Amis On Loss

By Bharat Tandon
The Times Literary Supplement, February 3, 2010

Edited by Andy Ross

The Pregnant Widow
By Martin Amis
Cape, 470 pages

In his latest novel, Amis casts his fictional eye back to 1970. He has been candid in interviews about the novel's autobiographical genesis. A more profitable way of reading the novel would be as a long critical dialogue with the works that Amis produced just after the period he represents, most notably The Rachel Papers (1973) and Dead Babies (1975).

At the beginning of the novel, in the summer of 1970, Keith finds himself spending his university vacation in an Italian castle, mugging up on the history of the English novel while finding his affections wandering between his on-off girlfriend Lily and the aristocratic Scheherazade. Amis depicts his characters not only occasionally groping one another, but also groping awkwardly for a stable understanding of what is expected of them.

Keith carries around the burden of what he would like to think of as chivalry, laden as he is with guilt over his inability to save his younger sister Violet from a life of pathological promiscuity. His confusion is exacerbated by everyone's seemingly being unsure how to use the freedom that is now up for grabs, and unsure whether it really amounts to freedom anyway.

Keith and his friends are as much victims as they are participants, the collateral damage of a socio-political shift that is still working itself out. Of all the nineteenth-century novelists Keith co-opts, the most prominent is Jane Austen. In her own way, Austen was not so much a comedian of manners as the comedian of a culture actively debating the very nature and existence of manners themselves.

To depict protagonists who aren't wholly aware of the genre of story they are in has long been a staple of Amis's ironic art. For example, John Self in Money (1984) and Samson Young in London Fields (1989) are united in their inability to "read" their own circumstances. The Pregnant Widow makes its own use of the device. It reads like a palimpsest of autobiographical novel, comedy of sexual misunderstanding, and pubby-clubby sociology.

The Pregnant Widow works best as an archaeology of the ageing body. The novel's multiple time frames give Amis the chance to measure Keith's increasing physical frailty unsparingly against his younger self.

The Pregnant Widow stands alongside novels such as Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach as an elegy to wasted opportunity. Amis is growing into a chronicler of loss and uncomfortable metamorphosis.
 

Summer 1970

By Richard Bradford
The Spectator, February 3, 2010

Edited by Andy Ross

Amis is the most expansively gifted prose stylist of his generation. The extent to which he has overindulged his abundant talent will remain a matter for debate.

The Pregnant Widow retains his stylistic signature, yet by turns modulates and remodels it. In the novel, he treats all of his creations with a combination of respect, altruism and kindness. We forget that they are inventions, and wonder about the causes of their variously endearing, troubled, despondent states.

Despite the absence of a plot, it is an addictive read. We live with the characters, follow them in and out of focus, and wonder continually about Keith. The narrative never releases us from his presence — shy, self-conscious, perplexed — and via him we apprehend a summer which will stalk the future lives of all with whom he shared it.

In a Coda, we follow him to age 60 and an accumulation of great sadness and regret. By 2009, he has still not detached himself from the night, ten years previously, when he witnessed his sister's death. In the closing sequences Keith is the most grievous, heartbreaking individual so far created by his author.
 

War Against Death

By Wayne Gooderham
The Guardian, February 19, 2010

If Kingsley Amis was the poet laureate of the hangover, then his son is surely the poet laureate of gerontology. I cannot think of another writer so obsessed with his characters' ages.
 

A Rethink

By Philip Hensher
The Telegraph, May 20, 2010

Martin Amis has been at the centre of English writing since 1973. The Pregnant Widow takes on the history of the past 40 years, and revisits and rethinks old themes.

Sometimes it has been difficult for his readers to see what a terrific novelist he is. Among his works, Money (1984) is obviously a classic. His four early novels, from The Rachel Papers to Other People (1981), are scabrous comedies of low life and disgrace. Amis evolved an unmistakable style in these books.

The Pregnant Widow returns to previous territory. Like The Rachel Papers (1973), it is about a literary education. Like Dead Babies (1975), it is the story of an early Seventies house party of indulgence and lechery. Like Success (1978), it is about the gap between social classes. Unlike them, it deals in humane portraits. It is written with Amis's customary elegance but has a new warmth and sympathy in its comedy.

Not everybody has agreed over the excellence of The Pregnant Widow. Its views are very definitely Amis's own. Surprisingly for a writer of his distinction, he has been passed over many times by prize juries. He divides opinion, as powerful writers often do.
 

More Lad Than Bad

By Edmund White
The New York Review of Books, June 24, 2010

Edited by Andy Ross

The Pregnant Widow
By Martin Amis
Knopf, 370 pages

The Pregnant Widow begins as a beautifully poised, patient comedy of manners, in the tradition of the novels that Martin Amis's college-age hero, Keith Nearing, is reading. In the last third, the narrative skips ahead and thins out and speeds up and starts to destroy itself joyously. I was reminded of Gravity's Rainbow, in which the main theme, entropy, causes the book itself to give up on being a historical novel about World War II and to go to pieces.

Amis has given us an example of imitative form. In the first two thirds of the book there are even many direct references to Shakespeare’s comedies, and young women are accused of being blokes, and the feminist revolution is piggybacked on the earlier sexual revolution. It all recalls Shakespeare's games with androgyny.

After dwelling on a single visit to an Italian castle for a tense, glorious summer in 1970 and working out all the erotic possibilities, the narrator nosedives through the succeeding decades up to the present, losing hopes, loves, friends, and even the lives of the people he loves along the way in a reckless, pell-mell casting aside of almost everyone he had ever cherished. Very lifelike. That's what aging does to you.

By 1970, when The Pregnant Widow begins, the youngsters have added copious four-letter words to their repertoire as well as saucily direct comments, appalling nicknames, and obscene erotic refinements. In spite of all these liberties and acquisitions, the youngsters still seem naive, self-hating, and snobbish.

Amis has used here the plebeian name Keith, as he has in his past fiction. Our Keith wants to be a poet. After a brief flurry of publishing in his early twenties he gives it up. Keith Nearing, we might say, resembles Martin Amis if he hadn't had the drive and talent to become a writer. Keith is addicted to sex, or thoughts of sex, as most men are, with this difference: male writers are also obsessed with dreams of glory and mental games of literary composition.

The Pregnant Widow is a kind of alternative memoir about a person who doesn't have the stamina and imaginative fire to write. Keith Nearing's biological parents are of the servant class.

There's a large cast of young characters and few adults to supervise them. Keith is at the castle with his girlfriend Lily. When he has sex with her he often has to fantasize she's someone else, even with her verbal help and cooperation. At one point she pretends to be Scheherazade, who is so young she has only just grown into her beauty. At one point Scheherazade sets up a secret rendezvous with Keith until he gets drunk and starts ranting against God.

Gloria Beautyman is a triumphant narcissist who looks at herself and declares that she loves herself. There’s something mysterious and odd about her, though. Then there's the Italian aristocrat who's rich and and plays rugby and speaks several languages and is capable of deep emotions — and is four foot ten inches tall. There's the older, wiser gay man who's in love with a very young man.

This is a book that is highly conscious of being a book. Keith is reading all those novels. The action often echoes the plots of the novels he's reading. There are many subtle parallels between books and reality. But for Keith the whole experience is literary.

By contrast, the life he goes on to live is made up as it goes along. This contrast between the rare, well-made, already novelistic experience and the more common, messy, improvised shapelessness of ordinary existence explains the shift from the tidy social comedy of youth to the baffling weirdness of age — and the exploded shape of this book.

Martin Amis is very funny and accurate about aging. But Amis has no theory about age. It's much too interesting an experience. The nasty depredations of age are items Amis ticks off in a comic list of horrors. The rhetorical effects of repetition, the insistence that everything is all right, the parody of cheerfulness in the service of disgust, all dramatize the tragicomedy of one's "late period."

Perhaps Amis's most striking meditations on age and time in this "snuff film" we're all starring in derive from his analysis of age as the one remaining class system. As we lie dying, not many of us will have enjoyed the inestimable privilege of being born with white skin, blue blood, and a male member. Each and every one of us, though, at some point in our story, will have been young. The people who are currently young, Amis predicts, will rebel against caring for the growing percentage of the population that is old.

The tone of these comments is rendered in Amis's hilarious essay style. Sometimes I wonder why writers who are witty and restless and worldly in their essays become dull narrators, inexhaustibly sequential in their novels, grazing every last thing in view.

I mention this notion of fiction not because I want pages and pages of ideas in novels but as a corrective to the American assumption that true novelists are rough-and-tumble brutes getting it all down. Writers shouldn't lose twenty points of IQ when they turn away from essays to fiction. They should remain true to whatever it is that engages them in writing, no matter what the genre.

Amis knows how to present dramatic scenes with dialogue and terse descriptions of action. But he also knows how to analyze action, usually from a comic point of view. In The Pregnant Widow, the wit and the analysis are used to open up the story, to take a single idyllic summer and trace out its consequences in numerous lives and through four decades.

Amis has always dealt with lads or cads. He understands that evil exists in the world and he knows how to portray it. When I teach creative writing I have to give a very exact assignment to get my students to sketch a bad person. Only once they break the good barrier do these young writers begin to understand the possibilities of fiction. Martin Amis learned this liberating lesson early and well.

Keith Nearing is more lad than bad in The Pregnant Widow. By the end of the book he has grown bleak with insight and depressing wisdom. No one can deny the attention to detail and to language lavished on every sentence. Beauty has reentered literature through this strange, sparkling novel.
 

AR  I befriended Martin in the academic year 1969/70 at Exeter College Oxford. He spent the summer of 1970 with his girlfriend Gully Wells in a château on the Côte d’Azur. I worked that summer as a laborer in a steelworks. But no need to complain — I spent the summer of 1971 (Martin's post-finals summer) with my girlfriend Judy in Paris, Chartres, Mont St Michel, and Amsterdam. Judy read Hobbes' Leviathan and Moby Dick, I read Moby Dick and a pair of Dostoyevsky novels (The Idiot and Crime and Punishment).