State of Arousal
Three years after a critical spanking, Martin Amis returns with a new novel and no apologies.
by Scott Indrisek
February 27, 2007
ouse 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 — in which an aging and unattractive female is 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 moot point — 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 one 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.
Your narrator was based on Sayid Qutb, the ideological father of radical Islamists. He came to America in the 1940s and wrote about how disgusting American sexual licentiousness was. I love his writing and how it relates to Islam and women and sexuality — those passages are almost like Harlequin romance novels. How much do you think the origin of radical Islam is based in this kind of sexual repression? I know you've said you think repressed women in Islamic society are the key to change.
I do think that's true. I think that Islamism is revanchist; it's trying to get back what's been lost. What they hate most about the West is sexual equality. A devout Muslim sees a woman driving a car, guess what he feels? Dishonor. He feels humiliated. It's their last fief. It's ferociously patriarchal.
I've heard Iran hires censors to go through individual magazines by hand and black out any skin.
And women can't go to football matches because they'll see the men's legs. The suggestion is that Muslim women are so unbelievably attractive, and Muslim men are such incredible studs and jocks and so horny that the sight of a strand of hair would send them absolutely crazy. And you're not supposed to have eye contact with a woman. If you interviewed a woman for a teaching job, you wouldn't look in her eyes. The whole predicate is that [the men are] so virile.
There's a lot about the West that you seem to think is lurid and pornographic.
It's very unlovely, modernity, and it's very messy, but everything I love is in that. I read some conversation between two Pakistanis in Karichi. One said, "We need some Taliban in Karachi." The other one said, "No, they're crazy!" And the first said, "Not much. Just a little bit of Taliban." So we need a little bit of Taliban. You take the unlovely aspects of it as just a part of what human beings are like.
The narrator of House of Meetings talks about how the midlife crisis is a purely Western phenomenon. How was yours?
I did have one. Sorry to inform you that you're going to get one every decade after you're forty, and it's a different kind of crisis every time. You can read every novel ever written and they won't prepare you for it. My midlife crisis was bang on schedule: mid-forties, divorce, terrible realizations about death. You know that feeling when you look in the mirror and you think, This is really odd, because everyone else is getting old, but you, you lucky cheeky boy, it's not happening to you! That feeling goes away. You feel your years. You hardly notice a pretty girl. It's a great melancholy.
Now, with modern medicine, you're expected to remain virile into old age.
Until your death. Viagra — no one's said an honest thing about Viagra. It goes right to the heart of masculinity. Sexual failure, fiasco, what Christopher Hitchens and I call the "no-show" of the hardon — what's that there for in masculinity? It's there to keep you honest, to keep you humble. Any swagger and macho stuff can be horribly undercut by the no-show. And if the no-show is no longer possible because of chemical assistance, I don't think it'll have a good effect. The no-show is a moderating thing, where your anxieties and your Hooksexups and your insecurities express themselves in this horrible way. The potential to fail, if that's chemically removed, it won't be there to keep you honest, to keep you humble. Everyone will swagger around thinking they've got a big cock.
I can't think of any taboos you haven't tackled in your books. In Yellow Dog, there's this odd — not incest, but . . .
Childish molestation, yeah. Incest.
Why broach these subjects?
I like extreme things. I like the subjects that get people's alarm bells ringing, but I don't do it for that reason. I'm excited by transgression, I suppose. It's a delayed rebelliousness. I didn't need to be a rebel when I was young, because I got on so well with my parents. My friends tended to have a great battle, particularly with their fathers, and I never did. I didn't need to. And that was all about sex, actually — the fathers felt the sexual revolution came when we were all about twenty. I think many a father clashed with his son in that generation because [of the father's] sexual envy, disguised as high-mindedness and morality and scruple. He probably married the second or third woman he'd ever gone out with, and had been more or less faithful to her. Full of unexplored sexual drives. And when they see their sons pulling women out of their hair, they clash. My father never put any obstacle in my way about that. He took my brother and me out to lunch when we were about fourteen or fifteen and bought us a gross of condoms each. If you had a girl that went into the wrong room in the middle of the night, you'd find a note outside your door saying, "If your friend would like to stay for breakfast, be discreet with the cleaning lady." n°
©2007 Scott Indrisek and hooksexup.com