Martin Amis, The Zone of Interest

Join us for Tuesday Night Book Club! Hosted by Monmouth University’s Ken Womack, each month we’ll explore a different novel. All you have to do is Zoom in and join the discussion! This week’s book is The Zone of Interest by Martin Amis.

Martin Amis was an English novelist, essayist, and short story writer. His works included the novels Money, London Fields and The Information.  The Guardian writes that “all his critics have noted what Kingsley Amis [his father] complained of as a ‘terrible compulsive vividness in his style… that constant demonstrating of his command of English’; and it’s true that the Amis-ness of Amis will be recognisable in any piece before he reaches his first full stop.” Amis’s raw material is what he sees as the absurdity of the postmodern condition with its grotesque caricatures. He has thus sometimes been portrayed as the undisputed master of what the New York Times has called “the new unpleasantness.”

Once upon a time there was a king, and the king commissioned his favorite wizard to create a magic mirror. This mirror didn’t show you your reflection. It showed you your soul—it showed you who you really were.
The wizard couldn’t look at it without turning away. The king couldn’t look at it. The courtiers couldn’t look at it. A chestful of treasure was offered to anyone who could look at it for sixty seconds without turning away. And no one could.

The Zone of Interest is a love story with a violently unromantic setting. Can love survive the mirror? Can we even meet each other’s eye, after we have seen who we really are? Powered by both wit and compassion, and in characteristically vivid prose, Martin Amis’s unforgettable new novel excavates the depths and contradictions of the human soul.