Book of the week

The Pregnant Widow by Martin Amis

The Pregnant Widow
by Martin Amis
Jonathan Cape 480pp £18.99

"As is customary in the case of Martin Amis, advance reports about his new novel have resembled Met Office predictions of the approach of a tropical storm," said Peter Kemp in The Sunday Times. "Readers had been alerted that something full of seething turbulence was heading their way." Feminists and former girlfriends were told to expect the worst - it was touted as a "fearless" and "blindingly autobiographical" examination of the sexual revolution. "After all this, it comes as something of a surprise to find that the subject he is fearlessly taking on is a group of loungers having a holiday in Italy." The Pregnant Widow begins in 1970, with 21-year-old Amis-surrogate Keith Nearing (short, anxious and clever) staying with his girlfriend, Lily, her alluring friend, Scheherazade, and several others at a castle near Naples. It is "a time of momentous change": the girls are suddenly "acting like boys" - having sex without commitment - while "the boys are going on acting like boys". In the course of this "hot, endless and erotically decisive summer", Keith sustains a "sexual trauma" that will cast a shadow over his whole life.

The novel is richly comic - cruelly comic - as you would expect from Amis," said Justin Cartwright in the FT. But it is also "shot through with serious themes". Much of the book is "reflective, looking back from the vantage point of 2009" on the process of ageing and on the long-term impact of the new sexual freedoms (the title of the book is from Alexander Herzen, who wrote that the effect of revolutions is not felt immediately: they leave "not an heir but a pregnant widow"). And it is "Amis's finest novel for a long time" - "close to a masterpiece", hilarious, perceptive, "uncompromisingly ambitious" and marred only by some stylistic "over-striving".
That's putting it kindly, said D.J. Taylor in The Literary Review. The book is very "prolix", particularly as regards sex: "rarely has a novel gone on quite so much about women's breasts". There's far too much pompous pontificating, and the prose is full of those "trademarked sentences in which everything - plausibility, character, distance between writer and subject - is jettisoned in favour of the grand gesture". Around 250 pages in, however, "the writing seems to relax", said Christopher Tayler in The Guardian. Amis (above) gets funnier, and he even starts telling a good story, about "Keith's sentimental education at the hands of a femme fatale". If not exactly a "return to form", this is at least a compelling read. It's "a strange ride with The Pregnant Widow", .is the narrator says, and the reader is mostly "happy to tag along".