THE PREGNANT WIDOW
by Martin Amis
Random House; Hardback; 470 pages; Price £18.99; ISBN 9780224076128

Annie McDermott

On the terrace of the Italian castle where they’re spending the summer, the characters of Martin Amis’ new novel are discussing a problem. If, on the ideal woman, ‘the tits and the arse should be on the same side’, which side should it be? The front, ‘to get the face’? Or the back, so she could still walk forwards?

Martin Amis is back where he belongs. The Pregnant Widow stages the sexual revolution as a time when new words are as exciting as new acts; when sex is everywhere though not necessarily everyone’s; when conversations are games of brashness; when the surface is what counts – and this world is the natural home of his prose.

Keith Nearing, another from the Charles Highway stable of bookish twenty-year-olds who don’t think they’re tall enough, is spending the summer in Italy with his sisterly girlfriend Lily, her beautiful friend Scheherazade and a disparate cast of acquaintances that includes a silver-tongued four foot ten Italian, a tweed-wearing aristocrat and his Muslim boyfriend, Amen (pronounced Ahmun). It is 1970, the sexual revolution is upon them, and everywhere girls are ‘acting like boys’.

Afraid of becoming an anachronism, Keith embarks on a project of ‘character management’ which will make him better at acting like a boy himself. In the spirit of this ‘willed reptilianisation’, he spends much of the summer (and much of the novel) psyching himself up to a betrayal of Lily which is to launch the trajectory of ‘chronic sexual failure’ that lasts into his middle-age.

So far, so Amis. And yet, this is no typical tale of irreversible descent. Compassion is successfully banished, as we would expect, but what happens next is much more of a shock: it returns. When Keith tells his third wife ‘I’m kind now,’ thirty years after he first decides not to be, one suspects that Martin Amis might be saying the same.

Keith can become kind again because Amis has chosen a different villain for this novel, and that is old age. This is a villain feared by narrator, reader and characters alike, and this shared horror allows an empathy into this novel that is absent in some of Amis’ crueller and more bullying work. We may laugh when Keith decides that ‘Old age wasn’t for old people. To cope with old age, you really needed to be young – young, strong, and in peak condition’; we may recoil from his ‘trembling, haddocky fingers’. But we cannot feel superior and we cannot feel safe: we’re all in this together.

Amis’ sentences have always swarmed greedily around the body, and The Pregnant Widow’s holy trinity of youth, age and sex allows them to show off their powers to the fullest. We are told early on in the novel that sex is indescribable, and Amis does not try to prove this wrong. Instead, his prose largely remains on the other side of sex, trapped in the fantasies of the twenty-year-old Keith, describing the sex he isn’t having but feels like he ought to be.

This is done brilliantly: prose that would no doubt gain a Bad Sex Award nomination if it was describing real sex becomes the perfect vehicle for describing its absence. ‘And he had read that men were beginning to see women as objects. Objects? No. Girls were teemingly alive. Scheherazade: the inseparable sisters who were her breasts, the creatures that dwelt behind her eyes, the great warm beings of her thighs.’

We learn the colours of briefly-glimpsed underwear and the shapes that remain in recently-discarded towels. We count the ‘fucks per novel’ as Keith works his way through his holiday reading list, returning to Northanger Abbey ‘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.’ Nothing is safe: ‘Even the fountain in the centre of the courtyard had its own vital statistics, approximately 7’6’’, 44-18-48.’

Amis’ prose is always most comfortable in uncomfortable situations, and the narcissistic world of the seventies as he paints it is the ideal home for his flamboyantly self-aware style. His art does not lie in hiding the art: on the contrary, this is art that stands in the spotlight and takes a bow hand in hand with its artist. When Scheherazade is ‘decanting herself downwards’ towards the pool, when Keith ‘insomniated’ by Lily’s side in Italy or ‘impended over the basin in the bathroom,’ horrified by his middle-aged reflection, we consciously applaud the choice of word, feeling ourselves in the presence of a performer.

And The Pregnant Widow is a virtuoso performance. Martin Amis may be kind now – or at least a little bit kinder – but his writing has lost none of its force.