Children of the Revolution

Martin Amis's long awaited new novel about the sexual revolution does nothing to restore the author's reputation. By Edward O’Hare.

High summer, 1970.

Keith Nearing, his girlfriend Lily and her friend Scheherazade, all just turned twenty, go to stay in an Italian castle. Outside the social order is undergoing a metamorphosis. The sexual revolution has reached full pitch; Feminism is upending old power-structures.

Girls are turning into boys and boys don’t know what to be anymore. For those summering in the castle these questions are not just theoretical, they will shape the people they shall become. Literature student Keith is supposed to be studying the English Novel and mending his relationship with Lily but he is spending most of his time studying the impossibly alluring Scheherazade, whose beauty is in full bloom. Soon he becomes convinced that fate wants him to bed her and connives to turn the sexual empowerment of womankind to his advantage.

But he truly loves Lily. As this tortuous scenario unfolds Keith realizes he faces a decision but the choice he makes is one that will ‘ruin him for twenty-five years.’

The last ten years have seen Martin Amis’s reputation slide deeper and deeper into trouble. It’s hard to deny that he is one of the most capable of cultural critics, or that his outspoken opinion pieces on global affairs amount to a daring alternate-view of what is happening in our time. Unfortunately, for a man who claims novel-writing as his main vocation, Amis’s literary output has lately been a sorry affair. A decade’s worth of lacklustre books was only alleviated by The House of Meetings, a somehow hilarious novella set in the Siberian Gulag, back in 2007.

But the return to form this seemed to signal was an illusion. The Pregnant Widow, Amis’s eleventh novel, is one of his most clumsy, shallow, tiresome and odious books yet.

To put the (few) things Amis gets right on record first. The Pregnant Widow’s theme, the treacherous guessing game of what the outcome of the sexual revolution would mean for those who were there at it’s inception, is reasonably original. His evocation of time and place, the sweltering heat of a much more alien rural Italy, is convincing. The first quarter of the novel rolls along intriguingly and skilfully.

To his credit Amis manages to create characters just out of their teens who are highly intelligent but who don’t sound like miniaturized adults. He also just about succeeds in keeping himself out of this novel and reigns in the omniscient authorial voice which wrecked some of his earlier works.

Unfortunately, despite these merits The Pregnant Widow still becomes a great, swollen mess of directionless prose. The main problem here is substance. Amis has enough material for a really good, twisty 220 pager. Stretched to more than 450 pages, the narrative momentum quickly dissipates and we are left with a ponderous, flatulent dinosaur of a novel whose only claim to being an epic is that it’s very, very long.

Lacking subject matter Amis calls upon some of his old reliables (chess, narcissism, Philip Larkin, nuclear war) but these add nothing. Labelling the characters in a Martin Amis novel unlikeable may be an exercise in futility, but those in The Pregnant Widow are simply unworthy of attention. Keith, Lily and Scheherazade (and, it seems, everyone else), are such unbelievable solipsists that it’s a waste of time following them. They speak, smoke, drink, read, write, they sleep with one another, but its all a dumb show: they are not human.

What made Martin Amis’s name was his eye-popping linguistic virtuosity, his ability to turn the clichés of English upside down and inside out. The word juggling in this novel is tired, forced and unmemorable. Amis’s brand of famously caustic wit is also thin on the ground and, like a bad comedian, when he does come up with a good joke he can’t stop himself from repeating it until it’s no longer funny.

In fact, what amuses most about The Pregnant Widow is the number of Amis’s linguistic pyrotechnics which fail to go off, the word-combinations that to him must have seemed rich, clever and suggestive but which come across to anyone else as silly and meaningless. When, on the very first page, part of a girl’s anatomy is referred to as her ‘pincers of bliss’ it’s fair to expect things can’t get any worse. They do.

Indeed, it’s when Amis turns to sex that the desperation of The Pregnant Widow really shows through. Incapable of making any real comment about human behaviour he tries to bait the reader along with terrible descriptions of nude sunbathing and girls unknowingly displaying their underwear.

Amis must think himself very smart and ironic to have written a novel supposedly about the rise of Feminism which has allowed him to wax lyrical about the bronzed buttocks, vast thighs and colossal breasts of his heroines but the voice you hear in your head when you read these passages is not that of one of the world’s most famous authors but the salacious tones of Terry Thomas, Leslie Phillips or any other ravaged old rascal from some awful 1970’s British sex farce. They couldn’t be more stomach-churning.

Some critics have said that Martin Amis should quit novel-writing and concentrate on being a journalist and pundit, a role he has an obvious talent for. The Pregnant Widow certainly lends weight to this argument. It contains the occasional flash of the old master’s brilliance, a perfectly worded description or one of those hilariously dry observations that he alone can make, but there would need to be a hundred times more of these to make The Pregnant Widow worthwhile. The bad boy wonder of the seventies is really going to need to catch up on what he’s missed if he is to remain a writer of relevance.

The Pregnant Widow by Martin Amis

Jonathan Cape 465 pp

18 EURO