Book review: The Pregnant Widow

Published on Friday 5 February 2010 18:07

THE PREGNANT WIDOW BY MARTIN AMIS Jonathan Cape, 465pp, £18.99

IN 1970, Keith Nearing, a 20-year-old literature student, spends the summer in a swanky castle in Italy with his clever, slightly plain girlfriend Lily. But Keith doesn't really fancy Lily any more and develops a crush on her good-looking friend, Scheheradzade, who has taken to sunbathing topless by the pool while waiting for her boyfriend to pitch up. Keith's attempts to get off with Scheheradzade end in humiliation but unexpectedly he scores, for a whole day at least, with another house-guest, Gloria Beautyman, who has lots of tricks in bed.

That's the story of this "blindingly autobiographical" novel. Amis's thesis is that his generation lived through a revolution in which sex became detached from love and suffered from this "sea change" uniquely. "They were not like their elders and they would not be like their youngers. Because they could remember how it was before ..."

The title The Pregnant Widow is taken from a quote from the Russian writer Alexander Herzen, in which he observed that when one social order dies, it is frightening because "the departing world leaves behind it not an heir, but a pregnant widow", and that between the death of one era and the birth of another, "a long night of chaos and desolation will pass".

That's poor little Keith. In the very first paragraph, we are told that his life is ruined for 25 years by the sexual trauma he suffers on his summer holiday. It's not that the sex was scarringly bad. On the contrary, it was all too good, too pornographic. But it was without love.

In the great sexual revolution, the thesis runs, women – some women at least – started acting like boys when it came to sex. They became, in the gamey Amis lingo given a full run-out here, "cocks". Gloria Beautyman is a prize cock, successfully self-adoring. "Are you secretly from another planet?" the awe-struck Keith asks her. "No. I'm secretly a cock ... In the future every girl will be like me. I'm just ahead of my time."

Amis, never an erotic writer, doesn't quite make it clear why Keith's session with her is so overwhelming that he can't get love and sex back into proportion for a quarter of a century. There's talk of dressing up as a nun and as Elizabeth Bennet from Pride and Prejudice, and of a "sinister refinement", which turns out to be using bodily fluids as cosmetics. None of that seems convincingly life-changing.

But then Amis has always been in the business of systematic overstatement. This novel is once again a most peculiar combination of broad farce and portentous significance. Amis's true vein remains low comedy delivered in a highly disdainful mock-heroic style and there's plenty of that here. He has been indulgent to his alter ego Keith, who is said to occupy "that much-disputed territory between 5ft 6in and 5ft 7in", although even this means that "all but an hour or two of every day quite poisoned by the awareness of a physical insufficiency". But to put that problem in perspective there's also a libidinous Italian count, Adriano, who is 4ft 10in, which occasions all kinds of mirth, especially when he is placed alongside his brothers, 6ft 3in and 6ft 6in.

Adriano has worked hard on his physique, such as it is. "I guess they all tend to do that. Little people. They can't make themselves taller. So they make themselves wider," observes one character. They develop big voices too, if they can, which is what Amis has done, with his hugely distinctive style of repetition and emphasis, backed up with heavy literary allusion. Here the farcical story is supported by a running tutorial on Shakespeare, Richardson and Jane Austen, and almost the whole of Ovid's Echo and Narcissus, as translated by Ted Hughes, is recited as a profound, mythological source for the frustrated lover.

For although this novel returns precisely to the era of Amis's first two, the scabrous comedies The Rachel Papers and Dead Babies, it does so in sorrowful, grimly over-determined retrospect.

Amis's hypersensitivity to normal ageing is such that, unlike Saga Holidays, he believes that after the age of 50 all that anybody has left is memory, the past. Eventually, it emerges that the entire novel is being narrated not by Keith himself but by the separate entity that is Keith's conscience, looking back from the utter ruination that is 60 (Amis's age). "We live half our lives in shock, he thought. And it's the second half."

Thus, after 400-odd pages devoted to a blow-by-blow account of Keith's summer holiday – "the only passage in his whole existence that ever felt like a novel" – we are whizzed through the remainder of his life, right up to 2009, in a mere 60 pages.

Amis condemns life as a formless genre: "Life is made up as it goes along. It can never be rewritten." He wants life to be reformed by fiction and seriously believes that it is the novelist who can redeem the time.

That's an irony because The Pregnant Widow is never remotely convincing as a novel in which "the reverberation, the echo of humanity" can be heard. It comes across more as a 470-page interview with Martin Amis. Oddly endearing to read. But as fiction, it's a farce.