Customer Reviews

The Pregnant Widow

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

Martin Amis sets much of the action in THE PREGNANT WIDOW in a castle in Italy in the summer of 1970. There, Keith Nearing, Mart's young and literate protagonist, cohabits with Lily (his girlfriend), the nubile Scheherazade (Lily's best friend), and the sexy Gloria, the girlfriend of Scheherazade's uncle.

Initially, Mart uses these characters to write a hilarious parody of "The English Novel", with the innocent Keith infatuated with the beautiful Scheherazade, as he works his way through PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, WUTHERING HEIGHTS, VANITY FAIR, JANE EYRE, and so on. Not only does this portion of TPW address the complications of courtship and codes of behavior, as do the classic novels that Keith reads; but the castle where Mart sets the story has rich widows, wealthy but imperfect male suitors, orphans, and other elements of this genre. Altogether, the comedy in this section of TPW is absolutely first rate, while reaching its high point in the terrific chapter "The Waiting".

But then, Keith has a sudden and unexpected sexual encounter that "rearranges his feelings." At this point, Keith's life stops feeling like an "English Novel." Initially, he finds that Kafka's "Metamorphosis" captures his guilty reaction to change. But soon, Keith inhabits a carnal mindset, where Mart identifies the genre as a "pornotheological farce". Once again, Amis is hilarious, although his subject has shifted from sensitive pursuit to hapless predation.

In TPW, Amis follows Keith from innocence to carnality to thoughtful maturity, where he has fathered four children and had three wives. While Keith's adventures in romance and carnality are hilarious, he is also a personality that Amis uses to explore the sexual revolution and its effect on women. Here, his female characters range from "old regime" to Keith's sister Violet, who "has sex like a boy," which is the possibility all the females in TPW try to address. The pregnant widow, by the way, is Mart's metaphor for the widow who carries her baby through the revolution, birthing her baby into a new world, even though her own sensibilities are influenced by the past.

In many ways, Mart shows himself at his best in TPW. Besides hilarity, disciplined structure, and a confrontation with complex issues, this novel features consistently superior writing. This includes such tropes as "...the ethereal castanets of the butterflies" and his description of flies as "up close, armoured survivalists with gas-mask faces."

Likewise, there are numerous longer passages of insight, which are also funny or beautiful. On this family forum, Keith's description of walking behind a herd of goats may not be welcome. But, here are some of his thoughts about dreams.

"...why couldn't you smoke in dreams? You could smoke almost anywhere you liked--except in churches and rocket-refuelling bays, and most hospital delivery rooms, and so on. But dreams were non-smoking. Even when the situation would normally demand it, after moments of great tension (after a chase sequence, say, or while recovering from some horrific transformation); or after a long episode of strenuous swimming, or strenuous flying; or after a sudden bereavement, a sudden subtraction; or after successful sexual intercourse. And successful sexual intercourse in dreams, though rare, was not unknown. But you couldn't smoke in dreams."

I must confess, however, that I didn't quite get Keith's relationship with the young Conchita. Is it as terrible as I suspect? On the other hand, I thought that Amis worked his Muslim females into his story with great skill and plausibility. Finally, I was grateful that Amis defined boredom, which he calls "the absence of a wish." For steady readers of Amis (this is my 13th Amis book) or fans of Bellow, this is a gift.

Highly recommended.

The Pregnant Widow can be boiled down to two words --- sex and height, both long-held preoccupations for the author. I so much wanted to like the novel and believe the reviews but this one's a serious disappointment. Yes, it's a parody of all the books, Keith, our hero is reading, those English classics that dance around sex while mainly abstaining from the act. That can't disguise a complete lack of plot, nor hide the fact that this isn't so much of a novel as an intellectual excercise. Amis wants to talk philospohy, biology, literature and the disappointments of aging. I've got no problem with that, but this is a stifling novel that springs to life for brief, entertaining pages and lapses back into navel-gazing. When you look back at London Fields or Money, you can see a writer setting out for new lands and moving towards them. This is the exact opposite, a book that takes place in an Italian castle and bounces back and forth within the walls, going nowhere, doing nothing. Avoid it.

Just after reading The Pregnant Widow, I spent an afternoon looking at innocence through the eyes of Pierre-Auguste Renoir. An exhibit including 54 late paintings arrived with spring at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The L.A. Times' reviewer, Christopher Knight, scoffed, "With long limbs, high breasts and no sense of either skeletal structure or musculature beneath tactile flesh, mannered female figures in oil paint or bronze are like inner tubes filled with compressed air." So much for Aphrodite's golden apple.

Mr. Knight is a younger man than I. The poignancy of Renoir, longing for a mythic past at a time when his brushes had to be taped into hands deformed by rheumatoid arthritis, took my breath. A return visit last week was just as arresting.

Martin Amis sets a gauzy remembrance in the swinging seventies, Italy with eternal sunshine and possibilities. Amis's triumph seems greater than Renoir's. The relentless humor of his narrator Keith breaks through the idyll, but the looming world he dubs Larkinland surely exposes an older man's longing for innocence, for justice and beauty, all torn in the drubbing of time.

Amis's peerless facility with language is always a delight.

"Now fade. Here is Keith, a towel round his waist. Here is Gloria, holding up a blue
dress as if assessing it for length. Then the look she gives him just before she turns.
As if he has come to deliver the pizza or drain the swimming pool. Then the physical
interchange - `the act by which love would be transmitted', as one observer put it,
`if there were any'."

With a single paragraph he captures the physical scene, the separation in watching one's own frustrations played out on a screen, intensely personal and frozen in that final quote from Saul Bellow. Perfection.

As the book opens the narrator observes, "Sexual intercourse, I should point out, has two unique characteristics. It is indescribable. And it peoples the world." By the time we arrive in 2009, the writer's perspective has turned.

"A topic sentence. Pornographic sex is the kind of sex that can be described. Which told you
something, he felt, about pornography, and about sex. During Keith's time, sex divorced itself
from feeling. Pornography was the industrialization of that rift ."

The Pregnant Widow is surely one of Amis's very best. I'm looking forward to a second visit.

I finished this book because of the language of Martin Amis, but the tedious solipcism of the narrator got to me after a while. The play on the victorian novel was cute at first, but Amis won't make me forget Jane Austin. I did not find this book to capture the sexual freedom of the 70's, but it did capture the self-centeredness of so many modern characters and the breast fetish of so many "older" men, trying to hide through the unconvincing voice of a 20-something. In the end, you really don't care if all these forgettable characters step on an old WWII land mine and blow themselves all up. Amis can do better.

The is one of those labored modern novels about next to nothing. It basically covers the memories of a man, who spent a summer with some other young people in a house in Italy. The novel takes place in the seventies, probably when the author was young. (I dont know his age) There is a lot of thinking and musing about sex, but not much happens. Give me Hardy or Dickens or even some of our more modern authors like Grass or Russo, who know something about character development.
I give it a C.

I've read several of Amis' books (London Fields, Information, Night Train) and generally enjoyed all of them. The Pregnant Widow, however, will make me think twice about buying his next novel. I thought writers are supposed to write for readers. Amis, however, seems to write for himself. Or maybe I'm just not smart enough to get all of his inside references. The Pregnant Widow does offer a few glimpses of Amis' wit and ability to use the English language, but those are few and quite far between. Instead we get a parade of characters who I couldn't keep straight and, frankly, didn't care enough about to go back and re-read. The book then fizzles out completely and ends, not with a bang like many of his works, but with a whimper.

If you can get over the envy of a privileged sex-filled summer of the middle class youth and the author who wears his intelligence strongly in his writing style, then there are moments of brilliance and a return to form in this very male analysis of the sexual revolution of the 1970s.

The bulk of "The Pregnant Widow" is set in the summer of 1970 in a beautiful Italian castle where the almost 21 year old Keith Nearing, an English Literature student, has come to spend the summer with his on/off girlfriend Lily and her more physically attractive best friend Scheherazade. Amongst the other attendees are a gay couple, an short Italian suitor to the ample chested Scheherezade who is waiting for the arrival of her boyfriend and, critically for the story the ample bottomed Gloria and eventually her rich boyfriend. If this all sounds like one of those enviously indulgent, middle class, sex filled summer of love stories, then partly it is, but this being Martin Amis, there's a lot more depth and sadness attached to the story. It's an investigation into the changing roles of females and particularly their attitudes to sex, and for Keith in particular, the long term implications of this idyllic vacation are not going to be happy and Amis provides a `what happened next' to bring each of his characters up to present day.

Martin Amis' novels are always stylish and original. In his early career he could be quite brilliant but for me at least, his recent novels have not quite sustained this promise and have been more `interesting' than brilliant. With "The Pregnant Widow" there is something of a return to form, not least because he is returning to his best subject areas; namely sex, humour and the self-pitying, British male who is filled with guilt. As often with Amis, the humour is frequently cruel and here in particular is often derived from physical appearances. Keith is filled with guilt about his younger sister, Violet, who makes only a fleeting, but tragic appearance in this book. One suspects that there are elements of Amis' own experience here with his own sister's death, but this is a novel and not an autobiography, so for me the book has to stand on it's own merits. For me, Violet isn't really explored enough to become more than a caricature which is a shame.

There's plenty of Amis' stylish tics here too. Some work better for me than others. His constant use of repeated phrases works well, while his tendency to give the Latin and Greek derivations of words comes across more as a demonstration of his learning than contributing much to the story. And that's sometimes a problem with Amis - I have no doubt that he is far more intelligent than me, but I don't always want it rammed down my throat. Far more forgivable is the frequently stunning unusual metaphors that litter his writing that are a complete joy. Lily for example is said to "sub-edit" her packing. In a stroke, you know what he means and you have an insight to her character.

Again as is common with Amis, it's not all about plot. It's his style that is so attractive and interesting. His ideas are also well thought out. The main thrust of the narrative is the changing role of females in their approach to sex - they behave like boys (although he puts it in slightly cruder terms). Thus it's a stroke of brilliance to have one of his characters, Gloria, reading a book on Joan of Arc and making the point that the crime for which she was burnt was for dressing as a boy. Throughout, Keith is reading classic English novels and musing on the protagonists' sexual adventures, particularly Jane Austin's female characters. Comparing their methods of sexual conquest with Keith's awakening into the post 1960s free love world is thoughtful and works well.

At times, Amis provides acute (male) insight into the sexual revolution, but at others there is a sense of male self-pity. The title itself is a metaphor for bereavement of the old and hope for the new. Few of his characters have much in the way of traits that make them appealing - and those that do, like Lily, tend to fare less well. I found the first half slow moving at times and, with more than usual amounts of dialogue for Amis here, which often jumps around in terms of subject matter, it can be disorientating. The solution is to make sure you read it in sizable chunks. Dipping into it can make for a disjointed read. However, with Gloria's arrival on the scene, things pick up considerably for the reader, if not for all of the characters.

For me, it's not in the same league as works such as "Money", "Time's Arrow" or "Yellow Dog", and if you are new to this writer, then I'd suggest starting with those. However, for long time Amis followers, it is something of a return to form. It's a book I'm glad to have read, but not one that I think that I will pluck of the shelf in a few years with fond recollections. There's a certain coldness about it but when he soars, Amis writes as well as any British writer today.

I was absolutely riveted by this book, but then, I was born in 1949. The so-called sexual liberation that occurred in the seventies is sort of a guilty secret for our generation. There was this extraordinary pressure on young people to be sexually active during this period, not as an expression of love or affection, but simply for the sake of sexual activity. Shy, modest girls were encouraged to by magazines and popular entertainment to have multiple sexual partners. Even doctors suggested that sexual restraint was either a lie or else some kind of neurosis. They practically insisted that young women should get on the pill. Where were the police indeed? The decade was truly a nightmare for young women. However, I can see that many readers did not understand what Amis was describing. If this was not the decade of your youth, you might well wonder at the characters' apparent obssession with sex.

I want to state emphatically that this is not a misogynist novel. Keith starts out as an insensitive lout but the author telling the story is full of empathy for his woman. Women bore the burden of recovering a respectable place for sexuality in human relations after the chaos of the seventies, and there was no Mr. Knightly to show the way. The author states this explicitly:

"It was already obvious that every hard and demanding adaptation would be falling to the girls. Not to the boys--who were all like that anyway. The boys could just go on being boys. It was the girls who had to choose. And ingenuousness was probably over. Maybe, in this new age, girls needed designs."

Girls who embraced the prevailing seventies lie about sexual liberation (Rita and Violet) did not come out all right in the end. The character Keith is clearly heartbroken about Violet's fate, but the fact that two concerned brothers could do nothing to protect her, could do nothing but drag her out of the muck and wash her off as often as necessary, is a scathing condemnation of the period, and not an expression of misogyny.

Amis uses familiar works of English literature to enrich his material in a remarkably effective way. His view of this one significant summer through the lens of time duplicated something for me, although I do not share Amis's extreme revulsion at my own aging process. I had a summer like that in the seventies though. For that one summer, it really seemed like the chatter about innocent love and open relationships had some validity, before all of our hearts were broken. Amis makes the very apt observation that seeking pleasure in the external world will never satisfy the human soul. The body is always yearning for more. The mind is always calculating other possibilities. Why couldn't lovemaking with a fragrant girl in a castle in Italy suffice for Keith? He could not understand at the time. The entire novel is an exercise in trying to come to terms with that understanding and it is excellently done.

The only thing more insufferable than arrogant, entitled undergraduates is arrogant, entitled British undergraduates. Years ago "London Fields" was a revelation with its erudite and earthy verbal gymnastics. "The Information" was salvaged by some 11th hour redemption. No such luck here.

I drifted away from Amis after "LF" began to feel more an anomaly than the first of coming masterworks. There were misfires on either side of that peak -- his tin ear for American dialect is especially grating -- but I had hopes for this entry. Amis seems bent on some world historic comment on the sexual revolution. But the results are fairly trivial, mundane and smarmy. The tightly circumscribed setting -- an Italian castle -- smacks of either memoir or metaphor but mostly feels claustrophobic. Is the introduction of the absurd, smitten Italian count Adriano meant to normalize the vacationing Brits? It doesn't. The characters are rendered at times with clinical specificity, yet still seem vague. Amis' verbal dexterity too often obfuscates rather than enlightens. Could British undergrad intelligentisia in 1970 be so obsessed with 19th century novels to the utter exclusion of any mention of rock'n'roll or pop culture? It seems unlikely.

The book picks up somewhat in the second half when the lugubrious holiday's over and the structure goes all organic. Throughout there are tidbits of sparkling prose and acute observations, but not enough to justify the slog.

When you start to read this novel, right away you are swimming in Amis' incomparable turns of phrase and descriptions that make you happy to be in the company of someone who is a master of words. I loved this book and its settings: sweet, sunny Italy, and gritty, grey, competitive London. Underneath the very English plot of love, sun, mistaken identities, heroes and heroines losing their way, with plenty of literary references that are both fun and erudite, there is a current of melancholy that gives the book shadow as well as light. After all, a pregnant widow has the joy of a child to anticipate but the grief of great loss to endure, and the complicated relationships transcend the summer of 1970 and finally bring the characters to the current day, flawed, grieving for a lost sister, but with hard-won happiness found at last. Oh, and I loved the homage to Nabokov, as well as to Philip Larkin, just to contrast with Austen, Fielding, Trollope, and D.H. Lawrence, And this book sent me to look again at Experience, Amis' own memoir, which as some parallels with TPW. A very nice book to read.