Book Review

 

This swift, weird little novel by Martin Amis is his best fiction in years. Two stories pivot on the axis of a profoundly gripping voice. In the background, two brothers fall for a young Jewish woman in Moscow in the period after World War II but before Stalin’s murderous purges. One is a sensitive poet—the other a pragmatic killer.

As the book opens, the loser in this battle for her heart returns to Norlag, the gulag where he spent a dozen-plus years, dredging up old feelings, ruminating on what he expects to get from seeing the source of his deprivation and torture again. His twisting, self-lacerating narrative, we are to believe, is a letter to his step-daughter.

As the years have gone on, believing in Amis' fiction has presented more and more hurdles. That a man would write this way to his family—"in a state of permanent lost temper"—seems unlikely, but Amis' prose is worked to such a fine, filthy froth here it's easy to overlook this minor quibble. This is a powerful story about envy and decline, and the long-term corrosive effects of crime on the soul, in which brotherhood emerges not a bloodline but a kind of fatal embrace.