Book Review: The Pregnant Widow

If nothing else, the last decade in literature has answered the question of what happens when former enfant terribles begin to go grey. As we move father and farther away from the Cold War heyday of radical, experimental fiction, the leading literary lights of those days have undergone a series of deeply fascinating changes. Philip Roth transformed from an angry young man obsessed with sex into an angry old man obsessed with death, Thomas Pynchon became something of an old hippie, and Christopher Hitchens turned into a neoconservative. Martin Amis--son of Kingsley, friend of Hitchens, and former London literary bad boy--has not escaped the aging process. But rather than turn him into a crotchety old Tory as it did to his father, age has simply (and perhaps somewhat boringly) made Amis fils a wiser and more subdued writer. The Pregnant Widow, his most recent novel, bears witness to this process of maturation.

 The Pregnant Widow is the third Martin Amis novel I have read in the last six months, following Money: A Suicide Note (1984) and London Fields (1989), and I believe it to be the best of the three. Now, this is not to say that the earlier novels are not genuinely wonderful books in and of themselves--they most certainly are (especially Money, which is as sharp a satire of the wretched excess of the Reaganite-Thatcherite 80s as has ever been committed to the page)--but they are also thoroughly "postmodern" in their approach, and at times tend to fall victim to some of that particular literary mode's worst impulses. As amusing, thought-provoking, and deeply rewarding as those older books could be at certain moments, they also had a tendency to be ponderous, shallow and, at times, overly self-impressed by their own formal cleverness. While not as formally explosive or linguistically daring as the books that preceded it, The Pregnant Widow is ultimately much more substantial as a novel

One of the primary reasons for this is that here Amis has all but abandoned the allegorical pretensions of his 80s novels. Money and London Fields are both clear attempts at making Grand Statements on historical conditions, and as a result end up populated with characters who are less three dimensional, fully developed individuals than they are flat stand-ins for this or that social "type" or trend or tendency. While ostensibly "about" the long-term effects and aftermath of the social and sexual revolutions of the 1960s, the social commentary in The Pregnant Widow resides mostly in the background, as Amis instead focuses primarily on crafting a fairly straight-forward (by his standards, anyway) comedy of manners. The novel is centered around the romantic (mis)adventures of one Keith Nearing, with its first two thirds being dedicated to the time he spent as a twenty year-old at an Italian castle with a handful of other colorful characters (including his on-again, off-again girlfriend Lily, a 4'10" Italian millionaire, and Gloria Beautyman, a figure who could potentially be described as the feminine version of a Cormac McCarthy antagonist) in the summer of 1970, and the last third serving as a catalog of the trials and tribulations he experiences in the 39 years following that momentous summer. While Big Questions regarding the historical import and the wide-ranging effects of the social upheavals of the 60s are ever-present, a large majority of the page-count is given over to smaller-scale affairs, as it explores the difficulties Keith encounters as he tries to navigate the increasingly tricky minefields of love and sex in the second half of the 20th century. Rather than being an allegorical stand-in for a whole generation of young men, as he may have ended up being in the hands of lesser novelist, Keith eventually stands simply as someone who experienced the revolution first hand and has lived to tell the tale.

In addition to toning down the portentous and apocalyptic allegoricism of its predecessors, The Pregnant Widow also goes much easier on the sort of meta-fictional, "po-mo" formal tricks that mark the work of the Young Amis. Other than a few self-reflexive moments, which hit that much harder for being so rare, the book is formally quite conservative indeed. A seemingly minor plot point in the novel concerns Keith's attempt while in Italy to familiarize himself with the English Novel by speeding through the entire canon from Richardson to DH Lawrence, and for long stretches The Pregnant Widow itself, with its romantic intrigues and comedic set-pieces, reads like nothing so much as an updated, more self-aware, slightly pornographic take on the classic, canonical English comic novel as practiced by the likes of Fielding, Austen and Thackeray. In fact, beyond everything else, the book can also be seen as a mediation on the novel's status as a dying but still-vitally necessary generic form. This comes through most forcefully in a passage near the very end of the book in which the story pauses briefly and the narrative voice that has been speaking for the last 360 pages steps forward to identify itself for the first time. It is a remarkable passage for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that it stands as an excellent argument for the continued preservation of the classic, literary novel in these seemingly post-novelistic (and possibly even post-literary) times:

...I? Well, I'm the voice of conscience (which made such a dramatic comeback between his first and second marriage), and I preform other duties compatible with the superego. No, I am not the poet he never was. Keith could have been a poet. But not a novelist. His provenance was too peculiar for that. He couldn't hear what others hear--the reverberation, the echo of humanity. Confined by truth, by Life, I'm nonetheless the part of him that always tried to listen out for that.

It is those reverberations, those echos of humanity, of other people, that the truly great novels capture more perfectly than any other literary or artistic form. In the midst of his senescence, Martin Amis has written a truly great novel.