So this is how it goes: Every couple of years the British novelist Martin Amis cooks up a piece of fiction, and this fiction gets thrown to the slobbering pack of misanthropes, playa haters, and jealous nerds known as literary critics. These critics will pause from masturbating over, say, The Emperor's Children long enough to taste this fiction-meat and find it ... wanting. Good, they'll murmur, but not great—a bit overcooked, too gamey. A proper Amis review will end with the sage summation that, while we're all eagerly awaiting this limey's coup d'etat, this ain't it.

So okay, sure, Amis has some problems—as others have said, House of Meetings is a pretty weird retread of Koba the Dread, with a bit of brother vs. brother sexual jealousy to motor the plot along. It's not Money or Success or London Fields or even the grossly maligned, crapped-upon Yellow Dog. This new one is about Russia, so it's missing a lot of that bloody good shite that old Martin's so boss at: the stink of chip shops, Cockney rhyming slang, cretins playing fruit machines. But it's still a captivating read, and screw it—Martin Amis phoning it in is still a few leagues better than the combined output of this decade's Iowa Writer's Workshops. It doesn't hurt, in the midst of the interminable Death of Print Culture, that he smokes and drinks and does his part to make the writer's life seem tragically, painfully hip. And there's still no one out there better at flagellating, teasing, and bitchslapping English words into enough fascinating shapes to make the results seem like a whole new language. So, is House of Meetings the Amis masterpiece? No. But this talented bastard deserves our envy-free praise.—Scott Indrisek