The Pregnant Widow: Inside History

There are so many jewels hidden in this novel that I read it slowly and reread parts as I went. If I am willing to read a novel before falling asleep, it's an adequate but not outstanding work. I was not willing to read this one at bedtime as the exquisite handling of the workings of the inner mind would go right over my head. If you think it's just a book about sex in the summer, you missed it.

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.

In the summer of 1970, college students were touring Europe. Keith and Lily are in Italy with her tall friend Scheherazade and a third female Gloria. However, the amiable relationship between Lily and Keith begins to crack when she concludes that her boyfriend desires her friend and perhaps their other companion more than her. Ironically Gloria also a beauty seems willing to sack with Keith while Scheherazade appears out of his reach. Lily increasingly realizes she cannot compete with either of the beautiful girls for Keith's attention though she allows him sexual pleasures when she is not teasing him. With Lily torturing him with on and off sex, and Gloria apparently willing to have sex, Keith's lofty goal for the summer remains climbing Scheherazade. Although the pivot that keeps the story line anchored is how far women came due to the sexual revolution of the early 1970s caused by medical advances (some will say subtractions), The Pregnant Widow is more a treatise than a straight forward tale. Character driven by the traveling troupe, but with a deep look at religion and culture during the beginnings of radical change leading to "You've come a long way baby", this is a profound but not an easy read. Martin Amis using flashbacks proves his belief that the sexual revolution dramatically changed life as few events in recorded history have. Harriet Klausner

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.

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 tens