The unnamed narrator of Martin Amis' latest novel wants to have things both ways. He wants to be as provocative and offensive as possible, to poke his finger in your chest and rant, but he wants you to keep listening all the same.

Listen you do, since Amis has fashioned for him such a mesmerizing voice - part defiant shout, part whispered confession, part howl of pain. He's not quite the tipsy storyteller on the next barstool, or the crazy on the street, or the ornery uncle always reminding you of the $50 your father still owes him. But that's getting close to the mark, assuming that these hectors are also very Russian and very intelligent.

The narrator in "House of Meetings" is to Russian totalitarianism what John Self was to Western capitalism in Amis' 1985 novel, "Money." Both are cynical and vulgar, sex-mad and misogynistic, opinionated, driven to extremes, egoists eager to please only themselves. Each, in different ways, is the end-product of a system that rewards mankind's baser motives. If Self was a pop-culture maven, this narrator is more likely to name-drop poets.

The new novel's central characters make up a lopsided triangle: the narrator; his younger half-brother, Lev; and the woman they both love, Zoya. Their attempts at sharing her are poisonous. Surprisingly, Lev, the asthmatic runt, gets the girl early on; the narrator must settle for bitterness.

A Red Army veteran, the narrator meets fellow student Zoya at an engineering college a few years after World War II. She's a free spirit who shamelessly flits from lover to lover, while he can only gaze in wonder from a distance. On the basis of botched eavesdropping - the brothers refer to Zoya's body as "the Americas," voluptuous at top and bottom, joined by a waist as thin as Panama - first the narrator and then Lev are shunted off to a labor camp for their "pro-Americanism." This image may be the only note of humor in an otherwise grim tale.

Stalin's Gulag is the novel's fulcrum, an intensified version of the brutal state that gave birth to it. Amis summons Norlag, a camp near the Arctic Circle, with swift, sure strokes. "Even in June," he writes, "your breath hung in the air as if you were smoking an enormous and fiery cigar. ... Our clothes were stiff, practically wooden, barklike, with dirt. And under the wood, wood lice and woodworm." The 86-year-old narrator, a self-described "vile-tempered, foul-mouthed old man," is trying to explain, in 2004, this long-ago world to his adult American daughter. It's too awful to be explained away, with its unceasing savagery, and its odd admixture of common criminals, sadists and political prisoners.

Nor does the narrator indulge in touching up his own foul portrait. When Lev, a pacifist and aspiring poet, arrives in camp, the narrator advises him to "find some murder in your heart." Lev refuses to take this low road, where murder is essential to survival. Lev is super-ego, or conscience, to the narrator's all-consuming ego; Zoya, the undisciplined pleasure-seeker, will function as his id.

The Soviet regime is such an expert instructor in inhumanity that life before and after the camp isn't much better. The narrator is not only an inveterate womanizer; he's even worse. "In the rapist army," he calmly notes of his wartime experience, "everybody raped." Once out of the camp, he exploits an exploitive system. Over the decades, he vaults from black-market television repairman to chauffeur-driven arms engineer.

Amis, in a rare misstep, neglects to make this trajectory entirely believable. He also errs by naming the narrator's daughter Venus, and her now-deceased American mother, Phoenix. Amis need not have spelled out so obviously what is still denied our narrator - love and rebirth - even after he has defected to the United States in the '80s.

In 2002, Amis published "Koba the Dread," a nonfiction exposé of Stalin's crimes and of Stalinist apologists, including his own father, the late novelist Kingsley Amis.

In retrospect, however, we can see that Amis' immersion in the literature of Soviet infamy prepared the way for the masterfully conceived "House of Meetings."

Its narrator is one of those vibrant monsters of nihilism, a Stalin in miniature, like Philip Roth's Mickey Sabbath ("Sabbath's Theater") or John Lanchester's Tarquin Winot ("The Debt to Pleasure"). Here is evil, as creepy as it is unforgettable.

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