6. The House of Meetings

House of Meetings
By Martin Amis
Publisher: Knopf
256 pages
$23.00

A gruff, amoral Red Army veteran looks back on the time he spent in a Russian gulag and the damage it did to his life and that of his gentler, more delicate brother Lev. A supreme stylist and black comedian, with a gift for philosophizing about brute physical violence, Amis loves rolling around in the bitter, angry mud of men at their worst.