Inside the nightmare.

House of Meetings, by Martin Amis (Knopf, 256 pp., $23)

I WAS eager to read and review this novel, because of my interest in the topic and setting (Soviet society and the Gulag) and because of the rave review it elicited from the New York Times's Michiko Kakutani, whose no-nonsense critical judgments I usually respect and find congenial. I also looked forward to reading it because I found Amis's Koba the Dread an unusual and respectable nonfiction attempt to confront the horrors of Soviet totalitarianism and Western responses to it. I appreciated his interest all the more since it contrasted so sharply with the indifference of Western writers towards these Communist societies, even though they provide superb raw material for grasping the vital connections between the personal and the political and the impact of social forces on individual lives. I further shared with Amis an admiration of Saul Bellow and Vladimir Nabokov. All these circumstances converged to create high expectations.

It is well known that works of fiction are nurtured by a blend of experience and imagination to which good writers have access. It is, of course, impossible to specify the proportions or weight each requires for a great work of fiction to emerge. Many writers manage to write admirable works of fiction situated in settings of which they know little from personal experience. Nonetheless writers seem to do better when they enrich what is known to them from personal experience with their imagination, instead of attempting to chart a largely unknown social and human landscape, or one they know only from secondary sources. It is one of the paradoxes of producing memorable and enduring fiction that it must have profound, if implicit, roots in closely apprehended social and human realities from which the creative imagination can take flight.

Amis, impressively familiar with many facts and features of both Soviet society and post-Soviet Russia, knows more than enough to write a book such as Koba the Dread, but not quite enough to write a completely persuasive work of fiction situated in the same region. In this novel he makes good use of what he knows about the Soviet system and Russia and succeeds in acquainting the reader with the bleak social-political background against which the story unfolds. He also illuminates the historical connections between the Soviet system and the Russian past, and even the national character, which includes "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 ... at unlikely moments--say, in the middle of a prison stampede ... or in the most sepulchral phase of a terror famine."

He further observes that in Russia for hundreds of years "resentments and jealousies were resolved ... [by] denunciation and arrest," that "permanent desperation" is a "feature of national life," and that "when it comes to death ... Russia remains a land of opportunity." Few among those who grew up in that country would seriously dispute these observations. This appropriately gloomy background for a tragic love story takes the reader, in a somewhat jumpy fashion, from World War II to the postwar Gulag, to post-Communist Russia, and even, in a few glimpses, to the United States, where the narrator spends an undetermined amount of time late in his life.

The central, and purposefully disjointed, love story concerns the narrator and his brother, who compete, over a very long time, for the same woman (who is married to the brother). They also share the experience of the Gulag and, for narrative convenience, are in the same camp. They are, needless to say, innocent of any genuine wrongdoing. The "House of Meetings" is the hut the post-Stalin authorities provide for conjugal visits, in which sexual and emotional fulfillment sadly eludes the prisoners. Sex, its real and illusory gratifications and abuses (rape prominently included), is a major theme throughout. Amis seems to suggest that there is a connection between obsessive sexual preoccupations and life in an oppressive political system--a theme also prominent in the novels of Czech author Milan Kundera.

The narrative is convincing when it offers insights and sketches of Soviet and Russian life but far less satisfactory in the department of human character and relationships. There is something contrived about the story, its presentation (a long letter to the stepdaughter of the narrator), and its major turning points. Moreover, despite the author's efforts, the characters do not readily come to life and remain poorly defined. The style does not help either, as it ranges from words that send the reader to the dictionary, to unnecessarily complex and obscure formulations, and especially a straining for poetic effect. We learn of the central female character that "her blushes lasted for half an hour, and the great shaft of her throat was like an aquarium of shifting blues and crimsons." Has anybody ever seen such a throat or can we imagine one? Elsewhere "her pallor: The flesh had the numb glisten of white chocolate--but with the promise of other tints in it, yellow, beige, brown, rose." A minor character's teeth change color "from almond flesh to an almond's woody husk." These stylistic excesses may be dismissed as minor irritants but they substantially contribute to the shaky authenticity of the whole narrative.

Another problem is that each of the major protagonists (all Russian) commands a uniformly high level of eloquence and erudition often difficult to credit and associate with his background. Zoya (the central female character) says at one point, "I dye the s**t out of it [her hair] once a week. Oh, I'm gray. Like Voltaire." Is Voltaire a ready point of reference for this woman?

On the other hand. the author's insight into the differences between Western and Soviet/Russian society and their impact on personal lives is among the novel's strengths. He writes: "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 ... cocaine, crash diet, powerboat, new baby, religion, hair transplant. Over here, now, there's no angling for your male midlife crisis. It is brought to you and it is always the same thing. It is death."

Finally I must address the gulf between my assessment and that of Kakutani. I certainly concur with her that "many of the most compelling parts of this novel consist of the narrator's straightforward description of life at Norlag [the particular camp]." But I strongly dissent from the propositions that this is "a novel that subjugates his [Amis's] penchant for postmodern pyrotechnics to the demands of the story at hand" and that Amis depicts his characters "with an economy of language" (unlike that in an earlier "overwritten" novel).

Although much of the novel portrays lives crushed and deformed by the forces of history and an irrationally repressive society there is also a more elusive, romantic message. Thus at the end of the story the narrator's brother (looking back upon his and his brother's lives) writes: "The hunger and the cold and the fear and the boredom and the oceanic weariness--that was general, standard-issue ... off the rack. What I am referring to is the destiny made to measure. Something was designed inside us, blending with what was already there." These musings suggest that the fate of these individuals was not so much determined by the conditions imposed by their social setting and the political system as by some unknown and undefined "destiny" inside them. It is an ambiguous and mystifying idea that further confounds the message of this ambitious but problematic book.

Mr. Hollander is the author most recently of The End of Commitment: Intellectuals, Revolutionaries, and Political Morality.