In the Shadow of the Gulag

The novel guides us in a glinting, almost furtive way through the brothers' later lives, revealing Lev's eventual abandonment by Zoya as well as the narrator's material success, first as a television repairman and then an expert on "rotary launchers for nuclear weapons." All of this occurs prior to his own reckoning with Zoya and then emigration to America in the early 1980s.

The book opens two decades after that. He has returned, quite rich, to Vladimir Putin's post-Soviet Russia, which he recognizes as never having undergone the atonement that Germany at least attempted to practice for its own mass murders. Hearing news, in 2004, of the Chechen rebels' siege of Beslan's School No. 1, he feels himself "re-Russifying," once more picking up the "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." The "Russian cross" is not an emblem of revitalized Christianity but a point of actuarial calamity: the graphic intersection of the declining birth rate and the rising death rate, which occurred in 1992. "Russia is dying," says our narrator, in farewell. "And I'm glad."

His voice throughout is ugly and seductive, full of Amis's typically wonderful phrasing and metaphor: An apartment building full of the retired political elite in the 1980s contains "many a venerable and contented mass-murderer -- taciturn amnesiacs on state pensions"; shaking hands with a politically reliable Soviet novelist, the narrator feels "the vile bivalve of his clasp."

The difficulty with such bravura moments is that readers will too often feel themselves hearing not the gulag survivor but the accomplished English novelist. A line such as this one -- "Great beauties, they don't have to do the work that we have to do, the work of vox populi and 'Mass Observation' " -- belongs more to Oxford than to Omsk; it is the price Amis occasionally can't help paying for his own extreme gifts.

The book's title refers to a camp building in which Lev is permitted a conjugal visit with Zoya in 1956. What actually happens inside the House of Meetings, and its shattering effect upon the narrator's half-brother, become the chief psychological mystery and source of suspense in the novel, but the revelatory payoff may strike readers as somewhat vague and anticlimactic, dampened as it is by some of the same abstraction that the narrator finds so telltale in the national character.

Still, the book gnaws at one's memory. Amis tries to imagine history with the intimacy and specificity that the greatest historical novelists, including Tolstoy, have always presumed to seek for it. History is the element that Soviet citizens were encouraged to see themselves living in and moving through, always forward; it is the element from which Americans tend to see themselves, even now, as being exempt. For Amis's narrator, it is the swirl in which we swim and sink, a poison that lays waste to millions of lives and sullies even a kiss. ·

Thomas Mallon's novels include "Henry and Clara," "Bandbox" and the forthcoming "Fellow Travelers."