Pregnant Widow [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

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 tension (after a chase sequence, say, or while recovering from some horrific transformation); or after a long episode of strenuous swimming, or strenuous flying; or after a sudden bereavement, a sudden subtraction; or after successful sexual intercourse. And successful sexual intercourse in dreams, though rare, was not unknown. But you couldn't smoke in dreams."

I must confess, however, that I didn't quite get Keith's relationship with the young Conchita. Is it as terrible as I suspect? On the other hand, I thought that Amis worked his Muslim females into his story with great skill and plausibility. Finally, I was grateful that Amis defined boredom, which he calls "the absence of a wish." For steady readers of Amis (this is my 13th Amis book) or fans of Bellow, this is a gift.

Highly recommended.

The Pregnant Widow can be boiled down to two words --- sex and height, both long-held preoccupations for the author. I so much wanted to like the novel and believe the reviews but this one's a serious disappointment. Yes, it's a parody of all the books, Keith, our hero is reading, those English classics that dance around sex while mainly abstaining from the act. That can't disguise a complete lack of plot, nor hide the fact that this isn't so much of a novel as an intellectual excercise. Amis wants to talk philospohy, biology, literature and the disappointments of aging. I've got no problem with that, but this is a stifling novel that springs to life for brief, entertaining pages and lapses back into navel-gazing. When you look back at London Fields or Money, you can see a writer setting out for new lands and moving towards them. This is the exact opposite, a book that takes place in an Italian castle and bounces back and forth within the walls, going nowhere, doing nothing. Avoid it.

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.