low life expectancy for men—and in one passage, two of his great interests fuse:

In America, with divorce achieved, the midlifer can expect to be more recreational, more discretionary. He can almost design the sort of crisis he is going to have: motorbike, teenage girlfriend, vegetarianism, jogging, sports car, mature boyfriend, cocaine, crash diet, powerboat, new baby, religion, hair transplant.

Over here, now, there's no angling around for your male midlife crisis. It is brought to you and it is always the same thing. It is death.

Amis is right. Longevity, rather than new sexual mores or technological practices, may be the most significant social fact of modern Western life—and if this is the case, if the mere lack of longevity is the prime distinguishing feature of a more "serious" place like Russia, then a lot of those things Amis has worried about during his midlife crisis as a novelist (Is he a profound enough writer? Is this topic sufficiently weighty?) seem to fall away. And so this book comes to seem less like Amis looking for gravitas among the bones of Soviet Russia than like an author who had lost his sense of the world slowly working back toward it by learning some basic things. One is that all stories everywhere are the same, whether in Russia in the 1930s or London in the 1990s or now, in New York. Another of those basic things, if you're Amis, is that there is no escaping yourself: Amis now knows that he can write a book about the Gulag and still come out sounding pretty much the same, with the same inflections and the same concerns: breasts, erections (presence and lack of them), and writing. So, maybe that means those are the great concerns, and he's going to have to live with them.

Because one of the things you can't escape if you're Martin Amis, son of Kingsley Amis, friend to the Hitch, former friend to Julian Barnes, and so on, is writers and writing. It's what interests you most about the world; your obsession with it led to one of your best novels, that horroristic satire The Information. At the end of House of Meetings, we are introduced to a character worse even than the narrator, a writer who sold his talent in exchange for a comfortable life during the dark days of Stalinism. All he had to do was praise the system. The equivalent of such a writer in our own time would have to be someone who simply avoided all contemporary themes, or pretended that the makers of the world had not in fact made it, that life and history were elsewhere. Amis has told Poets & Writers that his next novel will be more autobiographical; that "everyone will hate me again."

I hope so. Amis' five-year excursion through Russian history during the global war on terror seems to have shorn him of some of his old liberal attitudes, which he seems, in retrospect, never really to have held. If his recent pronouncements on terrorism (or "horrorism," as he calls it) are any guide, he has adopted a politics that I, personally, find wrong and dangerous—it's the politics that lumps Stalin (or Saddam) in with Mohamed Atta and lands us in Iraq. But if this is now to become the core of Amis' work, we might find that he'll return to what he knows how to do—and return to it, for the first time, fully himself. We might not like it, and it won't be perfect, but it could genuinely be something to behold.

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Keith Gessen is an editor at n +1. He has written about books for The New Yorker, The Nation, and Dissent.
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