What’s Wrong with Martin Amis’s New Holocaust Novel?

More than two decades ago, Martin Amis gave us Time's Arrow, a novel told from the perspective of a Nazi official who served at Auschwitz. Now he has returned to the death camp with Zone of Interest, a fictional account, partly seen through the eyes of a Jewish prisoner, of a love affair involving a camp functionary and the camp commandant's wife. The novel showcases Amis's lavish literary talents, writes Ruth Franklin, especially for satire and parody, but fails to come to terms with the gravity of its subject matter—partly because it labors in the shadow of an entire library of previous fiction and memoirs, but partly for more telling reasons: