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The Pregnant Widow

Martin Amis

3.09 · Rating details · 2,653 ratings · 336 reviews

The 1960s, as is well known, saw the launch of the sexual revolution, which radically affected the lives of every Westerner fortunate enough to be born after the Second World War. But a revolution is a revolution - contingent and sanguinary. In the words of the Russian thinker Alexander Herzen: The death of the contemporary forms of social order ought to gladden rather tha The 1960s, as is well known, saw the launch of the sexual revolution, which radically affected the lives of every Westerner fortunate enough to be born after the Second World War. But a revolution is a revolution - contingent and sanguinary. In the words of the Russian thinker Alexander Herzen: The death of the contemporary forms of social order ought to gladden rather than trouble the soul. Yet what is frightening is that what the departing world leaves behind it is not an heir but a pregnant widow. Between the death of the one and the birth of the other, much water will flow by, a long night of chaos and desolation will pass. In many senses, including the literal, it was a velvet revolution; but it wasn't bloodless. Nor was it complete. Even today, in 2009, the pregnancy is still in its second trimester. Martin Amis, in The Pregnant Widow, takes as his control experiment a long, hot summer holiday in a castle in Italy, where half a dozen young lives are afloat on the sea change of 1970. The result is a tragicomedy of manners, combining the wit of Money with the historical sense of Time's Arrow and House of Meetings.

It was summer 1970 - a long, hot summer. In a castle in Italy, half a dozen young lives are afloat on the sea of change, trapped inside the history of the sexual revolution. The girls are acting like boys, and the boys are going on acting like boys, and Keith Nearing - twenty years old, a literature student all clogged up with the English novel - is struggling to twist feminism and the rise of women towards his own ends. The sexual revolution may have been a velvet revolution (in at least two senses), but it wasn't bloodless - and now, in the twenty-first century, the year 1970 finally catches up with Keith Nearing. "The Pregnant Widow" is a comedy of manners and a nightmare, brilliant, haunting and gloriously risque. It is the most eagerly anticipated novel of the year and Martin Amis at his fearless best.

About the Author

Martin Amis is the author of ten novels, the memoir Experience, two collections of stories and six collections of non-fiction, most recently The Second Plane. He lives in London. ...more

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Hardcover, 480 pages

Published February 4th 2010 by Jonathan Cape (first published 2010)

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May 24, 2010 Jessica rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Recommends it for: maybe baby boomers? men? so they can tell me if i'm missing something?

Recommended to Jessica by: no one, and in fact i read it AGAINST the infallible advice of mike reynolds

Shelves: groups-of-people, leetle-boys, love-and-other-indoor-sports, bad-reads, crazy-ladies, dicklits

You know how women are always saying that what they want is a guy with a great sense of humor, while men are always saying that women love assholes? I've long thought, based on this, that a lot more women than'd admit it want to bang Martin Amis. Despite his innumerable turnoffs and appalling flaws, there is something bangable -- er, compelling about the guy and his writing. I gave The Pregnant Widow an extra star because (for reasons I can't fully explain) I did enjoy the first three quarters o ...more

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Jun 02, 2011 Ruby Soames rated it did not like it

An arse writing with his dick about tits.

I bet you if I told Amis that I found his book mildly offensive to women, he'd retort, well you've probably got small tits or you've not been laid recently. That's the voice I heard reading this novel. And I found it boring, empty and irritating - the novel was a page turner for the wrong reasons. Amis is no doubt a great writer - the prose is hands down perfect - but what he writes about is a joke: an unfunny, long and forgettable joke. Are we supposed An arse writing with his dick about tits.

I bet you if I told Amis that I found his book mildly offensive to women, he'd retort, well you've probably got small tits or you've not been laid recently. That's the voice I heard reading this novel. And I found it boring, empty and irritating - the novel was a page turner for the wrong reasons. Amis is no doubt a great writer - the prose is hands down perfect - but what he writes about is a joke: an unfunny, long and forgettable joke. Are we supposed to laugh at Keith, the psychologically priapic student oogling his girlfriend's best friend's huge tits? Or the sexual interest of the book, Sheherazade, a sexually frustrated aristocrat who can't find a man to satisfy her? Most probably the punch line's with the reader who's just bought another Amis book to be dazzled by the prose but left with a lack-lustre story.
A group of university students spend a summer in the 1970s in a castle in Italy (as you do) and the men watch the girls and the girls watch men watching the girls. The women are usually topless and the men talk about women's bodies and sex, clever men ask deep and meaningful questions like: do men like tits because they look like arses? Should arses and tits be on the same side of the body? Why do men like big tits? With no plot or real characterisation, it just comes across as desperate.
Don't think this book is about sex: no one has sex much in it, if they do, Keith does with Lily, his girlfriend, that fact is only mentioned in passing. Nor do they do anything on this summer holiday apart from read the English clssics and speculate about each other's vital statistics.
The Italian backdrop feels superfluous and the decade doesn't really ring true either. There's nothing to learn about the sexual revolution. Nor about the characters. Amis has written some pretty sub-standard books, some great books - some of my favourite books - but we continue to read him because he always writes so well. Unfortunately this is not someone `back in the game' or a book worthy of The Information, Night Train, Money, London Fields or the House of Meetings. And what's so annoying is that it should be! So why doesn't he write with his heart? Because in those brief moments when he does - it's acidic, hilarious and fizzing with insight. The main story is interspersed with Keith's point of view as a many times divorced father going into old age - it's profound, philosophical, poetic. He writes about Keith's sister, which is heart breaking and deep - but unfortunately, his focus is lead away by boobs sunning themselves by the pool. A shame and such a waste of immeasurable talent and originality.
...more

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Apr 16, 2019 Kevin Shepherd rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: reviewed, fiction, own

I came to Martin Amis via Christopher Hitchens. Hitch being, arguably, the most well-read person on the planet, I had lofty expectations. For my first foray into Amis-Land, I will simply say that I am whelmed. Not overwhelmed. Not necessarily underwhelmed. Just whelmed.

The lion's share of The Pregnant Widow takes place in the summer of 1970. Our protagonist, college student Keith Nearing, is on a holiday excursion with a group of friends to an Italian castle. Here, Keith diligently but rather aw ...more

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Mar 29, 2010 Andrew rated it liked it · review of another edition

Life consists of waiting to fuck, fucking, and then remembering when you fucked. When you die, you think about how the fucks went. When you grow old and stare vacantly into the mirror, your 'bald patch receding into infinity', you say to yourself, 'Fuck, I rememember when I used to fuck, what happened to all those fucks.'

This is the impression of life I get from The Pregnant Widow, Martin Amis' latest novel. The book was originally planned to be an autobiographical account of Amis' sex life, but ...more

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Mar 24, 2011 William2 rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: uk, candidate-to-reread, 21-ce, fiction

Another through-the-roof masterpiece from Martin Amis. It's distressing how consistently he turns them out. I have only read The Pregnant Widow once, and have settled on the following thoughts to share for now.

1. Those of us used to the usual Amis verbal fireworks will have to wait. He wants a slower build here. He doesn't want to eject readers along the way with too many polysyllabics. He focuses on character and action for the first third. In time we get to all of the stuff that we enjoy so mu Another through-the-roof masterpiece from Martin Amis. It's distressing how consistently he turns them out. I have only read The Pregnant Widow once, and have settled on the following thoughts to share for now.

1. Those of us used to the usual Amis verbal fireworks will have to wait. He wants a slower build here. He doesn't want to eject readers along the way with too many polysyllabics. He focuses on character and action for the first third. In time we get to all of the stuff that we enjoy so much in an Amis novel: the snippy italicizations, word play, narrative obliquity, nonce words, archaisms, etc. However, the book doesn't really take off until the Gloria Beautyman character arrives on the scene around page 115 or so.

2. There is in the early going a merciless objectification of the female body. This is perhaps inevitable since the hero is male, twenty years old and living in 1970 at the height of the sexual revolution. This objectification of the female is something feminists have always pointed to as a purely male phenonmenon, but lately it has become a common view among young women as well. Which is not to say the feminists were wrong, but only to emphasize how all encompassing the phenomenon has become. In order for Amis to turn the concept on its head he must first acknowledge it. Then he turns it on its head by way of Gloria Beautyman.

3. You’ve probably read all the plot points by now but here they are again. Keith Nearing, a British subject, is staying at an Italian villa for the summer with his girlfriend, Lily, and another young woman, Scherezade, also British citizens. Most of the early going is about Keith's schemes to sleep with Scherezade and it's funny enough, but compared with certain other Amis novels it's a slow start. Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times has called the novel "tedious." That might be true if one only read the first 1/3 and nothing more, but the novel goes on and the action speeds up. The final emotional payoff is nothing short of shattering and something to which Kakutani seems sadly oblivious.

4. Amis' thesis is that the sexual revolution was never really about a change in male attitudes. Men had been copulating their brains out since time immemorial. Rather, it was the change in the attitude of women toward sex that made the revolution real. Suddenly women wanted theirs, too, and they got it. Thus the concept in the last 2/3 of the book of the female "cock." This offsets the earlier part about the objectification of the female body . "Cock" is British slang term for a man who takes lovers and casts them aside at will. A female cock is a woman who does the same thing, who "acts like a man." (See Linda Fiorentino's character in The Last Seduction as an extreme example.) Gloria Beautyman is a complete original. ...more

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Oct 28, 2019 MJ Nicholls marked it as sampled

The living, sweating, rutting embodiment of meh.

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Dec 06, 2015 Stela rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: postmodernism, reviews

Martin Amis’s The Pregnant Widow is the first book I’ve finished in 2016 (I wanted to write “this year” then I remembered that once I had started a review with “this summer” and later, while re-reading it, I had to investigate to learn what summer I was talking about ☺ ) and what a good beginning it was, indeed!

Maybe this is not Martin Amis at his best, but it was fun, despite the somehow gloomy title, inspired by Alexander Herzen’s dooming prophecy used as the first motto of the novel:

“The deat ...more

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Mar 02, 2010 Rick rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 2010

Loved it. Amis is softening, but it's a good thing. Man, people are so mean to him. Why do I look the other way? Maybe I feel bad about his upbringing. I didn't know about his sister. That's really sad, and he did a great job writing this book as a tribute to her.

HIs turns of phrase never cease to amaze me. He makes it look effortless. And I love the extended coda of the ending. I love how he freely admits that the summer in italy was the only part of Keith's life that took the form of a novel, ...more

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Jun 08, 2010 J. rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Recommends it for: Tweens

Shelves: dumpster-adjacent, amis-and-son

On a remote Italian hilltop, magic and fireflies surround an enchanted castle... Evening descends and the Mediterranean azur deepens, around the sons and daughters of the absent affluent.

A paen to youth, a valentine, in fact, to words like paen and wordplay for its own sake; a bonbon of elegiac yearning and wonder. And in case you were wondering, happy coincidence, the screenplay simply writes itself.

Doesn't it just :
Lucky, larky lads and libertine lolitas drape themselves around every frame. ...more

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Apr 17, 2011 Tony rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: british

There is, within, this piece of dialogue:

"You know in Dickens, when the good characters look in the fire, they see the faces of their loved ones. And the bad characters, they just see hell and doom."

"What do you see?"

Ponder that. Amis does, through the life of an alter-ego, and resolves that great existential question on the final pages. Skip ahead if you want.

The first half of this book spawned vapid characters, and too many to be adequately fleshed out. Twenty-somethings summering in Italy, wo ...more

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Nov 14, 2010 Jennifer rated it it was amazing

There are times when reading Martin Amis that I feel as though I just don't get "it." And that is when I realize that the it I will never get is the thought process of the other sex. Seriously. Reading this book I identified with Lily and her frustration with Keith the main character and narrator. (Naming a hero Keith takes gumption). But then, I realize, that is the point. That is precisely why I love reading Amis, because it gives me a glimpse into a world so familiar and yet so completely dif ...more

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Jun 22, 2011 Mark rated it did not like it

Recommends it for: nobody

Recommended to Mark by: a "friend"

I'm not sure that I've ever disliked a book more that I have actually finished. The author spends so much time impressing us with his word-slinging technology and introducing countless characters, but it was never really clear to me what exactly was going on. I suspect that he did this on purpose. Here's an example:

"Keith replaced the receiver and thought of the white T-shirt in Holland Park. The meteorological or heavenly connivance. No-see-um raindrops, and her torso moulded by the pornodew. ...more

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Mar 07, 2010 Kira Henehan rated it really liked it

I feel like reading this cast into sharp relief the level of tortured writing and storytelling through which I'd been unwittingly suffering over the last few books I've read/started.

Thank GOD for some playfulness, some exuberance with the language. This book made me HAPPY to read, it made me laugh, it made me consider.

So fuckit. Yay Mr. Amis. Sorry everyone hates your book so much but you pleased me to no end. ...more

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May 06, 2012 Matt rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: social-crit, fictions-of-the-big-it

Took off well, didn't denouement like it should have. Method editing? ...more

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May 20, 2012 GD rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 2012

I normally write short reviews because most of what I want to say about a book has been said by other people before, but this book has a much lower rating than I give it, and I feel I need to reveal more sack because of it. I'm not a Martin Amis fanboy, although I think he's one of the greatest living writers. He has written some stinkers, and his non-fiction, my god, except for the memoirs, is just excruciating for me to get through. And I really didn't like his book before this one, with the R I normally write short reviews because most of what I want to say about a book has been said by other people before, but this book has a much lower rating than I give it, and I feel I need to reveal more sack because of it. I'm not a Martin Amis fanboy, although I think he's one of the greatest living writers. He has written some stinkers, and his non-fiction, my god, except for the memoirs, is just excruciating for me to get through. And I really didn't like his book before this one, with the Russian camp, I thought it was a sure sign of his becoming obsolete. Then he pops back with this little piece of badassery!

I think part of the reason this book (and most of what he's written in the last 15 years or so) is maligned so much is because he's become so establishment, he's critically lauded, all the literary magazines and reviewers go gaga over him, and he's been teaching creative writing; all signs for a younger generation that the time has come to shit on him in favor of something new. You can even tell by the style of a lot of the negative reviews that the writers of them are hoping to become fiction writers themselves, and one day (hopefully) they might, and I don't (can't!) know that they won't, because that's exactly the way Martin Amis probably started out himself.

A lot of negative reviews noticed the similarities between this book and Dead Babies and The Rachel Papers, and came down on him about it for various reasons. Some said he was losing his creativity, some said he was ripping himself off (whatever that means), and some (I can't believe after all these years these people still exist) came down on the book because they think he's sexist. People who (still) think Martin Amis is a sexist, fuck, they make me think of people who think Eddie Murphy or Chris Rock are racist because they've made fun of white people.

Martin Amis has always been out to make people laugh at the weirdest shit, and I think he totally succeeds again here. I think he's in top form, and I don't think he's repeating himself. Well, in a way he is, the way Hemingway repeats himself with strong tough guys, or the way Thomas Pynchon repeats himself with absurd paranoiacs, or the way Stephen King does with New Englanders running across spooky supernatural shit. He's always been obsessed with feelings of lust, insecurity, and the unstoppable, deadly passage of time (oddly none of the reviews I read said anything about Time's Arrow, which I thought this book had a lot in common with), and almost all his books address these things. The Amis style is a little stale sometimes, I agree (like how, for effect, he says the same thing in two consecutive sentences with little or no alteration), but dismissing the book for that's like tossing out a kickass pizza because one of the pepperonis is charred.

I know Amis has been called (derogatorily) a "boys' writer" by a lot of people, and of course I think this is grossly unfair, but on the surface this is one extremely sexist book, and those same people are probably going to feel more secure in their assertions because of it. And his giant's status in the literary establishment is going to turn some people off as well. But I have very little interest in whether a writer is a critics' darling or not, or whether the books have been turned into movies or not, and I read like a giant construction company levels pristine jungles and abandoned urban slums alike: with no other thought than to get what I want from it. ...more

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Jan 21, 2013 Col rated it liked it

Shelves: 2013, a

Blurb..........

Summer, 1970. Sex is very much on everyone's mind.

The girls are acting like boys and the boys are going on acting like boys. Keith Nearing - a bookish twenty-year-old, in that much disputed territory between five foot six and five foot seven - is on holiday and struggling to twist feminism towards his own ends. Torn between three women, his scheming doesn't come off quite as he expects.

I wasn’t especially looking forward to reading this, particularly after the recent train-wreck ...more

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Oct 14, 2012 Sarah rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: literature-contemporary, did-not-finish-will-not-reread, library-books

4/10 - Oh dear! At 3.01, this has a dreadful average rating that's giving me premonitions of it being a DNFer. This is the problem with not having a smart phone with the GR app on it. To be continued...

Later - I'm having trouble making any sense of this book.
For example, why does Amis insert a lesson in etymology into a sentence every often? On page 25, why do we need to know that 'Desolate' is from L. Desolare 'abandon', from de- 'thoroughly' + solus 'alone'? Who inserts that into a sentence fo 4/10 - Oh dear! At 3.01, this has a dreadful average rating that's giving me premonitions of it being a DNFer. This is the problem with not having a smart phone with the GR app on it. To be continued...

Later - I'm having trouble making any sense of this book.
For example, why does Amis insert a lesson in etymology into a sentence every often? On page 25, why do we need to know that 'Desolate' is from L. Desolare 'abandon', from de- 'thoroughly' + solus 'alone'? Who inserts that into a sentence for no obvious reason?

This paragraph on page 27-28 completely baffled me and is actually what sent me running to the journal so I wouldn't lose the energy and urge to write that's been brought about by that confusion.

"Keith was assuming social realism would hold, here in Italy. And yet Italy itself seemed partly fabulous, and the citadel they occupied seemed partly fabulous, and the transformation of Scheherazade seemed partly fabulous. Where was social realism? The upper classes themselves, he kept thinking, were not social realists. Their modus operandi, their way of operating, obeyed looser rules. He was, ominously, a K in a castle. But he was still assuming that social realism would hold. What does he mean by partly fabulous, and what does K in a castle mean?

Then there's page eight, which is four lines away from being a full page contemplation of women's measurements. Now, correct me if I'm wrong because despite being a girl myself I'm hardly an expert, but isn't it true that the narrowest part of a woman's torso is her waist. No matter if she's an or a 28, her waist will always be narrower than her hips or chest. If that is true how on earth can measurements like 35-45-55 or 46-47-31 be possible, or something a boy in 'early adolescence' would fantasise about?

After 30 pages I think I've spent about enough time on this sex-driven mess of a story. I've only got a few weeks before I leave for three weeks in France and a lot of books to read before I go most (if not all) of which I won't be able to take due to due dates occurring while I'm away. So, a book's got to be reasonable for me to spend precious time on it, and this was far from it. Such a low average rating, immediate evidence of the reasons given for that low average rating and my own personal confusion have lead to this being a great big NOPE . ...more

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Oct 31, 2014 Henning Koch rated it really liked it

There is a wealth of experience and wit in this book, I love almost all of it - until the last thirty or forty pages, when Amis departs from the format of his novel and goes into a fast forward mode of cataloguing main character Keith's future.
Why did he do it? Just to avoid the easy, obvious success? There are some writers who are uncomfortable with endings - a sort of literary fear of death? There is an awful lot of twisting and turning, pirouetting and twirling, rather than just boldly endin ...more

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Jul 08, 2016 Tom rated it liked it

Shelves: fiction, men, english, england

I start of with Andrew's summary of this book: "Life consists of waiting to fuck, fucking, and then remembering when you fucked. When you die, you think about how the fucks went. When you grow old and stare vacantly into the mirror, your 'bald patch receding into infinity', you say to yourself, 'Fuck, I rememember when I used to fuck, what happened to all those fucks.'".

"The Pregnant Widow" is a book about the Sexual Revolution at the start of the seventies. We follow the ever-horny literature I start of with Andrew's summary of this book: "Life consists of waiting to fuck, fucking, and then remembering when you fucked. When you die, you think about how the fucks went. When you grow old and stare vacantly into the mirror, your 'bald patch receding into infinity', you say to yourself, 'Fuck, I rememember when I used to fuck, what happened to all those fucks.'".

"The Pregnant Widow" is a book about the Sexual Revolution at the start of the seventies. We follow the ever-horny literature student Keith Naring during his summer trip to Italy. He stays in a castle that once housed D.H. Lawrence and his girlfriend Frieda, who also really liked to fuck. At least, that's what Keith is focused on.

His company includes his girlfriend Lily, but also a character which is actually named Scheherazade, who is mostly described as the carrier of 'great tits'. All the characters in the novel seem to be fascinated by those glorious tits of Scheherazade. They represent, in a way, the sexual oblivion every character is chasing.

There's Keith, who spends his summer trying to discover "the great English novel" but can only seem to remember the sex scenes in each book he reads. He desperately tries to seduce Scheherazade, ignoring the pleas of his girlfriend, Lily. Ironically, even though she is the most sexualised character in the book, Scheherazade is one of the more conservative characters throughout. Keith is set against a group of women who seem overwhelmed by the options they have after the Sexual Revolution. Each in their own way, they try to come to terms with their own liberty and erotic desires.

Ultimately though, the book is an account of the failure of the whole Revolution. For Martin Amis, it's a personal story. The character Violet, for example, is loosely based on Amis' own sister, who became an alcoholic before drifting away into eternity. Amis reportedly blamed the Sexual Revolution for 'taking his sister away from him'. And the story about the events at the castle was meant to figure in a sort of 'sexual autobiography', which Amis ended up abandoning in favor of this project.

The process of sexual rapture followed by an unability to recover reoccurs throughout the novel. Keith has a sexual encounter of his own, which leaves a mental scar in the years and decades to come. He is the posterboy of the quote that is found in the prelude of "The Pregnant Widow":

The death of the contemporary form of social order ought to gladden rather than trouble the soul. Yet what is frightening is that the departing world leaves behind it, not a heir, but a pregnant widow. Between the death of the one and the birth of the other much water will flow by, a long night of chaos and desolation will pass.

What Amis is suggesting, is that the abandonment of morals or moral systems is useless if there is no system in place to replace it. As such, the loose sexual abandonment of many characters in the book condemns them to a place in no man's land. They seem to be looking for more and more, but there is no finish line on the horizon; the sexual reward is its own reward.

As such, the ridiculously named Scheherazade turns out to be a somewhat profetic joke Amis is playing on the reader. By making the reader part of the sexually aroused mass, and ultimately not delivering, he manages to deliver the disappointment of Keith and his promiscuous friends. So I wouldn't say "The Pregnant Widow" is a book just about a topless girl with glorious tits, lying by the poolside. It's a more interesting take, by far. But still - it's bound to piss of some feminists along the way. Even though, interestingly, Amis' book is a declaration of war on superficiality;

Surface will start tending to supersede essence. As the self becomes postmodern, how things look will become at least as important as how things are. Essences are hearts, surfaces are sensations.

And that is just what Amis is rallying against. ...more

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Nov 29, 2013 Robert rated it liked it

The Pregnant Widow by Martin Amis is a challenging novel for a number of reasons. The first challenge is that is too long. The second challenge is that it is too silly. The third challenge is that it is too true.
This is a book with deep roots in the summer of 1970 when a group of prickly friends, male and female, took stock of what the sexual revolution of the 1960s had wrought in terms of where things stood, male- and female-wise. The friends are largely, but not exclusively, English, and the The Pregnant Widow by Martin Amis is a challenging novel for a number of reasons. The first challenge is that is too long. The second challenge is that it is too silly. The third challenge is that it is too true.
This is a book with deep roots in the summer of 1970 when a group of prickly friends, male and female, took stock of what the sexual revolution of the 1960s had wrought in terms of where things stood, male- and female-wise. The friends are largely, but not exclusively, English, and they are mostly twenty years old, and there are unanswered questions in the air not only about whether women had finally become the "cocks" of the bedroom but also about the extent to which sexual interaction defines an individual in his or her essence, erasing all that had gone into getting to twenty and settling down hard on what he or she gained or lost by handling intimacy in a more or less aggressive way.
Amis and I are contemporaries, more or less, and I do recall the microscopic looks people in their twenties cast at one another in 1970. These were not profound inspections, however. They were largely superficial questions of attraction, social status within a group, and whether such and such a relationship would work or just be a night or a weekend together. Lots of sex, but perhaps not sex that was as rigorously regulated (by the women) as is the case in The Pregnant Widow.
The key figures in the novel--Keith, Gloria, Lily, Scheherazade (yep,that's the name of the girl with the mammoth, constantly displayed and commented upon breasts)--are very verbal, analytic types. Keith, the key figure of all, is really not sure, however, what good his brooding does him when, in the end, he will have access to these and other women largely on their peculiar terms.
So we're in a castle in Italy, there's a midget count on the scene, a few tower bedrooms connected by a shared bathroom, a swimming pool, and some coming and going that follows the general trend-lines of the English novels of manners that Keith must read as he prepares himself for the life he foresees as a critic and poet. This, the heart of the book, is the most tedious part.
The better parts are the opening, wherein Keith has reached his fifties and is looking back on that pivotal year, and then a series of chapters that trace the evolution of the group post-1970, taking them all the way to 2009.
A theme that connects some of this action is Narcissus. When he looks into the water, does he fall in love with himself, or is that a female self he sees looking back at him? Of course gender roles and rights are big questions, and they merit reflection, but the trouble is that in 1970, if one was twenty, one was hardly in a position to comprehend the magnitude of what the 1960s had done to western mores. One could act, but think and hesitate and worry and fret and see oneself as central to a big cultural shift as occurs in this novel? I'm not so sure. But I am definitely sure that the endless game-playing Amis engages in vis-a-vis Scheherazade's mammaries and Gloria's buttocks is too much.
The truth of the novel crawls on its belly out of that summer in Italy into a series of interesting re-couplings, divorces, binges, disappointments, births and deaths. Here's the magic of the novel form: you spend so much time with characters that even when they irritate you, they begin to interest you, and what happens to them matters. Amis is puckish and nimble and ironic and sharp, but he still holds onto that gravity life acquires over a span of decades and makes it work.

For more of my comments on contemporary writing, see Tuppence Reviews (Kindle). ...more

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Sep 21, 2016 Maya Lang rated it it was ok

Imagine throwing a dinner party when in sweeps your friend, your bit-of-a-dick friend, who's late, naturally, and empty-handed, who's soon telling pompous, preening stories in a carrying voice because he finds himself very clever, all while not-so-subtly ogling all of the women's breasts and helping himself freely to the booze. (I picture Philip Seymour Hoffman's character from The Talented Mr. Ripley in this role.)

This is how I'd describe the narrative voice of this novel. It is sloppy and ful Imagine throwing a dinner party when in sweeps your friend, your bit-of-a-dick friend, who's late, naturally, and empty-handed, who's soon telling pompous, preening stories in a carrying voice because he finds himself very clever, all while not-so-subtly ogling all of the women's breasts and helping himself freely to the booze. (I picture Philip Seymour Hoffman's character from The Talented Mr. Ripley in this role.)

This is how I'd describe the narrative voice of this novel. It is sloppy and full of itself and condescending and entitled, indulgent and arrogant and misogynistic, waiting (gleefully!) to be called misogynistic so it can sneer that the woman waging this accusation is probably frigid. This is a novel in which women are only as valuable as they are sexy. It is a novel in which we are supposed to care about a great tease of a plot which fails utterly to deliver in a way that feels as dissatisfying as bad sex. It is a novel that hopes to redeem itself intellectually by making passing reference to various classics, as though a passage from Shakespeare or an allusion to Kafka elevates what's around it. It doesn't.

(Yes, there's the whole "Decameron" thing, which I haven't even gone into, but who cares about that parallel when the characters are treated so superficially? And that's the thing. Novels should make us care. They should make us sit up and care.)

There were moments of gorgeous prose and surprising description. Such moments kept me going. But what a waste that they were embedded in a plot that didn't even feel like it was trying. What a waste that the constant lure of the nameless mystery narrator turns out to be such a flop. And Gloria's great secret? Suffice it to say it's not so great.

The prose and intelligence of Martin Amis are wasted here. The beauty of a line quickly pales when followed by, "We may parenthetically note that it is the near-universal wish of dying men that they had had much more sex with many more women." Maybe, Martin Amis, but maybe it should be the universal wish of lauded male authors that they tried a little harder instead of limply dialing it in. ...more

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Mar 22, 2013 Mark Desrosiers rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction

Aging fox theorizes about this henhouse perched atop the backwards-flying angel of history.

The story itself occasionally reaches awful peaks of hilarity and absurdity, complete with white-knuckle plot curves like I haven't seen since Money. And you gotta admit that the way he weaves his twin obsessions -- height and Islam -- into the story is both preposterous and very witty. I no longer consider Martin Amis a font of wisdom, but I admire his ability to plant an ideological stake and then stick ...more

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May 21, 2016 Megan rated it it was amazing

I was a little surprised by all of the negative reviews here; for me, this is one of Amis's best novels. Yes, it's about a group of sex-obsessed twenty year olds, but the book is not celebrating sex; instead, it's (rather viciously) interrogating the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s and the world it helped create. The book is set in 1970, and the characters are young people groping their way through a world in which, sexually speaking, anything goes. As the book makes clear, this new freedom is no ...more

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Jul 31, 2016 Jane Branson rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Shelves: unfinishable

Whatever one star stands for (the Goodreads mobile app won't let me see) it's one too many (but Goodreads doesn't allow nil stars). Admittedly I only read the first 50 pages but that represents a considerable effort and, frankly, life's too short to read another line. Another reviewer summed it up nicely with some choice language, but I shall have to restrain myself because I am Goodreads-friends with my children. Suffice it to say, I had to create a new 'unfinishable' shelf. ...more

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Apr 27, 2020 Leonard rated it did not like it

In my lifetime I have worked with a couple people who, if you told them they could not use the F word, would be speechless. The characters in this book are not quite that bad or that illiterate, but almost. I wasn't impressed and would not want to hang out with these people. They seem shallow, thoughtless, and inconsiderate. They're more like caricatures than characters and the story comes across as shallow and meaningless. ...more

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Jul 28, 2018 Jeanne Thornton rated it it was ok · review of another edition

does literature require kindness, and why

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Aug 30, 2010 Andrew Smith rated it liked it

I'd never had any interest in reading a Martin Amis book until The Pregnant Widow. I'd read short stories by Amis which I found tedious and/or annoying, and I'd seen profiles of him that led me to believe I didn't much like the man. Mainly because I couldn't take his arrogance in the ongoing personal "rivalry" with Julian Barnes, who in my opinion is one of the most intelligent, interesting writers of his and Amis's generation (now in their late 50s) of UK authors. But when I heard that Martin A I'd never had any interest in reading a Martin Amis book until The Pregnant Widow. I'd read short stories by Amis which I found tedious and/or annoying, and I'd seen profiles of him that led me to believe I didn't much like the man. Mainly because I couldn't take his arrogance in the ongoing personal "rivalry" with Julian Barnes, who in my opinion is one of the most intelligent, interesting writers of his and Amis's generation (now in their late 50s) of UK authors. But when I heard that Martin Amis's latest book was about a group of 20-something Brits taking an Italian holiday and that the book was set in 1970 I couldn't resist, because I had escaped to Italy from UK most summers myself when I was in my early 20s, which was in the late 60s/early 70s. There were too many parallels in the book's outline for me to be able to give it a miss.

But the Italian sojourn Amis describes turned out to be very different to any of mine. I never stayed in a luxurious castle with a swimming pool and servants, surrounded by wealth and privilege. Nor, I don't think, was I completely and utterly preoccupied with sex and the appearance of other people's bodies, as is Keith, the protagonist in The Pregnant Widow. There's more description of body parts in this book than in Gray's Anatomy. That said, they're very clever and vivid descriptions, so for this reason, and because there is some suspense surrounding who Keith will eventually have sex with, apart from his longstanding and long suffering girlfriend Lily, that I stuck with the somewhat boring description of the vacuous group's comings and goings as the sweltering Italian summer wears on.

I'm very glad I didn't discard the book because the last quarter is a stunning piece of dream-like writing, akin to watching a Fellini movie. Having employed a plodding straightforward style to describe the drawn-out holiday where little occurs, Amis chooses to take the last quarter or so pages to tell us everything that happens to Keith and most of the other characters during the following 30 years in a languid stream-of-consciousness style that I found fascinating.

As Amis's writing style changed I found myself re-reading sentences to try and make sense of them, but I soon realized it was better just to let the prose wash over me and the meaning would automatically appear. Like dreams, Amis employs a lot of metaphor throughout this latter section, and like dreams the metaphors are sometimes opaque and difficult to translate. But somehow it all works to perfectly express the ennui of the early 80s and the acquisitiveness of the late 80s/early 90s. This section so perfectly evokes times, places and attitudes that, finally, one begins to care about Keith and his pals. Which almost makes the dreary and somewhat depressing Italian holiday worthwhile. ...more

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May 10, 2010 christa rated it liked it

This is one of those novels where a handful of young horn dogs go live in a castle in Italy for the summer. Martin Amis' novel "The Pregnant Widow" is set in 1970 and the writerly Keith Nearing is 20. He's hanging out with his plain Jane girlfriend Lily, and reading Jane Austin novels next to the pool. Meanwhile Lily's best friend Scheherazade has transformed from a mousy Meals-on-Wheels driver to the buxomest thing to ever prance around in a monokini.

Keith masks his feelings from Lily, with wh This is one of those novels where a handful of young horn dogs go live in a castle in Italy for the summer. Martin Amis' novel "The Pregnant Widow" is set in 1970 and the writerly Keith Nearing is 20. He's hanging out with his plain Jane girlfriend Lily, and reading Jane Austin novels next to the pool. Meanwhile Lily's best friend Scheherazade has transformed from a mousy Meals-on-Wheels driver to the buxomest thing to ever prance around in a monokini.

Keith masks his feelings from Lily, with whom his relationship is becoming more and more friendly, sibling-esque, while plotting how he can turn his late night card games with Lady D-cups into something more intimate. Keith spends plenty o'days panting over Scheherazade, who has a mysterious and seemingly disinterested boyfriend named Timmy who keeps finding reasons to stay away from the castle. Meanwhile, a young daredevil hotshot count -- who weigh's in at less than 5-feet-tall -- is using psychology to round the bases with the unwitting vixen.

Other visitors -- whether long term or short stays -- include: Rita, and her dinner conversations about buggery, who is nicknamed "The Dog," and Keith's BFF Kenrik, who has defied the suggestion of his friends to not sleep with "The Dog." Keith's friend Whittaker and his lover Amen. But it is Gloria Beautyman, who has a disproportionate body -- Normal on top, fantastic can -- who finally distracts Keith from Scheherazade with her Elizabeth Bennett role playing and nude prayer sessions.

When Keith isn't thinking with his pants, he's worrying about his little sister, a heavy-drinking temptress who sleeps with entire football teams.

The whole book is like this, well, at least 300 pages of it is like this. A literary sexual comedy set in the sexual revolution, and not unlike the Woody Allen moving "A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy," where the silliness is replaced with wittiness. The final 50 pages are a rush-job conclusion. The aftermath. Who married whom; Who had a deep dark secret during that stay at the castle; Who changes Keith's life, and turns him from a lonesome loser reeking of desperation into a dude who can get a lady?

Aside from some weird pacing and some Brit slang, phraseology, and vagueness that I wasn't clever enough to decode, this is a fun and funny portrait of a defining summer in the lives of this crew. And, of course, Amis has done nothing to mask that this one is pretty damn autobiographical, so that's fun, too. ...more

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Apr 09, 2012 Callie rated it liked it

Almost finished. You can see why Amis is considered a major talent. He can do everything. Strong plot, fully developed characters, creative use of language, and he has Big Ideas, or Themes. You read and keep thinking, I should be reading this for a class and underlining and I should have a lit professor to guide me through all of it.

This novel is grown out of and pays tribute to the novels of mostly female British writers of the mostly Victorian era. Austen, Eliot. Social realism. Novels about Almost finished. You can see why Amis is considered a major talent. He can do everything. Strong plot, fully developed characters, creative use of language, and he has Big Ideas, or Themes. You read and keep thinking, I should be reading this for a class and underlining and I should have a lit professor to guide me through all of it.

This novel is grown out of and pays tribute to the novels of mostly female British writers of the mostly Victorian era. Austen, Eliot. Social realism. Novels about men and women trying to hook up. It's tricky to write a contemporary novel that makes the characters wait until the very end to finally get together--it doesn't happen that way anymore. Yet Amis pulls that part of it off. What fails for me is that his protagonist is a twenty year old male who is obsessed with sex. Well, why do you have a problem with that? you ask, this is the reality of what single young men think about. Keith, the protagonist, is in love with Scheherazade simply because of her (to put it most delicately) wondrous bosom. He spends the entire novel trying to plot out a way to get with her without having to break up with his girlfriend, Lily. And, without hurting Lily's feelings. But it all feels hollow because it's only about sex and it's only about S's body. Keith and S. never really talk to each other much. They don't have any mind to mind or soul to soul connection. In the end, I don't care much whether they get together or not.

I think most women who love Austen and Eliot and their ilk love those books because they want to read about love and the complications of love. Amis is only writing about sex. Maybe that is what interests him.

In the end, though, 'it was ok' sounds about right for this book, I have to give it three stars. I did look forward to reading it each night, and Amis's worst is about ten times better than almost everyone else's best. There are insights and sentences and a level of intelligence and wit in this book that are, frankly, rare and definitely worthwhile.

Would I tell you to read it? Maybe try The Rachel Papers, I've heard a lot of people liked that one. I didn't love his memoir and I read Time's Arrow for a class, and found it difficult. So I've read three of his books and I haven't loved any of them. I keep giving him more chances, though. I can't say why. ...more

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Mar 23, 2011 Eliza rated it liked it

Shelves: novel

10/29/2012: I was stumped by this book. Confounded. But why, then, did I keep reading? It was a most frustrating experience; I kept thinking that Amis would say something to clarify his purpose, or to resolve his mysteries, or to align the elliptical asides that appeared every few chapters. But I ended where I began, with a "Wait, what?"

The man can write. And his characters, his scenes, his evocation of a time and place are arresting. Keith, Lily, Scheherezade, Adriano, Gloria, Violet--all seem 10/29/2012: I was stumped by this book. Confounded. But why, then, did I keep reading? It was a most frustrating experience; I kept thinking that Amis would say something to clarify his purpose, or to resolve his mysteries, or to align the elliptical asides that appeared every few chapters. But I ended where I began, with a "Wait, what?"

The man can write. And his characters, his scenes, his evocation of a time and place are arresting. Keith, Lily, Scheherezade, Adriano, Gloria, Violet--all seem to want to jump off the page. They are wonderfully and hilariously (and poignantly) drawn, as they bump and grind their way through a summer spent together in a castle in Italy, in 1970--the dawn of the Sexual Revolution. There is a pervasive nostalgia; the book is written from the present, looking back, from the point of view of an unnamed narrator, who reveals himself in the end, but who for all intents and purposes is omniscient, and has opinions about everything. Thus the poignancy, the sense that the wisdom of the old, while wonderful, can't ever beat the naive, foolish and hungry energy of youth. It is even possible to reconstruct the plot of the novel, to retell the story and get a hint at what Amis is driving at. But for over 400 pages I kept hoping that those hints would coalesce into a coherent, or at least poetically consistent, set of themes. And I'm still pondering.

I missed much of the British slang of the early 70s, the shorthand of the time and place. I also think I missed many of the literary references. And I should go search those out--it might make parts of the novel much clearer. But I don't have the energy for that. And I keep thinking that Amis--some of whose books I've enjoyed--suffers from two issues. The first is a severe case of self-indulgence (okay, inflated ego, maybe? but I won't go that far); he has clearly made it this far and can write whatever and however he wants, and he has chosen to write an elliptical, elusive, archly nostalgic novel. Okay…he can do that. The second problem? Ah, I've said THIS before. The book needs a GOOD EDITOR. Did I mention the over 400 pages…?

Take me back to social realism, please…!
...more

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About Martin Amis

Martin Amis

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Martin Amis is an English novelist, essayist, and short story writer. His works include the novels Money, London Fields and The Information.

The Guardian writes that "all his critics have noted what Kingsley Amis [his father] complained of as a 'terrible compulsive vividness in his style... that constant demonstrating of his command of English'; and it's true that the Amis-ness of Amis will be reco ...more

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Pulitzer Prize–winning literary critic Michiko Kakutani, the former chief book critic of The New York Times, is the author of the newly...

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“I've got two backs, me - and I'm glad! Tits can be . . . mwa, I know, but they're always in the bloody road. Even in bed.” — 26 likes

“Esprit de l'escalier: spirit of the staircase, wishing you'd said, wishing you'd done. Yet how much more indelible it was when the staircase was the staircase that led to the bedroom.” — 24 likes

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