The Pregnant Widow by Martin Amis

 

The Pregnant Widow, Martin Amis's best book since his memoir Experience (2000), presents itself as a disquisition on the victories and defeats of the 1960s sexual revolution. In languorous, effortlessly vivid prose, it follows callow Keith Nearing's attempts to seduce the beautiful Scheherazade during a long Italian summer holiday, with all the satirical reverses that would be expected. But there has been a profound shift in Amis's sensibilities over the last decade, and he is no longer interested in just skewering his characters on the page for maximum (and considerable) comic effect. Threaded throughout the narrative is Keith's festering concern about the effect the new sexual politics is having on his young and unstable sister, and the last section, a powerful, compressed fast-forward to the borders of Keith's old age, lays bare the psychic scars of that summer forty years before; not with sadistic glee, but with tenderness and compassion – concepts not normally associated with his fiction. Less about a societal revolution, this book is really concerned with the vast country of the past, growing in scale and form the closer we get to death. The Pregnant Widow inaugurates late-period Amis, and it promises even greater things to come. [Richard Strachan]