It goes without saying--or it should--that we live in an age of celebrity. But in this age, one subset of the fame species has all but vanished from the cultural landscape: the literary cele-brity. At the pre- sent moment, it could be argued that real literary celebrity, in which continued prominence corresponds to a lasting prime of talent as well as the ability to generate scandal on the gossip pages, is a fraternity of few (and a sorority of fewer), perhaps even of one. The one is Martin Amis, whose notoriety in the world of literature was assured at birth, but whose lasting fame has issued from an inspired 30-year career as a novelist, journalist, and now, two-time memoirist.

It might be said that a memoir is either the beginning or the end of a writer's moment, because every memoir bears an admission, implicit or explicit, that the best subject the author can come up with is himself--an admission that brings vanity, and therefore indulgence, to the fore of the reader's encounter. Experience, Amis' triumphant 2000 autobiography, sidestepped the vanity issue by focusing explicitly on his father: Kingsley's looming figure, the shadow it cast over Martin's own career, and the buoyant emotional memory his legacy bestowed on their unorthodox family.

Koba the Dread, Amis' latest memoir, centers only tangentially--though crucially --on the author and his father, focusing instead on a figure that cast a far more sinister shadow not only on the house of Amis, but over the entire world. The figure is Joseph Stalin, and the book is a passionate, measured argument against Soviet Communism.

Not exactly Remembrance of Things Past, then.

Because books no longer mean as much to as many people as they once did, literary celebrity carries the unusual mantle of authorial power--that is, a writer's ability to say something and expect people to hear it. And though Stalin may seem an unlikely topic for a contemporary author to tackle (since he doesn't exactly have a slew of defenders), Amis is after something more than a simple history lesson. The book's thesis is not only that Stalin was a monster--Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Robert Conquest have already made that fact irrefutable--but that the tendency of liberal intellectuals to defend the Soviet experiment in spite of the now-familiar accounts of the mass murder, torture, and starvation that fueled it represents the central moral collapse of the 20th century. Amis is saying, essentially, that not only is it no longer valid to wax nostalgic about what might have been, but it was never valid to begin with, and the movement to do so was self-deceit of the most damning sort, a defense of a "war against truth." As he puts it, in one of dozens of perfectly clinching assertions, "The enemy of the people was the regime. The dictatorship of the proletariat was a lie; Union was a lie, and Soviet was a lie, and Socialist was a lie, and Republic was a lie. The revolution was a lie." Pow!

If Koba the Dread was solely a list of the atrocities Stalin committed against his own people (and therefore humanity), the book might still be a worthy reminder, and a perhaps noble (or perhaps pious) demonstration of Amis' beautifully motivated prose. Since his mid-1980s "nuclear period," when the terror of mutually assured destruction dominated the conscience of his novels and short stories (particularly Einstein's Monsters, his weakest collection), Amis has learned how to incorporate moral outrage into his writing without sacrificing the irreverent rhetorical dazzle of incrementum and repetition that defines his style. Koba is quite obviously a cri de coeur, but not for the obvious reasons. And it is in the unobvious reasons that the book becomes both a legitimate memoir and a brave challenge--not just to the 20th century, but to the author's most intimate circle.

Two figures in Amis' life are called to answer for their Communist affiliations in the book. The first is Kingsley Amis, who, like most European intellectuals of the 1930s and '40s, was a staunch Communist sympathizer (before turning about-face to become a diehard conservative in the late '60s). The second is Christopher Hitchens, Amis' best friend, who is now famous for defending the war against terror, but who used to be the most prominent self-proclaimed radical Trotskyite journalist to ever have a column in Vanity Fair. The book's final third consists mainly of letters to these two men, in which the author proclaims his love while denouncing their former sympathies. For Kingsley, who is of course dead, the letter is a touching epilogue--not so much an "I told you so" as an assertion of the father-son connection, in death as in life.

In Hitchens' case, the gesture is more belligerent. Amis does not merely ask him why he ever defended the Soviets (Hitchens now describes himself as an ex-Socialist), but why he didn't dissociate himself sooner, and how he can cling to the nostalgic desire to believe in the idea (Hitchens frequently says he misses his Socialist convictions "like an amputated limb").

The assumed answers to these challenges are the book's reason for being. Amis calls out his familiars--both of whom are titanic writers--to demonstrate the allure, even to great minds, of a compelling lie; and also to insist to us, to his readers, to those who recognize his literary celebrity, that moral gerrymandering--i.e., defending Trotsky and Lenin while admitting Stalin was a monster--is a far worse crime.

by Sean Nelson