House of Meetings

Dan Kois (Slate), Jason Zinoman (New York Times), and special guest host Willa Paskin (Decoder Ring) discuss Martin Amis' 2006 novel about the Soviet gulag, House of Meetings. What are we to make of the novel's monstrous narrator, his pacifist brother, and the Amisian object of desire who divides them (and unites them)? And what is it about the horrors of 20th-century history that makes a novelist like Amis prick up his ears?