The Pregnant Widow.

In his new novel, ‘The Pregnant Widow’, Martin Amis has tried to blend Boccaccio’s ‘Decameron’ with a heavy helping of the Narcissus myth. Keith, an aspiring chain-smoking poet with a proletarian name, is a mock-hero spending a summer in a castle in Italy with some friends. He wears cool pants and he’s having an on again/off again thing with his girlfriend Lily. They’ve gone there to get away from it all but of course they bring it all with them. Some of Keith’s friends are posh. Scheherazade is being chased around the castle by Adriano, a vertically challenged Italian aristocrat. Whittaker is Keith’s gay drunken mate who gets fucked by the predatory Rita. They are joined by the mysterious Gloria Beautyman whose shapely arse attracts a lot of attention from the lads in the village.

Most of the time is spent lounging around the pool being witty and there’s a Muslim of course to represent sexual repression. Amis loathes Islam. For Keith, who is looking for the ultimate sexual experience Scheherazade’s breasts represent eternal female bliss if he can just find the right formula. Looking back years later he can’t quite work out why he was disappointed when he actually got whatever it was he thought he wanted at the time.

It’s not clear what kind of book Amis was writing. Is it a sexual comedy of manners with major themes or a memoir? Or both? Nothing much happens and there’s no real story. Unless you count the parts where an older wiser Keith reminisces about it all, the writing is flat. I was in trouble from page one. The topic, sexual revolution, seemed promising but the dialogue is just too clever. Amis focuses on that point in the early Seventies where young people became sexually liberated. There was a major cultural shift going on. Girls wanted to be boys, according to Amis’ thesis, and boys weren’t sure what they wanted apart from orgasms. Love maybe? The Pill had arrived. Sex was everywhere, right out in the open, available even to the spottiest. All you had to do was ask. Well not quite. You couldn’t just go jumping on people, there still needed to be some preliminary negotiations, but there was plenty of interest and getting laid wasn’t too difficult. So there’s a lot of frank discussion about sex, actual sex itself, and nobody is squeamish about saying ‘fuck’. Frequently. The girls in particular are embarrassingly liberated. They can’t stop talking about their tits and clits. There’s much of the usual smart word play we expect from Amis otherwise it’s all a trifle tedious. He’s at his best when he deals with aging but you still have to get through a lot of puerile humour and not particularly funny literary jokes. As Keith himself observes ‘Sex is bad enough, as a subject, and the self is pretty glutinous too.’ It’s all a bit of a yawn really but it’s Marty so I’m sure most reviewers will gush all over it.