House of Meetings is Martin Amis's first shot at critical recovery after 2003's Yellow Dog, a story about masturbating tabloid readers, royal-family sex videos and a father's lust for his young daughter. Hacked to pieces by nearly every critic who read it, the Yellow Dog massacre seemed to become self-sustaining after a certain point, with each reviewer trying to outdo the previous one's savagery. "The problem is Amis's intellectualism, which sticks out like a parson at an orgy and shrinks and shrivels whatever it goes near," concluded the New York Times Book Review. British novelist Tibor Fischer equated Amis's writing Yellow Dog to "your favourite uncle being caught in a school playground, masturbating."
But House of Meetings is no less outrageously sexual than Yellow Dog. A tale of familial sexual jealousy set in the Gulag and narrated by a dying geriatric, it's written with Amis's trademark linguistic shenanigans — he's previously called anaging and unattractive female a "pungently menopausal hillock of a woman" — and the sexual imagery is just as lurid. But House of Meetings is actually a sort of reversal for Amis, a novel about terrible extremes that render sex a mootpoint
— characters sleep in shit, are forced to shovel coal all day and find themselves doomed to ten years of captivity for saying something nice about America. For his part, Amis has been spending his time saying not-so-nice things about radical Islam, which may earn him the same sort of fatwa once bestowed upon Salman Rushdie. And as Rushdie could tell you, you can't buy that kind of publicity. — Scott Indrisek
Why did you return to the material you'd explored in your nonfiction work about Russian history, Koba the Dread, but this time in the form of a novel?
What often happens with me — happened with the royal family, it happened with pornography — is that I look at a subject for a long book review or reportage or as an amateur historian, and then a couple of years later I'll find it's settled down a bit deeper in me. It's gone from the front brain to the back, and I've got more to say more to say from a different part of me. I realized I had sort of skipped the camps in Koba, left that on the back burner. I read about this institution called the House of Meetings where, ridiculously and horrifically, they had conjugal meetings in the Gulag.
The intent was for this to be a reward?
You could never tell. You did have to be an exceptional worker to get the privilege. I imagine [it was] unbearably awful. I've never been to Russia. The origin of the book had more to do with reading Dostoevsky as a seventeen year old than it did from reading the history of the camps. It's not about the Soviet Union, really. It's about Russia and the Russian nature, the Russian curse, the Russian perversity.
It's a familiar dynamic for you — two people who are either close friends or relatives but secretly hate each other, and are engaged in sexual competition with each other. Here, the narrator and his brother are in a Soviet labor camp, but there's still that sexual jealousy.
It's true, it's a very familiar theme to have one very handsome one and one rather yokel-ish one. And yet in this case, Lev is really cleverer than the narrator. He's in a sense the hero of the book.
At one point the narrator confesses that, after World War II, he was pretty much raping his way across Europe. He's talking about how there's no sadness worse than the sadness of the rapist.
It's very intelligible that when the biggest army ever amassed comes steaming over your border, completely unprovoked, to wage a war of annihilation, and does in fact kill twenty-five million of your citizens, it's not unnatural that you should take revenge on the women of the country. It was a peer-group pride, the "rapist army" — everyone was doing it. As he says, the peer group can make you do absolutely anything, can make you machine gun children all day long rather than getting a bit of jostling in the lunch queue. Doesn't make it okay — you don't have to be very politically correct to disagree with rape. But you need to have historical imagination, and it's idle and ridiculous to apply the standards of our society to theirs.
The narrator has an obsession with owning and possessing each of his lovers by getting to know everything about their prior sexual history. Is jealousy always a component of sexual relationships?
I've never suffered from retrospective sexual jealousy. I find I'm naturally enlightened about that. You don't want your girlfriend to have fucked everybody, but you hope that she's had a nice time.
What about the summarizing theory in the book, that having that kind of sexual jealousy makes you "cryptoqueer"?
It's a gay thing. [That theory is] made up, but it's pretty obvious, isn't it? What you're replaying in your mind is them being driven mad with lust by some other guy. "He touched you where? You kissed his what?" And being shocked all over again. Did you suck his cock? It's that kind of thing.
Once you open that door . . .
There's no end to it. [The "cryptoqueer" analysis is] just amateur psychology for me. I just assume that's what it's about. It means the past is there, but in the wrong way. And the book is about getting the past wrong, or not facing up to the past, as Russia hasn't done.
Can we talk about your unfinished novella, The Known Unknown? Why did you kill it?
It wasn't fear of reprisal — maybe a bit, but it was just that it all looked too serious. To write satire about [Islamic terrorism] at this stage would be hostage to fortune. How funny is it going to be if there's a dirty bomb in New York that kills 10,000 people? I can't let this thing be out in the world when it could be cancelled out by events.
