House of Meetings, or Wanting to Kill Yourself

As I mentioned in my earlier post (below), Martin Amis' House of Meetings is a downer. The main character has returned to Russia to die. First revisiting the prison camp where he spent over a decade, a time where he protected his brother even while hating him for having the girl he loved.

The love triangle never really explodes, as I had expected, but that just makes the reading all the more tortured. God, this is a sad book. One of the characters explains, about pity:

She understand, and she pities me. In the end you finsih with self-pity. It's too tiring. You want someone else to do it for you.

Thus it is only fair that Amis evokes the reader's pity as well. These poor broken souls. They are fucked up, and you can't really sympathize with them. But you can pity them.

My understanding of Derrida was pretty paltry, but I remember a main point of my professor's being that Derrida eschewed the center in favor of the marginalia, that it was that edges that had the most meaning. I thought of this when considering House of Meetings. The novel's center - what happens on a fateful night at the eponymous House - is ultimately less than what surrounds it at the edges. What is supposed to have the most meaning may in fact have the least.

Or maybe not. If you've read it, or read other Amis, let me know what you think.