If I were to give Martin Amis a ‘report card’ (in the manner in which Kurt Vonnegut famously gave himself), House of Meetings would indeed get an “A” from me, though that in itself would not place it in my Amis Oeuvre Top Tier (with the unofficial ‘London Trilogy’—The Information, London Fields, and Money, respectively, and in that order). Yet even to speak of mere “tiers” is, with the work of Mr. Amis, rather misleading, because with House of Meetings we are also speaking of a different kind of novel from the London Trilogy entirely.

But how does House of Meetings differ in kind from the London Trilogy (you ask?)?

Let’s think of it this way: Amis himself has written of ‘talent’ novels versus ‘genius’ novels, ‘genius being the God-given altitude of perception and articulacy’, he writes in ‘Nabokov’s Natural Selection’ (The Rub of Time), ‘talent being technique, and all the skills that come under the heading of Craft’ (he finds that ‘in about a dozen Nabokov novels, […] talent and genius are in near-perfect equipoise’.)

Fleshing that distinction out a bit more, in one of his other books of criticism, The War Against Cliché, he says of Joyce:

Famously James Joyce is a writers’ writer. Perhaps one could go further and say that James Joyce is a writer’s writer. He is auto-friendly; he is James Joyce-friendly.

He is also a genius. One says this with some confidence: he makes Beckett look pedestrian, Lawrence look laconic, Nabokov look guileless. Throughout the course of his oeuvre one watches Joyce steadily washing his hands of mere talent: the entirely approachable stories of Dubliners, the more or less comprehensible Portrait, then Ulysses, before Joyce girds himself for the ultimately reader-hostile, reader-nuking immolation of Finnegans Wake, where every word is a multilingual pun. The exemplary genius, he is also the exemplary Modern, fanatically prolix, innovative and recondite, and free of any obligation to please a reading public (in place of government grants or protective universities, Joyce had patronage). Unreined, unbound, he soared off to fulfil the destiny of his genius; or, if you prefer, he wrote to please himself. All writers do this, or want to do this, or would do this if they dared. Only Joyce did it with such crazed superbity.

“Mere” talent, then, allows the gifted writer to craft a gem of a novel that communicates with and pleases the reader. Geniuses dare readers to follow them to realms of entirely new, not necessarily hospitable experience.

OK. But in this model, there is only a clutch of other sui-generis genius horses even in the race—who? Cervantes, Sterne, Joyce, Beckett, Borges, perhaps (+ name your hobbyhorse)…?

Personally, if I absolutely have to ‘think’ about a term like ‘genius’ (rather than, as usual, just nominally toss just such a word around when I really resonate with the work of an artist and like to imagine/impute some ‘objective correlative’—as Eliot would called it—some actual thing out there in genius-land as an actual ‘work of genius’—as, admittedly, I quite often still do), I get all latitudinarian about it and prefer to look at it in the now-obsolete sense common to the late 16th- early 18th centuries: as someone’s native quintessence¹, or quiddity, viz

Sir Philip Sidney (1595): A Poet, no industrie can make, if his owne Genius bee not carried into it.

John Milton (1644): But what might be the cause, whether each ones alotted Genius or proper Starre, or…

Jonathan Swift (1701): The People of England are of a Genius and Temper, never to admit Slavery among them.

—To speak of the ‘genius’ of (e.g.) Joyce, therefore, would then be not Joyce as most ‘Joyce-friendly’, but at his ‘Joyce-iest’ (& does his true genius/quiddity shines forth with his Ulysses, then, or his Wake?).

I shall set aside for another day any delving-into what Amis’s genius involves or stands for, i.e., just what it might mean for an Amis novel to be ‘at its Amis-iest’, except to say that it involves a certain destabilization of the reader’s world-view at the level of the sentence: strange, and estranging metaphors and images and other turns of phrase that get you, with his Richard Tull in The Information, questioning common-sense reality as an artist (or child) might:

Richard contemplated his sons, their motive bodies reluctantly arrested in sleep, and reef-knotted to their bedware, and he thought, as an artist might: but the young sleep in another country, at once very dangerous and out of harm’s way, perennially humid with innocuous libido—there are neutral eagles out on the windowsill, waiting, offering protection and threat.

Sometimes Richard did think and feel like an artist. He was an artist when he saw fire, even a match head (he was in his study now, lighting his first cigarette): an instinct in him acknowledged its elemental status. He was an artist when he saw society: it never crossed his mind that society had to be like this, had any right, had any business being like this. A car in the street. Why? Why cars?  This is what an artist has to be: harassed to the point of insanity or stupefaction by first principles. The difficulty began when he sat down to write. The difficulty, really, began even earlier. Richard looked at his watch and thought: I can’t call him yet. Or rather: Can’t call him yet. For the interior monologue now waives the initial personal pronoun, in deference to Joyce. He’ll still be in bed, not like the boys and their abandonment, but lying there personably, and smugly sleeping. For him, either there would be no information, or the information, such as it was, would all be good.

Aside: although he narrates 99% of The Information in the nicely-distancing 3rd Person, steps in from time to time to discuss the limitations of his imaginative and narrative capacities and responsibilities, sometimes directly, sometimes less so, but in all three of his ‘genius novels’ Martin Amis is present in some overt or implied form: anti-hero John Self actually meets MA in Money; and the first person ‘novelist’ of London Fields is ever-anxious about his relationship with his competitor, another ‘MA’, one Mark Asprey, with whom he has exchanged lodgings….

Additionally, an artist could also ask: why art, or artists? And, contemplating the low-life, and the criminal (as Amis often does, not just for its own sake, but also as synecdoche) why think about criminals—in one’s art…?

This last questions can hereby be answered by Amis himself:

the truism is true, and the criminal is like an artist (though not for the reasons usually given, which merely depend on immaturity and the condition of self-employment): the criminal resembles the artist in his pretension, his incompetence, and his self-pity.

To that list, I would add: a willingness to take great risks with one’s art, to see where its boundary lines are, and perhaps a bit of what lies beyond them; a willingness to reach the very limits of one’s own genius, and, like The Information’s Richard Tull, risk falling down on one’s own face so completely and so publically, that one’s art is immediately and completely transformed into the apotheosis of failure—in art, in life, in that longed-for, be-capitalized, ‘Life-in-Art’….

That’s one part, anyhow, of the Amis ‘genius’ (kissing-cousin to the Richard Tull genius: the genius for wanting or needing to write genius novels, not talent novels, irrespective and heedless of one’s capacity for doing so). Another, as I said, is for sticking his nose in the degenerate ‘muck’ of late 20thC urban life, and especially the male psyches that prowl and pollute its landscape, and seeing there much to deride and laugh at and almost despair over (almost, because these urban gothic has-beens and never-wases are always most comically thwarted and usually utterly humiliated).

Anyhow, my more capacious definition of ‘genius’ not only considerably expands the number of bona fide geniuses out there in the artistic marketplace (capitalist property relations metaphor alert: those writers who were brave/foolhardy enough to stake a claim on, and tame that frontier, their most original selves, vs those content to inherit the title to the manor, to hoe the rows domesticated for them by their forbears, by tradition?!), it also helps complicate my Amis ‘report card’, of course, but also make it more adaptable to his actual career: for one could make the case that, from his debut, The Rachel Papers, Amis appears to have set off in search of that new-found-land, that peak in Darien, the ultimate ‘Amis Novel’ (or again: ‘genius novel’, which, say I, he reached with the trilogy, nodded at with Lionel Asbo, and looked back upon, not at all in anger, with Inside Story), but along the way to this Eldorado he also took detours, ‘experimented’ (or dabbled, with genre—Night Train, Other People—or topical fiction—Einstein’s Monsters)…

…there was yet another kind of novel he attempted from time to time: the anti-genius novel, or the anti-Amis novel. This was a novel in which, though the reader searched high and low, no trace of the Martin Amis genius (I won’t do a list of attributes: if you’ve read any of the trilogy, you’ll know what I mean) might be found. In these novels, Martin Amis is attempting to efface his genius, and replace it, via a tour de force of sheer talent (i.e., technique and craft), with an entirely different experience: what would might be like, these novels ask, to see the world not through the eyes of Martin Amis, but as something completely and utterly, capital-O Other?

Times Arrow is one such anti-Amis novel. It answers the artistic question: what if Nazis had ‘actual’ souls, and what if those otherworldly souls experienced the sublunary unidirectional arrow-of-time quite literally backwards, ever-seeking the impossible Miraculous lurking as a haunting absence in the monstrous presence of the Actual, and all-too-human?

House of Meetings, is another such novel: it attempts to answer the question: what would a classic Russian novel be like if it were projected 100-150 years into the future? If it were wholly of the second half of the 20th Century, but written for and from the point of view of the early 21st century?

In my view, House of Meetings succeeds so fully/completely because I cannot hear Martin Amis’s unique voice in it anywhere—it lives nowhere within his own Tower of Song, but in a different tower, somewhere further (a lot further) down the line. If give it an ‘A’ (and I most emphatically do), I do so marveling that he could have accomplished such a feat as erasing himself so completely as to inhabit the fictional being of a Russian war hero, and gulag prisoner. I wonder, and I admire:

It is remarkable that Amis can turn such a feat talent and skill into a living and breathing feast of Soviet and post-Soviet impoverishment omni-valently & -dimensionally so (it answers the question: how did (and could) the Soviets empty all humanity out of their human beings? with one adjective, cold)…

But it is the Martin Amis genius novels that, God help me, I cannot help but love.

***

Spoiler: in lieu of actually writing anything actually about this fine novel, I shall endeavour to paint you a picture of its psychosocial climate, its Structure of Feeling, via selective, hardly random quotation (an impressionist canvas):

A man who escaped Russia after the fall of the Soviet block is returning home to confront his country’s (and his own) past…[

If Russia is going, then Russian is already gone. We were very late, you see, to develop a language of feeling; the process was arrested after barely a century, and now all the implied associations and resonances are lost. I must just say that it does feel consistently euphemistic—telling my story in English, and in old-style English English, what’s more. My story would be even worse in Russian. For it is truly a tale of gutturals and nasals and whistling sibilants…

Keep a lookout, hereafter, for other national traits: the freedom from all responsibility and scruple, the energetic championship of views and beliefs that are not only irreconcilable but also mutually exclusive, the weakness for a humor of squalor and cynicism, the tendency to speak most passionately when being most insincere, and the thirst for abstract argument (abstract to the point of pretension) at unlikely moments—say, in the middle of a prison stampede, at the climax of a cholera riot, or in the most sepulchral phase of a terror-famine…

It may very well be true that character is destiny. And the other way around. But on the larger scale character means nothing. On the larger scale, destiny is demographics; and demographics is a monster. When you look into it, when you look into the Russian case, you feel the stirrings of a massive force, a force not only blind but altogether insentient, like an earthquake or a tidal wave. Nothing like this has ever happened before…

He writes one last letter to his daughter, a gesture of love, of regret, but also some score-settling, even some cultural/generational gap-filling:

Your peers, your equals, your secret sharers, in the West: the one Russian writer who still speaks to them is Dostoevsky, that old gasbag, jailbird, and genius. You lot all love him because his characters are fucked-up on purpose. This, in the end, was what Conrad couldn’t stand about old Dusty and his holy fools, his penniless toffs and famished students and paranoid bureaucrats. As if life isn’t hard enough, they devote themselves to the invention of pain…

“I am not a character in a novel,” says Conrad’s Razumov, more than once (as the dreadful dilemma solidifies around him), and very reasonably, I think. I am not a character in a novel either. Like many millions of others, I and my brother are characters in a work of social history from below, in the age of the titanic nonentities…

He has returned home just as a group of Chechen terrorists has taken an entire Russian school hostage—quite possibly because the Putin regime needed a pretext to invade Chechnya, and turned a blind, but (all-too-typically) still-colder, eye…

And now there is a doctor, on the television, who says that some of the surviving children “have no eyes.” Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy: each of them insisted on a Russian God, a specifically Russian God. The Russian God would not be like the Russian state, but would weep and sing as it scourged…

You will recall my “proof,” framed in the autumn of 2001, on the nonexistence of God, and how pleased I was with it. “Never mind, for now, about famine, flood, pestilence, and war: if God really cared about us, he would never have given us religion.” But this loose syllogism is easily exploded, and all questions of theodicy simply disappear—if God is a Russian…

After WWII, he and his brother had ended up in the same gulag…

We too had wanted to see the future. Now we returned to the past—to the ball-bearings works, in fact, where you just went oompah every five seconds, and thought about cold soup, hot soup. I became convinced, around then, that boredom was the second pillar of the system—the first being terror. At school, Venus, we were taught by people who were prepared to lie to children for a living; you sat there listening to information you knew to be false (even my mother’s school was no different). Later on you discovered that all the interesting subjects were so hopelessly controversial that no one dared study them. Public discourse was boring, the papers and the radio were just a drone in the other room, and the meetings were boring, and all talk outside the family was boring, because no one could say what came naturally. Bureaucracy was boring. Queuing was boring. The most stimulating place in Russia was the Butyrki prison in Moscow. I can see why they needed the terror, but why did they need the boredom…?

…Having loved the same woman…

The love story is triangular in shape, and the triangle is not equilateral. I sometimes like to think that the triangle is isosceles: it certainly comes to a very sharp point. Let’s be honest, though, and admit that the triangle remains brutally scalene. I trust, my dear, that you have a dictionary nearby? You never needed much encouragement in your respect for dictionaries. Scalene, from the Greek, skalenos: unequal …

When a man conclusively exalts one woman, and one woman only, “above all others,” you can be pretty sure you are dealing with a misogynist. It frees him up for thinking the rest are shit. So what am I? You have consumed your share of Russian novels: every time a new character appears, there is a chapter break and you are suddenly reading about his grandparents. This too is a digression. And its import is sexual. So do yourself a favor, and go and get the framed photograph on my desk and prop it up in front of you as you read. I don’t want you thinking about the way I am now. I want you thinking about that twenty-five-year-old lieutenant who is throwing his hat into the air on Victory Day…

He takes the train north, north of the arctic circle. It is a one-way trip…

With an hour to go, the train makes a stop at a humble township called Coercion. It says it on the platform: Coercion. How to explain this onset of candor? Where are the sister settlements of Fabulation and Amnesia?

Yes, I’m re-Russified. But what can you do? The rule is: This thing, like every other, is not what it seems; and all you know for sure is that it is even worse than it looks. Every Russian I talk to, without exception, tells me that Middle School Number One is the work of the government. How would it go? For reasons of state, it would begin. For reasons of state—and then, in Aesopian language, the word is handed down. For reasons of state, we need something that will strengthen national support for the war on our southeastern border. Exploding apartment blocks and airplanes aren’t any good—we need something worse than that. We need a lower low…

[Cold] weakened us, it profoundly undermined us, but it didn’t come to us as pain. It answered something. It was like a searchlight playing over the universe of our hate… Cold is cold, obviously, and wants all your heat…

Join me, please, as I look on the bright side. Russia is dying. And I’m glad.

Join me, please, as i look on the bright side.

Martin Amis has left us many novels to re-read—a number of them, like this one, brilliant.

And a few: pure genius.

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1. By the mid-18th century, the term was already acquiring anti-rationalist, proto-Romantic attributes. Isaiah Berlin, in his monumental Three Critics of the Enlightenment, quotes from Johan Georg Hamann (mentor of the now more famous Herder)‘s On the Sacred Disease:
   Genius is not healthy, but a divine malady which, as Hippocrates says, is at once divine and human – panta theia kai panta anthropina – that which unites heaven and earth. Genius is mad in the worldly sense, for the wisdom of this world is folly; and the only use of reason is not to give us knowledge but to expose to ourselves our own ignorance – to conduce to humility. That we have learnt from Socrates. But, as Hume correctly says, reason taken by itself is impotent, and when it dictates it is a usurper and an impostor.
   
   Finally, here is the entry for ‘Genius’ in Raymond Williams’ Keywords, an absolutely essential book on the evolution of terminology in the field of culture & society (later becoming, thanks to Williams and Stuart Hall, Cultural Studies):
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