4.10.06

House of Meetings

"For all its incidental comic felicities, a reader could finish reading Martin Amis’s Yellow Dog (2003) feeling that too much had been sacrificed to the jokes; it is not that Amis’s distinctive gifts have ever been self-effacing ones, but there were moments in that book when the world was being just too deliberately shrunk to fit the satire’s demands. Darius the “seven-foot Seventh Day Adventist” couldn’t be six-foot-eleven, or indeed five-foot-six, just as Clint Smoker had to live in the geographically impractical location of Foulness – not in the interests of plot or character, but in order to feed the punchline. To move from such Technicolor knock-about to the sombre grey-scale in which House of Meetings lives is to encounter an almost completely different author, to negotiate a shift between moral worlds as well as palettes."

[full TLS review]

3 comments:

nico said...

It came out in the UK last Thursday. The guy in Exclusive Books told me it should be here in a couple of weeks.

Let me know when you see it on the shelf and I'll do the same.

nico said...

Hein, what about The Information?
But, I agree Experience is probably his best.

nico said...

Ah, fair enough.
BTW, I'm also looking forward to Cormac McCarthy's The Road.