House of Meetings - Martin Amis

It is an interesting direction for Amis to start writing about modern Russian history through his fiction, but I am hoping that this is a dry run for a more successful future work. The whizz-bang prose is toned down here, but the first-person narrator is so obviously a proxy for the author himself - he even repeats chunks that I have read in Amis's essays - that the recurrence of familiar tropes (male brutality, rivalry etc) becomes a distraction.

I have read a lot of first person narratives recently, and it is certainly easier to digest stories in which the narrator strongly resembles the author (Garner, Waugh, Powell). Whether the fault lies with me, the author, or the technique itself I'm not sure.