The Pregnant Widow by Martin Amis
Jonathan Cape, £18.99
Martin Amis attracts criticism – hostile, usually, and condemnatory rather than constructive – like a searingly bright flame attracts a moth. Maybe it’s because he’s clever – the congratulatory first in English at Exeter College, Oxford – although one of the headmasters at one of the longish list of secondary schools he attended famously described him as “unusually unpromising”. Maybe it’s because his father was a successful man of letters, although Sir Kingsley famously showed little interest in his son’s work. “I can point out the exact place where he stopped and sent Money twirling through the air; that’s where the character named Martin Amis comes in”, Martin told the New York Times. “Breaking the rules, buggering about with the reader, drawing attention to himself”, was his father’s damning verdict on the book. Maybe it’s the early success. His first novel, The Rachel Papers, published in 1973 when he was 24, won the Somerset Maugham Award and at 27 he was editing the books pages of the New Statesman. He arrived in the literary world fully formed and, as William Wordsworth put it in Intimations of Immortality, trailing clouds of glory.
Perhaps it’s tall poppy syndrome and a desire to cut a clever bugger (who rarely bothers to disguise his cleverness) down to size, or his propensity to court controversy. Four years ago he announced: “There’s an urge to say the Muslim world will have to suffer until it gets its own house in order” which provoked – and was probably designed to provoke, because he does like a little controversy when he has a new book to sell – accusations of Islamophobia. Last year he sneered at the literary efforts of Katie Price – the model formerly known as Jordan – and declared that she was nothing more than “two bags of silicone”.
Or, possibly, it’s because he’s not very nice. It wasn’t only his erstwhile best friend Julian Barnes who was put out when Amis left his long-time literary agent Pat Kavanagh, Barnes’ wife and a popular figure in the world of books, for Andrew “The Jackal” Wylie. Amis was honest enough to admit the motivation was, primarily, financial. Wylie succeeded in securing an enormous advance for his next novel but when The Information was published to poor reviews in 1995 there was quiet satisfaction in many quarters that a man who had let greed get in the way of loyalty and friendship had got his comeuppance.
Whatever the reasons, there are plenty of people who like to give Amis, now 60, a good kicking. Not all of them, though, bother to actually acquaint themselves with what he has written. Because Amis has written some very good books and is, whether you like it (or him) or not, one of the most significant English novelists of the post-war period. He has written four novels – Success (1978), Money (1984), London Fields (1989) and Time’s Arrow (1991) – which will stand the not always forgiving test of time and several other books – The Rachel Papers, Dead Babies (1975), Other People (1981) and the short story collection Einstein’s Monsters (1987) which are never less than interesting.
There was – as ever with Amis – much sniggering at the back of the class when Tibor Fischer laid into Yellow Dog in 2003: “It isn’t bad as in not very good or slightly disappointing. It’s not knowing where to look bad. I was reading my copy on the Tube and I was terrified someone would look over my shoulder. It’s like your favourite uncle being caught in a school playground, masturbating”.
That book is, frankly, a dog and Night Train and his last novel, House of Meetings, were disappointing. But so what? There isn’t a writer of prose fiction writing in the English – or any other – language who knocks out masterpiece after masterpiece and who never produces a dud. The point is that Amis is a serious – and a seriously good – author.
And the point is that The Pregnant Widow is a seriously good book, too. It’s a brilliant and beautifully written comedy of modern manners set in a castle in Italy during a long hot summer in 1970. It’s clearly autobiographical; and Amis, part time Professor of Creative Writing at Manchester University, doubtless tells his students the first rule is to write about what you know. Keith Nearing, his fictional alter ego, is on holiday with his girlfriend Lily but fancies her best friend Scheherazade. He’s devouring the great English novels while the sexual revolution gets underway but fears he might be missing out. This is a typical paragraph: “A silence developed and he attended to Northanger Abbey. He was going back to check whether Frederick Tilney did, in point of fact, fuck Isabella Thorpe. The novel became partly epistolary, and it was hard to be exactly sure.” It’s framed, for perspective, by Keith’s conscience looking back in 2009 and reflecting not only on sex and politics but on ageing and mortality.
It’s only February, but The Pregnant Widow, which shows Amis is back to his dazzling best, could yet be the best book of the year.
Keith Richmond
