The Pregnant Widow

by Martin Amis

The 1960s, as is well known, saw the launch of the sexual revolution, which radically affected the lives of every Westerner fortunate enough to be born after the Second World War. But a revolution is a revolution - contingent and sanguinary. In the words of the Russian thinker Alexander Herzen: The death of the contemporary forms of social order ought to gladden rather than trouble the soul. Yet what is frightening is that what the departing world leaves behind it is not an heir but a pregnant widow. Between the death of the one and the birth of the other, much water will flow by, a long night of chaos and desolation will pass. In many senses, including the literal, it was a velvet revolution; but it wasn't bloodless. Nor was it complete. Even today, in 2009, the pregnancy is still in its second trimester. Martin Amis, in The Pregnant Widow, takes as his control experiment a long, hot summer holiday in a castle in Italy, where half a dozen young lives are afloat on the sea change of 1970. The result is a tragicomedy of manners, combining the wit of Money with the historical sense of Time's Arrow and House of Meetings.

It was summer 1970 - a long, hot summer. In a castle in Italy, half a dozen young lives are afloat on the sea of change, trapped inside the history of the sexual revolution. The girls are acting like boys, and the boys are going on acting like boys, and Keith Nearing - twenty years old, a literature student all clogged up with the English novel - is struggling to twist feminism and the rise of women towards his own ends. The sexual revolution may have been a velvet revolution (in at least two senses), but it wasn't bloodless - and now, in the twenty-first century, the year 1970 finally catches up with Keith Nearing. "The Pregnant Widow" is a comedy of manners and a nightmare, brilliant, haunting and gloriously risque. It is the most eagerly anticipated novel of the year and Martin Amis at his fearless best.

About the Author

Martin Amis is the author of ten novels, the memoir Experience, two collections of stories and six collections of non-fiction, most recently The Second Plane. He lives in London.

Genres: Fiction, Contemporary, British Literature, Historical Fiction, Novels, Literary Fiction, Italy

480 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2010

About the author

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."

Reviews

[Jessica · Rating 2 out of 5]

You know how women are always saying that what they want is a guy with a great sense of humor, while men are always saying that women love assholes? I've long thought, based on this, that a lot more women than'd admit it want to bang Martin Amis. Despite his innumerable turnoffs and appalling flaws, there is something bangable -- er, compelling about the guy and his writing. I gave The Pregnant Widow an extra star because (for reasons I can't fully explain) I did enjoy the first three quarters of this novel. This enjoyment was especially significant and gratifying because I've been in a reading rut for months, and nothing I pick up can really engage me. So when I saw that Martin Amis had just come out with a new novel purported to be all about SEX, I thought, "well if that can't save me...." and I picked it up, despite the advice of trusted friends and brilliant critics (i.e., Mike Reynolds). I will say that until the last quarter I was thinking it was a three-starrer. But the end of this had me sputtering furiously, my American English failing me and phrases like "shite" and "vile rubbish" being spat out by the little Disney-brit chimney-sweeps who live in my mind. So that's the two stars: inexplicably enjoyable 3/4 and an inexpressibly bad ending.

I don't know how much the backstory of how this was written has come out yet in the press. Usually Amis comes up with ideas for novels on his own, and since he's pretty famous, he generally just types them up and sends them off to his publisher. But I think what happened here involved the British literary equivalent of our Hollywood Producers. See, a couple of them were sitting out by the Thames wearing tweed and drinking port, discussing the huge success a few years ago of Ian McEwan's sleeper hit, On Chesil Beach. See, that novel really seemed to resonate with people, especially with the Boomers, a key book-buying demographic. As the producers were talking, one of them recalled the start of Chesil Beach, which opened with that Philip Larkin poem that everyone likes so much, you know, "Sexual intercourse began/ In 1963...." And then the other producer, he set down his crumpet and his sleazy tabloid paper, and then he had his idea.

"Listen baby, old chap," he said to the other. "On Chesil Beach took place in 1962, before the invention of sexual intercourse. I'm thinking a bloody sequel.... Same Baby Boomer draw, but this time with skinny-dipping. We'll cast a tall blonde chippie with terrific tits.... some brunette slag with an enormous arse.... You know, old boy, we could pull in some lads! Those younger fellows, they've got loads of money to toss away on books."

"Jolly good! The epic story of the Sexual Revolution, with full nudity all round! You fancy we might persuade Philip Roth to direct?"

"I'm pretty sure he's written this book already, several times. Changing sexual mores, sexual revolution, that sixties generation.... But, he's a Yank. And likely all booked. Can't we get one of our own?"

"Martin Amis busy with anything?"

"No.... In fact, I don't think he is."

And I don't think he is either, because let's be honest: Amis is no longer screamingly funny, nor is he much of an asshole. I wish those things weren't connected, but I'm afraid they kind of are. The feeling I associate with good Amis is that of laughing my ass off, while hating myself for it. But he's not mean anymore, and worse, he seems confused. His claws do look dull, filed down to a civilized manicure. He may more likely to trip than to trip someone else.

So but like, as previously noted, I really did enjoy this for about the first three quarters, though I wasn't sure why that was.... I guess because it was well-written and about sex, and I'm picky about words and have a filthy mind. But see, most of it really wasn't about sex, it was more about desire, and in my experience writing that's about desire's often great, while writing about actual sex is almost always deadly boring. I mean, most sex-writing that doesn't elide the actual sex is just porn, and porn is dull. The Pregnant Widow tended to elide the actual sex and be boring, showing, perhaps, that Amis is aware of this problem and is not equal to the challenge he set up for himself.

I am not real big on plot summary, which is fine here actually because as far as I could see there isn't much of one to summarize. Middle-aged Keith (another Keith!) is looking back on the summer of 1970, which he spent in an Italian castle being hopelessly confused by a bunch of girls in various states of undress. There is a lot of buildup to how CONFUSED and TRAUMATIZED young Keith is about to become by some combination of these prurient, cocky young ladies who've the new Spirit of the Times about them (or who haven't), and by the turning of the hands of time, and also, somewhat inexplicably to this reader but also apparently semi-autobiographically so I should be polite about it, his younger sister essentially slutting herself to death? I dunno, I guess I just didn't really get the whole thing at all. During the last quarter of this book, I was actually gasping and shouting out loud as I rode the subway, because I just couldn't believe how bizarre and senseless things were getting. Not that anything was happening, it's more just that -- well, nothing was happening! That I could see. Maybe that was the point. Maybe this was all Amis being like, "Friends, fellow oldsters: the world has changed. It changed when I was twenty-one, and it looked like I understood it, especially in the eighties when I got all that attention, but really I was just playing along, and now time has gone on, and I'm getting impotent and senile, so I'll just babble off limply into obscurity now, and let you young pretty sharp things carry on from here...."

Only I don't really think so. I mean, he does still have his moments, and the few sharp and shining edges in here argue against its being purposely irrelevant and slack. Maybe I just don't get the joke because I wasn't there in 1970. Maybe I just don't understand the way Amis thinks about sex. Honestly, I do still kind of wanna bang Martin Amis, even if he's not that funny and not an asshole anymore, if just to see whether what he thinks he's doing and what I think I'm doing is a remotely related activity, because having read a few of his books about sex, I can't imagine that it is.

Ah, Martin. You do inevitably disappoint me, but I still find you compelling. Somehow being let down by this book made me feel I should read more Martin Amis, an irrational feeling I associate with my younger self's approach to relations with men. Hm, book premise in there? I think there might be. I've seen lamer ideas....

[Ruby Soames · Rating 1 out of 5]

An arse writing with his dick about tits.

I bet you if I told Amis that I found his book mildly offensive to women, he'd retort, well you've probably got small tits or you've not been laid recently. That's the voice I heard reading this novel. And I found it boring, empty and irritating - the novel was a page turner for the wrong reasons. Amis is no doubt a great writer - the prose is hands down perfect - but what he writes about is a joke: an unfunny, long and forgettable joke. Are we supposed to laugh at Keith, the psychologically priapic student oogling his girlfriend's best friend's huge tits? Or the sexual interest of the book, Sheherazade, a sexually frustrated aristocrat who can't find a man to satisfy her? Most probably the punch line's with the reader who's just bought another Amis book to be dazzled by the prose but left with a lack-lustre story.
A group of university students spend a summer in the 1970s in a castle in Italy (as you do) and the men watch the girls and the girls watch men watching the girls. The women are usually topless and the men talk about women's bodies and sex, clever men ask deep and meaningful questions like: do men like tits because they look like arses? Should arses and tits be on the same side of the body? Why do men like big tits? With no plot or real characterisation, it just comes across as desperate.
Don't think this book is about sex: no one has sex much in it, if they do, Keith does with Lily, his girlfriend, that fact is only mentioned in passing. Nor do they do anything on this summer holiday apart from read the English clssics and speculate about each other's vital statistics.
The Italian backdrop feels superfluous and the decade doesn't really ring true either. There's nothing to learn about the sexual revolution. Nor about the characters. Amis has written some pretty sub-standard books, some great books - some of my favourite books - but we continue to read him because he always writes so well. Unfortunately this is not someone `back in the game' or a book worthy of The Information, Night Train, Money, London Fields or the House of Meetings. And what's so annoying is that it should be! So why doesn't he write with his heart? Because in those brief moments when he does - it's acidic, hilarious and fizzing with insight. The main story is interspersed with Keith's point of view as a many times divorced father going into old age - it's profound, philosophical, poetic. He writes about Keith's sister, which is heart breaking and deep - but unfortunately, his focus is lead away by boobs sunning themselves by the pool. A shame and such a waste of immeasurable talent and originality.

[Kevin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I came to Martin Amis via Christopher Hitchens. Since Hitch was, arguably, the most well-read person on the planet, I had lofty expectations. For my first foray into Amis-Land, I will simply say that I am whelmed. Not overwhelmed. Not necessarily underwhelmed. Just whelmed.

The lion's share of The Pregnant Widow takes place in the summer of 1970. Our protagonist, college student Keith Nearing, is on a holiday excursion with a group of friends to an Italian castle. Here, Keith diligently but rather awkwardly navigates the sexual revolution and the burgeoning concept of free-love. He's at once a feminist and a womanizer. No. He's a womanizer who fancies himself as a feminist. No. He's a horn-dog, but a horn-dog with a heart-of-gold.

The style, structure and grammar are impeccable. Amis can make a paragraph look like a work of art. But, there is something about the way he writes women. It's as though they are not really women at all. They're men with vaginas and breasts and all the associated accessories. I often found them vapid and a bit cruel (e.g., men).

I suspect Amis is an acquired taste. He's certainly well refined and intellectual. Maybe I'll be more enthusiastic after I've read a few of his other novels(?).

[Tim · Rating 3 out of 5]

An enigmatic novel about the so called sexual revolution from a male perspective. Most of it is set in an Italian castle in the summer of 1970 where Keith, the narrator, is trying to mastermind the seduction of the beautiful Scheherazade despite the presence of his girlfriend. There are some very funny jokes but despite its immense cleverness it never entirely engaged me.

[William2 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another through-the-roof masterpiece from Martin Amis. It's distressing how consistently he turns them out. I have only read The Pregnant Widow once, and have settled on the following thoughts to share for now.

1. Those of us used to the usual Amis verbal fireworks will have to wait. He wants a slower build here. He doesn't want to eject readers along the way with too many polysyllabics. He focuses on character and action for the first third. In time we get to all of the stuff that we enjoy so much in an Amis novel: the snippy italicizations, word play, narrative obliquity, nonce words, archaisms, etc. However, the book doesn't really take off until the Gloria Beautyman character arrives on the scene around page 115 or so.

2. There is in the early going a merciless objectification of the female body. This is perhaps inevitable since the hero is male, twenty years old and living in 1970 at the height of the sexual revolution. This objectification of the female is something feminists have always pointed to as a purely male phenonmenon, but lately it has become a common view among young women as well. Which is not to say the feminists were wrong, but only to emphasize how all encompassing the phenomenon has become. In order for Amis to turn the concept on its head he must first acknowledge it. Then he turns it on its head by way of Gloria Beautyman.

3. You’ve probably read all the plot points by now but here they are again. Keith Nearing, a British subject, is staying at an Italian villa for the summer with his girlfriend, Lily, and another young woman, Scherezade, also British citizens. Most of the early going is about Keith's schemes to sleep with Scherezade and it's funny enough, but compared with certain other Amis novels it's a slow start. Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times has called the novel "tedious." That might be true if one only read the first 1/3 and nothing more, but the novel goes on and the action speeds up. The final emotional payoff is nothing short of shattering and something to which Kakutani seems sadly oblivious.

4. Amis' thesis is that the sexual revolution was never really about a change in male attitudes. Men had been copulating their brains out since time immemorial. Rather, it was the change in the attitude of women toward sex that made the revolution real. Suddenly women wanted theirs, too, and they got it. Thus the concept in the last 2/3 of the book of the female "cock." This offsets the earlier part about the objectification of the female body . "Cock" is British slang term for a man who takes lovers and casts them aside at will. A female cock is a woman who does the same thing, who "acts like a man." (See Linda Fiorentino's character in The Last Seduction as an extreme example.) Gloria Beautyman is a complete original.

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

Life consists of waiting to fuck, fucking, and then remembering when you fucked. When you die, you think about how the fucks went. When you grow old and stare vacantly into the mirror, your 'bald patch receding into infinity', you say to yourself, 'Fuck, I rememember when I used to fuck, what happened to all those fucks.'

This is the impression of life I get from The Pregnant Widow, Martin Amis' latest novel. The book was originally planned to be an autobiographical account of Amis' sex life, but Amis canned that concept as he found the prospect 'sort of disgusting, really... icky'. Instead Amis bent the truth a bit, and told us the story of Keith Nearing, a 20-year-old trying to come to grips with the sexual revolution, where girls are trying to act like boys, while boys are trying to get into the 'cool pants' of the girls.

Unusually for a 20-year-old ... Keith was aware that he was going to die. More than that, he knew that when the process began, the only thing that would matter was how it had gone with women. As he lies dying, the man will search his past for love and life.

The Pregnant Widow is Martin Amis' search through his past for 'love and life' and what it all meant. It can read at times like the gruff memories of an ageing man, with the 'when I was young' stories.

When I was young, old people looked like old people, slowly growing into their masks of bark and walnut. People aged differently now. They looked like young people who had been around for too long. Time moved past them but they dreamed they stayed the same.

The story itself can neatly be separated by a fuck. There is before the fuck, and after the fuck. The 'before-the-fuck' occurs in the confines of a castle in Italy in 1970, while the 'after-the-fuck' meanders slowly (and awkwardly) through a couple of decades in London and into the present day, or at least 2009.

The 'before-the-fuck' period reads like an old English novel (Amis references Austen, Bronte, Lawrence, Dickens and others throughout the novel). According to Keith Nearing, who is an aspiring critic, the English novel consists of the 'anticipation' of waiting for the woman to fall. In Amis' retake of the English the novel, we are waiting for the man to fall, and then during the 'after-the-fuck' period we see the consequences of that fall, and exactly how far he fell.

Amis posits that the sexual revolution has left us detached from ourselves and the other. During the featured fuck of the novel, Keith Nearing describes the sensation of experience as unreal, where the colours were 'wrong - all Day-Glo and wax museum,' with hopeless acoustics and hopeless continuity.

One moment the thunder felt no louder than a plastic dustbin being dragged across the courtyard; the next, it was all over you like a detonation. And the human figures - him, her? She was much better at it than he was, naturally (she played the lead); but he kept having his doubts about the quality of the acting.

Keith watched the whole fuck take place in the mirror, and it 'seemed to make sense only when you watched it in the mirror. Something had been separated out. He did know that.'

Yes, it was good in the mirror, realer in the mirror. You could see what was happening very clearly. Uncluttered, unsullied by the other dimensions, which were those of depth and time.

The revolution of the fuck sought to smooth things over. Things being depth and time. The glossy images of pornographic magazine. Still. Depth and time are relegated to the place of bookends, the before-the-fuck and the after-the-fuck.

The future Keith, the 'after-the-fuck' Keith reflects on this new condition. where 'something' had been separated out.

Surface will start tending to supersede essence. As the self becomes postmodern, how things look will become at least as important as how things are. Essences are hearts, surfaces are sensations.

Was post-modernism born then out of the fuck, out of the sexual revolution? Post-modernism is the condition of the pregnant widow, the real bastard child of the revolution has yet to be born.

What do you do in a revolution? This. You grieve for what goes, you grant what stays, and greet what comes.

So we shoud greet this surface, this detachment, this separation. Amis writes that in the 17th century poets lost the ability to both think and feel, he says that during the sexual revolution we lost the ability to both feel and fuck. This is what is left. The unfeeling fuck. Greet it, but grieve for what is gone, grieve for the poets who could both feel and fuck, because Amis cannot.

This review was originally published on my blog The Jackette

[MJ Nicholls]

The living, sweating, rutting embodiment of meh.

[Stela · Rating 3 out of 5]

Martin Amis’s The Pregnant Widow is the first book I’ve finished in 2016 (I wanted to write “this year” then I remembered that once I had started a review with “this summer” and later, while re-reading it, I had to investigate to learn what summer I was talking about ☺ ) and what a good beginning it was, indeed!

Maybe this is not Martin Amis at his best, but it was fun, despite the somehow gloomy title, inspired by Alexander Herzen’s dooming prophecy used as the first motto of the novel:

“The death of the contemporary form of social order ought to gladden rather than trouble the soul. Yet what is frightening is that the departing world leaves behind it, not a heir, but a pregnant widow. Between the death of the one and the birth of the other much water will flow by, a long night of chaos and desolation will pass.”

The quote not only unfolds the meaning of the title but, together with the other two mottos – the definition of the narcissism and two verses from Ted Hughes’ poem The Metamorphoses that allude to the changes of the human body, point out the central theme of the novel: the consequences of any social revolution (here, of the 70s) on the individual. Moreover, the quote from Hughes hints also to a secondary theme – the ageing.

Obviously, these themes are treated Amis way, that is by stressing either the tragi-comedy of the sexual revolution (which was already ripe, since, as Philip Larkin memorably informed us, it “…began in 1963 (…)/Between the end of the Chatterley ban/ And the Beatles’ first L.P.”), the role of the ego in the Me Decade (which was also a “She Decade” and which will continue in the following decades) and the inexorability of the physical changes due to the consenescence (diagnosed as “Body Dysmorphic Syndrome or Perceived Ugly Disorder”).

The main compositional technique is based on the well-known retrospection: some thirty-six years later, an oldish Keith Nearing discovers that the only way to overcome the dread of the age and the feeling that the life is passing by is to rely on memories:

As the fiftieth birthday approaches, you get the sense that your life is thinning out, and will continue to thin out, until it thins out into nothing. And you sometimes say to yourself: That went a bit quick. In certain moods, you may want to put it rather more forcefully. As in: OY!! THAT went a BIT FUCKING QUICK!!!... Then fifty comes and goes, and fifty-one, and fifty-two. And life thickens out again. Because there is now an enormous and unexpected presence within your being, like an undiscovered continent. This is the past.

Thus he keeps remembering a holiday in a castle in Italy (where, by the way he was going to meet all his three future wives), in a sunny summer of 1970. At that time Keith was twenty going on twenty-one and he thought of and spoke about and was interested mainly in sex. The obsession with sex was not only his: an entire generation of boys were in search of the much discussed sexual freedom that seemed to happen to anyone but to them, whereas the same generation of girls wanted to “act like boys” but to be thought conventional. The results were on the surface amusing (like Gloria’s pornographic scenarios based on Jane Austen’s novels or Sheherazade’s out of pity sexual offer, eventually aborted), but in the long run rather tragic (like the fate of Keith’s sister, the butterfly nymphomaniac Violet). All in all, sex seems the key word to define the young ego:

Sex is bad enough, as a subject, and the self is pretty glutinous, too. The I, the io, the yo, the je, the Ich: Freud’s preferred term for the ego, for the I. Sex is bad enough (but someone’s got to do it); and then there is the Ich. And what does that sound like – Ich, the Ich?

But this narcissistic attitude and apparent freedom had to be paid for, as I’ve already said, and the repercussions, sometimes a bit ridiculous and derisory, were sad nevertheless:

“Huw’s not keen on drugs. He’s a heroin addict.”
This makes perfect sense. Huw is tall, handsome and rich – so naturally he can’t bear it. He can’t bear it another second.

What is interesting and original in the novel is the narrative approach (but why be surprised, it’s Martin Amis, isn’t it?): although it is Keith who remembers it is not him who speaks about his memories. The narrative voice, announcing itself from the beginning as not only independent from the hero’s but also judgmental (“I used to have a lot of time for Keith Nearing. We were once very close. And then we fell out over a woman. Not in the usual sense. We had a disagreement over a woman”), identifies itself only in the end as the “superego”, with all the connotations Freud gave to this term, that is the consciousness that penalizes the ego either with remorse or guilt, for sins committed or only imagined.

In fact, on second thought, Martin Amis’s book brilliantly interprets the triangle ego – superego – society Freud defined in his Civilisation and Its Discontents (and not only there), for the book not only illustrates the characters’ struggle between Eros and Thanatos under the sanction of the society, but also (and this is where the laugh begins to grow bitter) the society’s ambition to develop its own “cultural super ego”, that baby in the widow’s womb that will finally gobble the individual too lost in his own private battle with Thanatos to beware.

And given that I’ll be fifty in a month or two myself, I can easily understand how you get distracted from the big picture while studying your body changes with the same fascination as Narcissus, but in reverse ☺:

Yeah. Fifty’s nothing, Pulc. Me, I’m as old as NATO. And it all works out. Your hams get skinnier – but that’s all right, because your gut gets fatter. Your eyes get hotter – but that’s all right, because your hands get colder (and you can soothe them with your frozen fingertips). Shrill or sudden noises are getting painfully sharper – but that’s all right, because you’re getting deafer. The hair on your head gets thinner – but that’s all right, because the hair in your nose and in your ears gets thicker. It all works out in the end.

It’s tricky this Amis’s book. Sometimes you don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Sometimes it’s overwhelming, sometimes the irony seems superficial. Not really a three-star (too little), neither a four-star (too much) book. But definitely worth reading.

And, to finish in style, if you are in need of some useful (☺) information, here are two samples:

"…Why’s it called the missionary position?”
“Because the missionaries,” said Lily, “told the natives to stop doing it like dogs and start doing it like missionaries.”
*
“Don’t you know anything? Fish makes ejaculate smell awful. There. You didn’t know that either, did you. Well then.

[Bruno · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5

Se esistesse una macchina del tempo e Jane Austen, invece di pascolare per il Somerset, avesse potuto fare una gita nel 1970, probabilmente questo romanzo l'avrebbe scritto lei, battezzandolo qualcosa tipo Scopate e Pregiudizio, Uccelli e Sentimento o Titsfield Park. Se invece il salto nel tempo l'avesse fatto la cara George Eliot, già di vedute molto aperte nel lontano '800, avrebbe sicuramente intitolato questo romanzo Il Mulino sulla Fess.

No, i protagonisti di questa storia non sono dei pornodivi, ma sono i baby boomers, figli del secondo dopoguerra e attivisti della rivoluzione sessuale. Keith, Lily e Scheherazade, accompagnati da una marea di gente altrettanto arrapata, si ritrovano a passare le vacanze estive del 1970 in un castello in Campania. Si apre così un siparietto su una commedia sexy, ma senza Renato Pozzetto o Alvaro Vitali - qui i ragazzi sono di grande cultura. Keith, infatti, divorerà per l'intera durata della vacanza un classico inglese dopo l'altro, smontandolo e rimontandolo alla ricerca della chiave maliziosa ed erotica.

"Clarissa è un incubo. Non ci crederai, Lily", disse "ma gli ci vogliono duemila pagine per scoparsela".
"Cristo".
"Lo so".
"Ma insomma, ti senti? Di solito, quando leggi un romanzo, non fai che parlare di cose tipo, che so, il grado di introspezione. O lo spessore morale. Adesso solo le scopate".

-

"In Mansfield Park si contano ben due scopate. Henry Crawford si scopa Maria Bertram. E il signor Yates si scopa la sorella di lei, Julia. Ed è un Honourable".
"Di cosa erano drogate?"
"Bella domanda. Non lo so. Genitori anaffettivi. Noia".

E anche ne La vedova incinta, come in Clarissa, l'azione ruota attorno al bramato coito del protagonista. Le donne, invece, duellano a colpi di topless e costumi a foglia di fico per diventare come gli uomini e addirittura superarli, per essere le vere promotrici della liberazione sessuale.

"… Anche a Scheherazade piace fare il maschio? È promiscua?"
"No. Io sono di gran lunga piú promiscua di lei. In termini numerici", disse Lily. "Sai. Ha avuto anche lei la sua dose di pomiciate e toccatine. Poi si è impietosita per un paio di idioti che le scrivevano delle poesie. E se n’è pentita. Poi niente per un periodo. Poi Timmy"

Amis, ad essere sinceri, inserisce il romanzo in un quadro più ampio e più profondo, affronta il tema dell'invecchiamento e della metamorfosi spirituale e fisica cui siamo sottoposti nel corso della vita. Il personaggio di Violet inoltre, la sorella di Keith, è in realtà ispirato a Sally Amis, la sorella dell'autore stesso, uccisa dalla rivoluzione sessuale come spiega in modo toccante in questo articolo.

Il romanzo non vuole assolutamente inneggiare al sesso o all'amore libero, ma la licenziosità e l'ironia della storia vanno troppo a cozzare con la materia riflessiva di fondo.
La vedova incinta è un libro divertente con dei personaggi sopra le righe - andrebbe letto soltanto per Gloria Beautyman travestita da Elizabeth Bennet, Gloria Beautyman dal culo farsesco - ma il godimento è oscillante e 400 pagine finiscono per essere fin troppe.

[J. · Rating 2 out of 5]

On a remote Italian hilltop, magic and fireflies surround an enchanted castle... Evening descends and the Mediterranean azur deepens, around the sons and daughters of the absent affluent.

A paen to youth, a valentine, in fact, to words like paen and wordplay for its own sake; a bonbon of elegiac yearning and wonder. And in case you were wondering, happy coincidence, the screenplay simply writes itself.

Doesn't it just :
Lucky, larky lads and libertine lolitas drape themselves around every frame. This is... that certain summer.
This is ... Italy, when it's italicized.
This is ... summer break, when your parents are, well, really very rich.

Doe-eyed Chloes and ankle-braceletted Zooeys are the richly-tanned and self-referential denizens, here, at Castle Narcissism. And author Amis has cleverly created a well-read satyr-character, a sort of cunning linguist, to represent his own interests here amongst the fauna, thinking it will become some kind of center to all this ...

This garden. This ripening vale of pheromone and gossamer wing'ed reflection. Sofia Coppola of course, or maybe her daughter, will direct.

No stretch to see the accolades pouring in, like gold-dust; perhaps with luck, the lusty eminence grise himself will do the screenplay, for added luster...
All the scents will conspire and confer -- evanescent ! ... incandescent ! ... luminescent ! ...

All of it, just so innocently, lingeringly ... scent-y.
Load of crap, Amis.

[Mark · Rating 1 out of 5]

I'm not sure that I've ever disliked a book more that I have actually finished. The author spends so much time impressing us with his word-slinging technology and introducing countless characters, but it was never really clear to me what exactly was going on. I suspect that he did this on purpose. Here's an example:

"Keith replaced the receiver and thought of the white T-shirt in Holland Park. The meteorological or heavenly connivance. No-see-um raindrops, and her torso moulded by the pornodew."

I was determined to finish the book (it was a book group selection), but by page 200, I found myself wishing that my own eyeballs would become moulded by pornodew so that I would have an excuse to quit reading.

Nevertheless, I hope that you will read the book so that you can write an amusing and scathing review and send it to me. That would make me feel better about the time I wasted with this book.

[Rick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved it. Amis is softening, but it's a good thing. Man, people are so mean to him. Why do I look the other way? Maybe I feel bad about his upbringing. I didn't know about his sister. That's really sad, and he did a great job writing this book as a tribute to her.

HIs turns of phrase never cease to amaze me. He makes it look effortless. And I love the extended coda of the ending. I love how he freely admits that the summer in italy was the only part of Keith's life that took the form of a novel, and it was the only part of the novel that took the form of a novel.

Thank you, Martin Amis, for capturing how I feel growing older.

And seriously - how did a Martin Amis novel make me want to read all of Jane Austen's works?

[Tony · Rating 3 out of 5]

There is, within, this piece of dialogue:

"You know in Dickens, when the good characters look in the fire, they see the faces of their loved ones. And the bad characters, they just see hell and doom."

"What do you see?"

Ponder that. Amis does, through the life of an alter-ego, and resolves that great existential question on the final pages. Skip ahead if you want.

The first half of this book spawned vapid characters, and too many to be adequately fleshed out. Twenty-somethings summering in Italy, wondering if they should have sex and what might imagined couplings be like. I was thinking, Martin, Martin, why have you forsaken me; the genius of Times Arrow and London Fields reduced to pabulum. Bring back Nicola Six, please!

And then, as if I conjured it, one of the characters stepped from her silhouette on the backdrop and became the femme fatale that Amis does so well. Gloria Beautyman, in this instance, who lures but does not ruin our protagonist with lust, deception and mystery. Their equipoise redeems this work.

There is no mistaking Amis' brilliance. His suggestion of sexual acts, without actually ever saying what they were, was particularly well done. But spot reviews of the 19th century English Literature canons, as the protagonist reads one a day, were often just digressive. Amis has the need, it seems, to display his erudition; which can seem like wearing very nice underwear on the outside of your suit. For instance, the protagonist and others feel the need to explain the etymology of the words they are using. Interesting, but it also may explain the sexual and emotional immaturity that challenged Amis' characters.

[Kira Henehan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I feel like reading this cast into sharp relief the level of tortured writing and storytelling through which I'd been unwittingly suffering over the last few books I've read/started.

Thank GOD for some playfulness, some exuberance with the language. This book made me HAPPY to read, it made me laugh, it made me consider.

So fuckit. Yay Mr. Amis. Sorry everyone hates your book so much but you pleased me to no end.

[ferrigno · Rating 4 out of 5]

Una scopata che ti rovina per venticinque anni. Ovvero: Soumission all'inglese.

Houellebecq: dev'essere contagioso. Anzi no: Amis lo precede di ben quattro anni. Ma andiamo per ordine.

Giunto circa a pagina 300, in corrispondenza della frase "Ma la mano seguiva l'occhio con una facilità conturbante" penso Che cazzo c'entra? ma scrivo la seguente nota:

"C'è una continuità di intenti e di poetica tra l'auto-onfalofilia del protagonista e quella dell'autore"

evidentemente contagiato dall'autore, che usa la parola "onfalo" (ombelico) ben sette volte.

Questo è un lungo, coltissimo, onirico, torbido lamento di due babyboomer, ventenni nel 1969, l'autore e il protagonista. Su quanto sia difficile gestire la rivoluzione sessuale. Il romanzo gira intorno ad una SINGOLA scopata e alla reazione a catena che determina. Il narratore butta giù i numeri: «(una scopata) Lo rovinò per venticinque anni.» A seguire, i venticinque anni di disgrazia. Conviene rompere uno specchio, la prossima volta.

Questo romanzo è un lungo, coltissimo ecc. Troppo lungo. Verboso, più che altro. Ma del resto. C'è un narratore che sa tutto del protagonista; ma noi sappiamo quante pippe si sono fatti i babyboomer sul narratore onnisciente, no? E mentre mi chiedo chi possa essere, il fratello? L'amico?, lui puntuale, si manifesta: Chi sono? Ve lo dico dopo. Alla fine lo dice: è il super-io del protagonista. Insomma, la sua coscienza. Riepiloghiamo: abbiamo un protagonista, raccontato dalla sua coscienza, redatta a sua volta da Amis che è entrambi, pare. Questo romanzo è molto autobiografico, pare. Non vi sembra un filino autoreferenziale? Come fai a non parlarti addosso? Inevitabile. Poi sono tutti letterati, tutti e tre.

Questo romanzo è un lungo, coltissimo, onirico, torbido lamento ecc. Amis procede per associazioni non lineari. Tutto torna, Amis non è Pynchon, gestibile. Ma, diamine, quei romanzi che dovresti ricominciare da capo dopo aver finito.

Questo romanzo è un lungo, coltissimo, onirico, torbido lamento ecc. Sesso torbido, sesso desiderato, procrastinato, compiuto e rimembrato. Dosato con molta eleganza e moltissima parsimonia.

Questo romanzo è un lungo, coltissimo, onirico, torbido lamento ecc. Coltissimo, come l'autore. Nei ringraziamenti, l'autore redige la bibliografia minima necessaria per capire di che parla: Austen, Bronte, qualche psicologo, uno storico, vari poeti. Oppure vi rassegnate a brancolare. Io ci ho giocato a moscacieca tutto il tempo. Magari adesso mi vado a leggere Orgoglio e pregiudizio.

A sorpresa, c'è una morale. Non è che il protagonista, o il grillo parlante o l'autore te la mettano nero su bianco, però traspare: chi scopa senza amore MUORE.
Per certi versi, questo romanzo è molto simile a Sottomissione di Houllebecq: in entrambi i casi abbiamo un letterato di mezza età, depresso e devastato dagli stravizi; Houellebecq cita Huysmans e finisce per seguirne le tracce convertendosi e sottomettendosi, qui si cita il romanzo vittoriano e si conclude che si stava meglio quando il sesso era solo DOPO il matrimonio.
La vedova incinta è infinitamente più bello di Sottomissione, sia chiaro.

Curiosamente, questo romanzo mi è piaciuto.

[Jennifer · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are times when reading Martin Amis that I feel as though I just don't get "it." And that is when I realize that the it I will never get is the thought process of the other sex. Seriously. Reading this book I identified with Lily and her frustration with Keith the main character and narrator. (Naming a hero Keith takes gumption). But then, I realize, that is the point. That is precisely why I love reading Amis, because it gives me a glimpse into a world so familiar and yet so completely different then my own that I am bewildered and yes, bewitched and bothered. That, my friends, is what makes fine literature.

As a beneficiary of the sexual revolution, I had no idea how difficult it was to experience it and then, to look back on the experience from the standpoint of thirty years. The point Amis makes about aging is a poignant. I will tuck it away and think about it.

"Life is made up as it goes along. It can never be rewritten. It can never be revised.
Life comes in the form of sixteen-hour units, between waking up and going to sleep, between escaping from the unreal and re-embracing the unreal. there are are over three hundred and sixty such units in each year."

[Nick Garbutt · Rating 2 out of 5]

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear! I really don’t know where to start with this.
Martin Amis used to be the golden boy of English writing. He achieved almost rock-star status for his prose and was widely covered by the media.
His personal life was far from pristine. He was insufferably vain and arrogant, he was a drinker and by all accounts he was a philanderer and his writing suggests he was also a misogynist.
But he was also a wonderful writer: inventive, funny and innovative.
Then he got cancelled. It started in 1989 when his brilliant novel London Fields failed to win the Booker Prize after being rejected by two feminist judges because they believed his alleged views on women barred him from the prize.
At the time I felt outraged.
But then I read this, a later example of his work. It is massively over-written and tedious and the women in the pages are cartoonish, there’s no depth to their portrayal.
It was almost as if the later Amis was determined to live up to his own image. And it is sad to this terrible book is part of a brilliant writer’s legacy.

[Matt · Rating 2 out of 5]

Took off well, didn't denouement like it should have. Method editing?

[GD · Rating 5 out of 5]

I normally write short reviews because most of what I want to say about a book has been said by other people before, but this book has a much lower rating than I give it, and I feel I need to reveal more sack because of it. I'm not a Martin Amis fanboy, although I think he's one of the greatest living writers. He has written some stinkers, and his non-fiction, my god, except for the memoirs, is just excruciating for me to get through. And I really didn't like his book before this one, with the Russian camp, I thought it was a sure sign of his becoming obsolete. Then he pops back with this little piece of badassery!

I think part of the reason this book (and most of what he's written in the last 15 years or so) is maligned so much is because he's become so establishment, he's critically lauded, all the literary magazines and reviewers go gaga over him, and he's been teaching creative writing; all signs for a younger generation that the time has come to shit on him in favor of something new. You can even tell by the style of a lot of the negative reviews that the writers of them are hoping to become fiction writers themselves, and one day (hopefully) they might, and I don't (can't!) know that they won't, because that's exactly the way Martin Amis probably started out himself.

A lot of negative reviews noticed the similarities between this book and Dead Babies and The Rachel Papers, and came down on him about it for various reasons. Some said he was losing his creativity, some said he was ripping himself off (whatever that means), and some (I can't believe after all these years these people still exist) came down on the book because they think he's sexist. People who (still) think Martin Amis is a sexist, fuck, they make me think of people who think Eddie Murphy or Chris Rock are racist because they've made fun of white people.

Martin Amis has always been out to make people laugh at the weirdest shit, and I think he totally succeeds again here. I think he's in top form, and I don't think he's repeating himself. Well, in a way he is, the way Hemingway repeats himself with strong tough guys, or the way Thomas Pynchon repeats himself with absurd paranoiacs, or the way Stephen King does with New Englanders running across spooky supernatural shit. He's always been obsessed with feelings of lust, insecurity, and the unstoppable, deadly passage of time (oddly none of the reviews I read said anything about Time's Arrow, which I thought this book had a lot in common with), and almost all his books address these things. The Amis style is a little stale sometimes, I agree (like how, for effect, he says the same thing in two consecutive sentences with little or no alteration), but dismissing the book for that's like tossing out a kickass pizza because one of the pepperonis is charred.

I know Amis has been called (derogatorily) a "boys' writer" by a lot of people, and of course I think this is grossly unfair, but on the surface this is one extremely sexist book, and those same people are probably going to feel more secure in their assertions because of it. And his giant's status in the literary establishment is going to turn some people off as well. But I have very little interest in whether a writer is a critics' darling or not, or whether the books have been turned into movies or not, and I read like a giant construction company levels pristine jungles and abandoned urban slums alike: with no other thought than to get what I want from it.

[Sarah (is clearing her shelves) · Rating 2 out of 5]

4/10 - Oh dear! At 3.01, this has a dreadful average rating that's giving me premonitions of it being a DNFer. This is the problem with not having a smart phone with the GR app on it. To be continued...

Later - I'm having trouble making any sense of this book.
For example, why does Amis insert a lesson in etymology into a sentence every often? On page 25, why do we need to know that 'Desolate' is from L. Desolare 'abandon', from de- 'thoroughly' + solus 'alone'? Who inserts that into a sentence for no obvious reason?

This paragraph on page 27-28 completely baffled me and is actually what sent me running to the journal so I wouldn't lose the energy and urge to write that's been brought about by that confusion.

"Keith was assuming social realism would hold, here in Italy. And yet Italy itself seemed partly fabulous, and the citadel they occupied seemed partly fabulous, and the transformation of Scheherazade seemed partly fabulous. Where was social realism? The upper classes themselves, he kept thinking, were not social realists. Their modus operandi, their way of operating, obeyed looser rules. He was, ominously, a K in a castle. But he was still assuming that social realism would hold. What does he mean by partly fabulous, and what does K in a castle mean?

Then there's page eight, which is four lines away from being a full page contemplation of women's measurements. Now, correct me if I'm wrong because despite being a girl myself I'm hardly an expert, but isn't it true that the narrowest part of a woman's torso is her waist. No matter if she's an or a 28, her waist will always be narrower than her hips or chest. If that is true how on earth can measurements like 35-45-55 or 46-47-31 be possible, or something a boy in 'early adolescence' would fantasise about?

After 30 pages I think I've spent about enough time on this sex-driven mess of a story. I've only got a few weeks before I leave for three weeks in France and a lot of books to read before I go most (if not all) of which I won't be able to take due to due dates occurring while I'm away. So, a book's got to be reasonable for me to spend precious time on it, and this was far from it. Such a low average rating, immediate evidence of the reasons given for that low average rating and my own personal confusion have lead to this being a great big NOPE .

[Steven Godin · Rating 2 out of 5]

A mess. Not quite the trainwreak that was Yellow Dog, but this felt like a vehicle seriously out of control. Too smutty for the sake of it and not even the Italy factor could save it for me. Had to result to skimming through the last third. Will always compare anything else read by Amis to the Brilliant London Fields, so if that was premier league standard then The Pregnant Widow was very much non- league football.

[Tom · Rating 3 out of 5]

I start of with Andrew's summary of this book: "Life consists of waiting to fuck, fucking, and then remembering when you fucked. When you die, you think about how the fucks went. When you grow old and stare vacantly into the mirror, your 'bald patch receding into infinity', you say to yourself, 'Fuck, I rememember when I used to fuck, what happened to all those fucks.'".

"The Pregnant Widow" is a book about the Sexual Revolution at the start of the seventies. We follow the ever-horny literature student Keith Naring during his summer trip to Italy. He stays in a castle that once housed D.H. Lawrence and his girlfriend Frieda, who also really liked to fuck. At least, that's what Keith is focused on.

His company includes his girlfriend Lily, but also a character which is actually named Scheherazade, who is mostly described as the carrier of 'great tits'. All the characters in the novel seem to be fascinated by those glorious tits of Scheherazade. They represent, in a way, the sexual oblivion every character is chasing.

There's Keith, who spends his summer trying to discover "the great English novel" but can only seem to remember the sex scenes in each book he reads. He desperately tries to seduce Scheherazade, ignoring the pleas of his girlfriend, Lily. Ironically, even though she is the most sexualised character in the book, Scheherazade is one of the more conservative characters throughout. Keith is set against a group of women who seem overwhelmed by the options they have after the Sexual Revolution. Each in their own way, they try to come to terms with their own liberty and erotic desires.

Ultimately though, the book is an account of the failure of the whole Revolution. For Martin Amis, it's a personal story. The character Violet, for example, is loosely based on Amis' own sister, who became an alcoholic before drifting away into eternity. Amis reportedly blamed the Sexual Revolution for 'taking his sister away from him'. And the story about the events at the castle was meant to figure in a sort of 'sexual autobiography', which Amis ended up abandoning in favor of this project.

The process of sexual rapture followed by an unability to recover reoccurs throughout the novel. Keith has a sexual encounter of his own, which leaves a mental scar in the years and decades to come. He is the posterboy of the quote that is found in the prelude of "The Pregnant Widow":

The death of the contemporary form of social order ought to gladden rather than trouble the soul. Yet what is frightening is that the departing world leaves behind it, not a heir, but a pregnant widow. Between the death of the one and the birth of the other much water will flow by, a long night of chaos and desolation will pass.

What Amis is suggesting, is that the abandonment of morals or moral systems is useless if there is no system in place to replace it. As such, the loose sexual abandonment of many characters in the book condemns them to a place in no man's land. They seem to be looking for more and more, but there is no finish line on the horizon; the sexual reward is its own reward.

As such, the ridiculously named Scheherazade turns out to be a somewhat profetic joke Amis is playing on the reader. By making the reader part of the sexually aroused mass, and ultimately not delivering, he manages to deliver the disappointment of Keith and his promiscuous friends. So I wouldn't say "The Pregnant Widow" is a book just about a topless girl with glorious tits, lying by the poolside. It's a more interesting take, by far. But still - it's bound to piss of some feminists along the way. Even though, interestingly, Amis' book is a declaration of war on superficiality;

Surface will start tending to supersede essence. As the self becomes postmodern, how things look will become at least as important as how things are. Essences are hearts, surfaces are sensations.

And that is just what Amis is rallying against.

[Henning Koch · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is a wealth of experience and wit in this book, I love almost all of it - until the last thirty or forty pages, when Amis departs from the format of his novel and goes into a fast forward mode of cataloguing main character Keith's future.
Why did he do it? Just to avoid the easy, obvious success? There are some writers who are uncomfortable with endings - a sort of literary fear of death? There is an awful lot of twisting and turning, pirouetting and twirling, rather than just boldly ending the book at a good point.
Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times described "The Pregnant Widow" as a "remarkably tedious" novel, which seems a rather premeditated attack. There are some people who are determined not to like Martin Amis, for reasons of their own.
At the time of writing, Amis would have been lingering in midlife crisis, one guesses, after all he does mention that life begins to "thicken" after one has turned 50, as a consequence of the discovery of "the past".
It would be an exaggeration to say that "The Pregnant Widow" is a retrospective of one man's love life - "sex life" may be more apt. Or better still, an account of the beginnings of the sexual revolution when women "could also be cocks", and how one young man's wheels came off in the process, never to entirely come back on.
Amis, as ever, has far too much skin to show what's underneath. But at least the surface is intriguing and, above all, it hints.

Recommended reading for those who have had enough of high-concept blarney, and prefer their novelists complicated and up close.

[Megan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was a little surprised by all of the negative reviews here; for me, this is one of Amis's best novels. Yes, it's about a group of sex-obsessed twenty year olds, but the book is not celebrating sex; instead, it's (rather viciously) interrogating the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s and the world it helped create. The book is set in 1970, and the characters are young people groping their way through a world in which, sexually speaking, anything goes. As the book makes clear, this new freedom is not particularly freeing. As a fortyish person, I missed the 1960s entirely, but have had the great importance of those years rammed down my throat for pretty much my entire life, so I very much appreciate a writer of Amis's generation admitting that the 60s created as many problems as they solved.

[Robert · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Pregnant Widow by Martin Amis is a challenging novel for a number of reasons. The first challenge is that is too long. The second challenge is that it is too silly. The third challenge is that it is too true.
This is a book with deep roots in the summer of 1970 when a group of prickly friends, male and female, took stock of what the sexual revolution of the 1960s had wrought in terms of where things stood, male- and female-wise. The friends are largely, but not exclusively, English, and they are mostly twenty years old, and there are unanswered questions in the air not only about whether women had finally become the "cocks" of the bedroom but also about the extent to which sexual interaction defines an individual in his or her essence, erasing all that had gone into getting to twenty and settling down hard on what he or she gained or lost by handling intimacy in a more or less aggressive way.
Amis and I are contemporaries, more or less, and I do recall the microscopic looks people in their twenties cast at one another in 1970. These were not profound inspections, however. They were largely superficial questions of attraction, social status within a group, and whether such and such a relationship would work or just be a night or a weekend together. Lots of sex, but perhaps not sex that was as rigorously regulated (by the women) as is the case in The Pregnant Widow.
The key figures in the novel--Keith, Gloria, Lily, Scheherazade (yep,that's the name of the girl with the mammoth, constantly displayed and commented upon breasts)--are very verbal, analytic types. Keith, the key figure of all, is really not sure, however, what good his brooding does him when, in the end, he will have access to these and other women largely on their peculiar terms.
So we're in a castle in Italy, there's a midget count on the scene, a few tower bedrooms connected by a shared bathroom, a swimming pool, and some coming and going that follows the general trend-lines of the English novels of manners that Keith must read as he prepares himself for the life he foresees as a critic and poet. This, the heart of the book, is the most tedious part.
The better parts are the opening, wherein Keith has reached his fifties and is looking back on that pivotal year, and then a series of chapters that trace the evolution of the group post-1970, taking them all the way to 2009.
A theme that connects some of this action is Narcissus. When he looks into the water, does he fall in love with himself, or is that a female self he sees looking back at him? Of course gender roles and rights are big questions, and they merit reflection, but the trouble is that in 1970, if one was twenty, one was hardly in a position to comprehend the magnitude of what the 1960s had done to western mores. One could act, but think and hesitate and worry and fret and see oneself as central to a big cultural shift as occurs in this novel? I'm not so sure. But I am definitely sure that the endless game-playing Amis engages in vis-a-vis Scheherazade's mammaries and Gloria's buttocks is too much.
The truth of the novel crawls on its belly out of that summer in Italy into a series of interesting re-couplings, divorces, binges, disappointments, births and deaths. Here's the magic of the novel form: you spend so much time with characters that even when they irritate you, they begin to interest you, and what happens to them matters. Amis is puckish and nimble and ironic and sharp, but he still holds onto that gravity life acquires over a span of decades and makes it work.

For more of my comments on contemporary writing, see Tuppence Reviews (Kindle).

[Maya Lang · Rating 2 out of 5]

Imagine throwing a dinner party when in sweeps your friend, your bit-of-a-dick friend, who's late, naturally, and empty-handed, who's soon telling pompous, preening stories in a carrying voice because he finds himself very clever, all while not-so-subtly ogling all of the women's breasts and helping himself freely to the booze. (I picture Philip Seymour Hoffman's character from The Talented Mr. Ripley in this role.)

This is how I'd describe the narrative voice of this novel. It is sloppy and full of itself and condescending and entitled, indulgent and arrogant and misogynistic, waiting (gleefully!) to be called misogynistic so it can sneer that the woman waging this accusation is probably frigid. This is a novel in which women are only as valuable as they are sexy. It is a novel in which we are supposed to care about a great tease of a plot which fails utterly to deliver in a way that feels as dissatisfying as bad sex. It is a novel that hopes to redeem itself intellectually by making passing reference to various classics, as though a passage from Shakespeare or an allusion to Kafka elevates what's around it. It doesn't.

(Yes, there's the whole "Decameron" thing, which I haven't even gone into, but who cares about that parallel when the characters are treated so superficially? And that's the thing. Novels should make us care. They should make us sit up and care.)

There were moments of gorgeous prose and surprising description. Such moments kept me going. But what a waste that they were embedded in a plot that didn't even feel like it was trying. What a waste that the constant lure of the nameless mystery narrator turns out to be such a flop. And Gloria's great secret? Suffice it to say it's not so great.

The prose and intelligence of Martin Amis are wasted here. The beauty of a line quickly pales when followed by, "We may parenthetically note that it is the near-universal wish of dying men that they had had much more sex with many more women." Maybe, Martin Amis, but maybe it should be the universal wish of lauded male authors that they tried a little harder instead of limply dialing it in.

[Chloe · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book fifteen years ago I reckon, maybe twenty and I couldn’t say this then but I can now: how did Amis KNOW??? How could he predict the creation of Boris, for surely Johnson himself would never knowingly have modeled himself on the undesirable but undeniably hilarious Jorq, castle-owner, cheese magnate (well the money has to come from somwhere) and holder of deleterious right-wing views? The blondeness, the “fat-strong” physique, the albinoid eyelash pimples (yuk!), the blithering inability to fathom doors (Truss clearly is a mere follower not a leader here as well), it’s all documented ahead of time.

Probably because he watched the upper classes and could reproduce the fatuousness of conversations down to their very cadence. Timmy, when telling of Adriano’s run in with a wall, first assumes everyone has driven to this African club, then realises it isn’t part of the story let alone the Everyman experience and tails off…

And its not just the English upper classes Amis parodies so perfectly: in a joke which Amis bounces across the novel, the Italian count Adriano completely fails to pronounce Keith’s name, so that by the time Keith answers Timmy’s casual: “Is there a “kitsch” staying here?” with “that would be me” the reader feels part of the eye-rolling hilarity of watching others inescapably mangle things.

Amis doesn’t laugh at though, because no-one, least of all Keith Talent, is spared the leveling wit nor the psychological sympathies afforded characters in a novel this sharp. Keith is pathetic but he is also trying: he knows he doesn’t fit but he doesn’t know how badly.

If Amis were a painter he would probably be Picasso: the first three-quarters of the novel demonstrate how well he writes, how deftly he handles flash forwards, places characters, reveals plot. And then he just gives up and goes for the fast-forward, the juicy bits, which at first unnerves, but finally it’s all very satisfying: a line reduced to the essential: the what happened, because by this time we all know why, and to whom, and why it (life) is sometimes just too exhausting.

[Mark Desrosiers · Rating 4 out of 5]

Aging fox theorizes about this henhouse perched atop the backwards-flying angel of history.

The story itself occasionally reaches awful peaks of hilarity and absurdity, complete with white-knuckle plot curves like I haven't seen since Money. And you gotta admit that the way he weaves his twin obsessions -- height and Islam -- into the story is both preposterous and very witty. I no longer consider Martin Amis a font of wisdom, but I admire his ability to plant an ideological stake and then stick around to defend it to those few who bother to actually engage it. In many ways, this novel is a nostalgic dusk-lit elaboration of Stephen Fry's theory about women, but without the lengthy apology.

Inspirational quote: "It sometimes seemed to Keith that the English novel, at least in its first two or three centuries, asked only one question. Will she fall? Will she fall, this woman? What'll they write about, he wondered, when all women fall? Well, there'll be new ways of falling..."

[Jane Branson · Rating 1 out of 5]

Whatever one star stands for (the Goodreads mobile app won't let me see) it's one too many (but Goodreads doesn't allow nil stars). Admittedly I only read the first 50 pages but that represents a considerable effort and, frankly, life's too short to read another line. Another reviewer summed it up nicely with some choice language, but I shall have to restrain myself because I am Goodreads-friends with my children. Suffice it to say, I had to create a new 'unfinishable' shelf.

[Leonard · Rating 1 out of 5]

In my lifetime I have worked with a couple people who, if you told them they could not use the F word, would be speechless. The characters in this book are not quite that bad or that illiterate, but almost. I wasn't impressed and would not want to hang out with these people. They seem shallow, thoughtless, and inconsiderate. They're more like caricatures than characters and the story comes across as shallow and meaningless.