The Pregnant Widow, Martin Amis, Jonathan Cape, 470pp, £18.99

‘The children of the nuclear age,’ wrote Martin Amis in his memoir Experience (2000),

were weakened in their capacity to love. Hard to love, when you’re bracing yourself for impact. Hard to love, when the loved one, and the lover, might at any instant become blood and flames, along with everybody else.

Neither the nuclear theme, which Amis wrote around in Einstein’s Monsters (1987), nor its significance has become irrelevant. ‘[T]he most important thing about you,’ he writes in his new novel, The Pregnant Widow, ‘is your date of birth’. Born like the author in 1949, the protagonist Keith Nearing is ‘a vet of the Nuclear Cold War (1949-91)’. Put ‘inside history’ at that time, Keith’s generation ‘might suddenly disappear’. The only thing for it is to ‘settle for All and Now’.

Set in 1970, The Pregnant Widow describes ‘the generation less and less affectionately known as the Baby Boomers’ at the end of their youth, spending the summer in a castle in Montale, Italy which D. H. and Frieda Lawrence might have visited. Returning approximately to the time at which Amis himself was starting out as a writer, the novel’s scenario echoes that of his second work, Dead Babies (1975). Here we do not have dead babies but children of dead and lost parents. Keith’s parents, like the young Conchita’s, died on the same day, while more or less every character has suffered a similar bereavement.

‘When I think of revolution,’ says the narrator, ‘I want to make love.’ The sexual revolution – for the first time understanding sex as not necessarily implying procreation – ‘was a velvet revolution, but it wasn’t bloodless’. Nor is ‘making love’ an appropriate phrase. The behavioural shift in attitudes towards sex, Amis argues, led to ‘sexual trauma’.

Taking its title from Alexander Herzen, the novel portrays how, with ‘The death of contemporary forms of social order,’

the departing world leaves behind it 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.

Where, Keith wonders in one of the novel’s spare humorous refrains, are the police? They do not seem to know about the great sea change, the way in which girls, having no other model upon which to base themselves, have started to behave like boys. Although Keith is the subject of the novel, he is in the hands of women. Approaching his twenty-first birthday, he spends his summer ‘flanked by two twenty year old blondes, Lily and Scheherazade … Lily: 5’5’’, 34-25-34. Scheherazade: 5’10’’, 37-23-33’, respectively students of English Literature and Law and Mathematics at the University of London. Bar a break during which she ‘wanted to act like a boy’, Lily is Keith’s loyal, if too rational, on-off girlfriend. Her beauty is not ‘coming in’ yet, unlike Scheherazade’s, which is ‘just off the boat’. Although she does not act like a boy, with her exotic, Arabian Nights name Scheherazade is ‘blooming and restless’ and, in the absence of her boyfriend Timmy, she is getting ‘ideas’. Increasingly aware of how beautiful she is, Scheherazade sunbathes topless in front of the incredulous Keith, who, although mostly an innocent until a formative, eye-opening experience, falls in love easily. As she presses against him in the car, Keith wonders if it means anything, if it is usual. In a state of nearundress in the bathroom, ‘Is she trying to tell [him] something?

‘What’s happening?’ Keith wonders, keen not to be an anachronism. If the world is ‘a book we can’t put down,’ Keith tries to understand ‘what all this is’ by reading extensively, from Jane Eyre to Vanity Fair, Pride and Prejudice to Peregrine Pickle. These books are hardly new: ‘all clogged up with the English novel’, Keith is guilty, as Lily for one reminds him, of ‘not seeing things clearly’. He is unreliable on ‘the immediate situation, the immediate process’. With Keith pretending to be Dracula from ‘the novel that would guide him into the next phase of his story’, and as he moves in on his pretend victim Scheherazade, they are ‘given a ticket of entry to another genre’ but, faced with her ‘illegible openness’ and an ‘alphabet that he couldn’t read’, Keith cannot move past his reading, cannot take advantage. Later he reflects,

Oh, I know now what I should have said and done. Count Dracula would want your throat, your neck, But I – I want your mouth, your lips. Then onward, and all would have followed and flowed.

Later still he asks, ‘Literature, why didn’t you tell me?’

Nonetheless, Keith attempts ‘to nudge reality in the direction he wanted it to take’, to carry out an ill-advised and incompetent plan by which he can sleep with the desperate Scheherazade. He suspects, though, ‘that there were certain people who were better at cunning than he was’, and this is so. Gloria Beautyman, with her ‘farcical arse’, is a grotesque who, in a mode familiar from Amis’s most accomplished postmodern novels, is a controller of the action other than the author, like Nicola Six in London Fields (1989) or Fielding Goodney in Amis’s masterpiece, Money (1984). Maintaining that young men ‘don’t know anything’, Gloria is fearsomely prepossessing despite her quietness, her church-going and her frumpy swimsuits. She even corrects Keith’s reading of Pride and Prejudice, dressing up as Elizabeth Bennet as part of a birthday-long, life-changing sexual display for him. ‘I am in the future,’ he surmises. ‘He felt as if Gloria was directing his life, like a general on a hill.’

For many years Gloria guides Keith through a series of bizarre, fleeting scenarios, despite finding him ‘very annoying’. Whereas with Lily all Keith has is love, with Gloria he just has sex. Like that of Rita (the Dog) and of Keith’s tragic younger sister Violet, Gloria’s behaviour highlights the ‘dissociation of sensibility’ which marked the sexual revolution. If, as T. S. Eliot argued was the case in the seventeenth century, ‘poets could no longer think and feel at the same time’, then in ‘the lost decade’ of the 1970s ‘feeling was separated from sex’. In the fallout Keith, whose sensibility demands that he use ‘that very compassionate book’, the Concise Oxford Dictionary, to define everything, to keep meaning in check, realises that ‘words change’. Whereas ‘When he was young, people who were stupid, or crazy, were called stupid, or crazy’, now a girl like Rita can say that she is a boy, and Gloria (in a characteristic Amis formulation) is ‘a cock’. Tellingly, as part of an ongoing ‘duolect’, in which they use one word or phrase in place of another, when ‘love’s … a noun’ Keith and Lily ‘substitute hysterical sex’. ‘Hysterical sex means never having to say you’re sorry.’

The change, although amusing, is indicative of a deeper trauma, seen in the shifting focus of Keith’s reading onto ‘just fucks’ (in such books as Tom Jones and Clarissa) and in the tongue of his sister Violet. Although in her words ‘an elfy young girl’, Violet is ‘An improbable sister and impossible daughter’, and ‘an inconceivable wife’. She talks ‘like a little girl’ (‘he beat me up! Wiv a cricket bat fanks very much’) because she is ‘A grown child in a world of adults: a very terrifying situation’.

Much has been made of the role of autobiographical material in The Pregnant Widow, a curious, old-fashioned critical approach described by Amis, in Experience, as ‘the elementary error of conflating the man and the work’.

He writes,

of course, even the most precisely recreated character is nonetheless recreated, transfigured; of course, autobiographical fiction is still fiction – an autonomous construct.

Also,

My life, it seems to me, is ridiculously shapeless. I know what makes a good narrative, and lives don’t have much of that – pattern and balance, form, completion, commensurateness.

Keith Nearing finds this to be true. Initially, he decides that fiction and social realism are ‘kitchen-sink’, but when Scheherazade takes off her top, when the upper classes are the ‘source of unsubtle social comedy’ and when he has his encounter with Gloria, Keith feels there to be ‘a slippage of genre’. Perhaps it is self-conscious questioning of literary convention, along with the novel’s difficult, lengthy composition, which make it structurally baggy. There is little pressure or dialogue between the main narrative of the novel and the continual interpolation of Keith’s subsequent life, and so the cause and effect of his apparent sexual trauma remain mostly assumed. Also, the revelation that the narrator is ‘the voice of conscience’, who ‘used to have a lot of time for Keith’ before they ‘had a disagreement over a woman’, seems unnecessary and even incongruous with the narration itself, especially when compared with the sustained power and importance of the voice of Odilo Unverdorben’s conscience-figure in Time’s Arrow (1991).

Amis himself is not unaware that little happens in the book. Asked by Rita what ‘wickedness’ the characters have all been up to (just over two hundred pages in) Scheherazade admits that the answer is ‘Nothing’. ‘It’s a bit feeble,’ she says, ‘but there it is. Nothing.’ After all, apparently ‘the summer in Italy wasn’t art, it was only life. No one made anything up. All this really happened’ (or did not happen). After leaving Italy, which it does only geographically, the novel spans nearly four decades in rapid time, but, the narrator claims, ‘Life is made up as it goes along’, has no set form, or any form at all. Life is not, contrary to how Keith perceives the Italian summer, a novel. It ‘has no time for the exalted proprieties, the ornate contrivances, and the intense stylisations of kitchen-sink’. Amis’s best novels, and they are leading contemporary novels, are busy with verbal flourishes, yet here a new, so-called ‘late style’ matches themes of loss and trauma with a suitable lack of adornment and with an appropriately amorphous structure. Less riotous than Amis’s previous accounts of the 1970s, The Pregnant Widow nonetheless justifies its different approach.

Subscribe for the latest from the UK’s oldest literary magazine.

Sign up to our newsletter for the latest poetry and prose, news and competition updates, as well as 10% off our shop. 

You can unsubscribe any time by clicking the link in the footer of any email you receive from us, or directly on info@thelondonmagazine.org. Find our privacy policies and terms of use at the bottom of our website.
SUBSCRIBE