The narrator is a man in his eighties, recollecting his past to his Westernized daughter.

The main theme running through his narration is his infatuation with a woman who his younger brother also loved, and their time in a gulag, where they were sent for being "socially hostile elements," or "fascists," and spent ten years. The shared love for the same woman is something that will stay with the brothers, profoundly affecting their relationship with each other. The brothers are almost complete opposites; the older one more worldly and brutish but not necessarily inherently evil at heart, the younger more idealistic and a pacifist.

Through it all, Zoya, the object of their love and lust, is the one constant that brings some semblance of joy to them. The narrator's younger brother even confesses to him in a letter that while he can sometimes persuade himself that he doesn't care about their mother, the narrator or his sister, "I can never say that I don't care about Zoya."

With its riveting and complex but somewhat confusing, narrative, we gradually come to see how elements of the past like shared feelings and memories linger on and burden people for their whole lives. The misery of the characters is compounded by that of their country, which endures crises from the 50s to current times. Despair is both personal and public.

The narrator constantly describes the problems in modern Russia, the successor state of the Soviet Union including the high mortality of males, the increase of abortions and the general hopelessness prevalent in society. It is fitting that the book is set during the 2004 Beslan massacre, when after militants stormed a school in Southern Russia and held over 1,000 students hostage, authorities managed to break the siege but at the cost of hundreds of hostages.

This tremendous negativity towards a whole nation, somewhat justified by facts, seems quite overwhelming but goes well with the book's tone.

Reading the House of Meetings will be a harrowing but compelling experience all through to the very end.