The Pregnant Widow (Vintage International) Paperback – May 3, 2011

Other reviewers have done an excellent job summarizing Amis' plot in "The Pregnant Widow." This review is my response to the novel, sans plot synopsis.I loved this book. Having watched the American release date get postponed time and again, I wondered if the reason might be the quality of the work. I need not have worried. Here Amis is in his zone, brilliantly nailing the humor, craftily weaving the plot, lavishly wordsmithing his abundant vocabulary to great ends, all the while revealing much about the sexes.I am thrilled with how funny and well written "Widow" is, how entertaining its story. After having appreciated "House of Meetings" but feeling weighed down by how depressing the material was, and after enjoying the slim tome "The Second Plane," I was long ready for a meaty Amis novel, and "Widow" delivered for me.With the passing of J.D. Salinger, Martin Amis is now my favorite living writer. I am lending "Widow" to a friend who has never read him, with the hope that this book will be an excellent introduction to a brilliant writer.Four stars instead of five because throughout my reading, I did have one nagging complaint about the believability of one particular issue I cannot reveal here without ruining a key surprise in the novel. I did not see this surprise coming, however, and in hindsight it does resolve what my complaint was.Well done yet again, Mr. Amis. Eagerly awaiting your next.

When you start to read this novel, right away you are swimming in Amis' incomparable turns of phrase and descriptions that make you happy to be in the company of someone who is a master of words. I loved this book and its settings: sweet, sunny Italy, and gritty, grey, competitive London. Underneath the very English plot of love, sun, mistaken identities, heroes and heroines losing their way, with plenty of literary references that are both fun and erudite, there is a current of melancholy that gives the book shadow as well as light. After all, a pregnant widow has the joy of a child to anticipate but the grief of great loss to endure, and the complicated relationships transcend the summer of 1970 and finally bring the characters to the current day, flawed, grieving for a lost sister, but with hard-won happiness found at last. Oh, and I loved the homage to Nabokov, as well as to Philip Larkin, just to contrast with Austen, Fielding, Trollope, and D.H. Lawrence, And this book sent me to look again at Experience, Amis' own memoir, which as some parallels with TPW. A very nice book to read.

I had very high expectations for this book, for some reason. Honestly, I have no clue why; I'd never written Amis before, his last few books had received lackluster reviews, and I hadn't received any glowing recommendations from friends. And yet, there they were, about to be crushed.Here's what's up:Pregnant in a good way (28 years old, married, healthy, financially stable):- There were some interesting parts, most of which involved sex with Gloria- There were some delightful characters, like Adriano, the wealthy yet distractingly short adventure-seeker- I understood what he was after with the parallel, and contrast, between the Italian summer and Keith reading English literature (Austen, Bronte, etc...). The message- presumed chastity means nothing.Pregnant in a bad way (15 years old, eight possible father, eating Hot Cheetos for prenatal vitamins)- It was just so boring at parts! The coital suspense was just painful at times.- It definitely wasn't plot driven, but it wasn't a character study either (I think it was intended to be so, though, which is part of my problem).- The sexuality seemed unnatural; in a time and a place where it should seem so easy, it really just seemed like an old man trying to write about the sexual revolution. Awkward.I really toyed between two and three stars, but I guess it could have been worse. And there definitely is worse on the market. The holidays have made me generous.

This book is pornography masuerading as literature. The author does not use such terms as whore or slut. He dredges up from some forgotten parts of the dictionary the word "slag" and everyone is a slag.None of the people in the book seem to have a job or other income in this summer in Italy. They sit around or go topless to the pool so they can examine others "behinds', called an "arse' in true, upper class British parlance, and mentally carnally know each other. One character, 4' 10" inches and rather cruelly nick named behind his back "Tom Thumb," has had thousands of women and yet almost never successfully knows one carnally in the book. He drives various vehicles: Rolls Royce's, Bugliatti's, and travels around in his helicopter furnishing transportation to anyone who wants it. The rest of the characters have no visual means of support. This may be how it is in Britain but it does not resonate as realism here in the USA.The one very attractive character, Violet, rolls under one man to another with heavy drinking sandwiched in between.Yes, the book raises many questions but for me there was only one when I finished. Why did I read it?[I bought it before publication in the USA on the rave reviews from Britain. I gave one star for the author being extremely capable as pulling the book off at all; the other was for those who like sex. You will get every chance to wallow in it. Most of it, I must admit, is best characterized by the title of one chapter: "Waiting."]

Sex ist an sich ein höchst interessantes Thema. Wenn es aber endlos darum geht, wer mit wem, wann, warum, wie oft und wo, wenn das ohne Steigerung und Höhepunkt (ich meine jetzt nicht Orgasmus!) sich strukturlos über zahllose Kapitel ersteckt, dann weiß ich nicht, warum ich das lese. So wichtig sind die sexual-autobiographischen Ergüsse von Martin Amis wirklich nicht.Er ist ein bewundernswerter Stilist, sprachlich ist das Buch großartig. Aber was soll's, wenn der Inhalt über lange Strecken so banal ist. Ich war auf die letzten Kapitzel gespannt, wo er aus seinem Leben nach 1995 erzählt. Doch statt wirkliche Reflektion wieder dasselbe, nur eben in einer anderen Lebensphase. Auf der ganzen Linie eine einzige Enttäuschung!

I've always loved Amis's writing. I've always admired his work. But of late I've become frustrated that his obvious literary talents, his style and his wit don't seem to equal a 'good' book any more. The Information was the last time I read and enjoyed one of his novels. Everything that has come since has seemed style over substance to a degree which I haven't been able to ignore. Of course, plot has never really been a concern of Amis's as a writer, but when he's good there's real substance behind the dazzling prose.So, it is hard to describe a plot here. A group of young people spend a summer lounging around the pool of an Italian castle and talk about sex. The novel is from the viewpoint of Keith (Yes, another Keith), looking back at the summer of his 'sexual trauma' as he begins to experience the first pangs of old age. The way Amis builds the importance of the actual 'trauma' and hides what it actually was is one of the pleasures of the book.But this is Amis, so as discussed above plot means nothing. What matters is that he is discussing issues, rather than being stylish for the sake of it. Age, the sexual revolution, friendship, a nod to the real life death of his sister. For the first time in a while Amis has written something with 'heart'. There is an emotional truth in the book which has not been evident in his work of late. Here when he talks about love and relationships you believe him. This time I care about his characters and not just admire the fictional constraint he has built for them.Not that the style had gone. It's hard to imagine a writer who shows such joy in the construction of sentences. Whatever you say about him, and a lot of people say a lot of things, he is a master of the English language. And Pregnant Widow is written with a swagger. Some of the writing is dazzling.But more importantly it's funny, laugh out loud funny in places. Amis can spot the farce in human relationships and is acerbic in his drawing of it.This is his most complete and satisfying novel for a very long time and in my opinion it is a scandal that it was overlooked by the Booker panel this year.

This is Martin's best novel since The Information. But it's not his best novel. That was Money. The Pregnant Widow is written with a long view, with a view to the reputation in decades and centuries to come. Perhaps it's a begging letter to the Nobel Prize committee. Or a required text for his university course, with the requisite plethora of vaguely scholarly references to more or less classic writings. But an airport novel it's not. That was Yellow Dog, which I bought in its first days as a hardback to read over the Atlantic and felt compelled to hide from the traveler beside me to prevent his seeing the shameful words on the page before me (once I'd read it to the bitter end, I tore up the book and trashed the shreds). By contrast, this new novel is worth sporting on the shelf for a lifetime. It's Martin's best shot yet at classic status. In times to come, when the London trilogy has lost much of its contemporary sizzle, The Pregnant Widow will live on as a challenge for English undergraduates eager to test their exegetical powers on a worthy target. This new novel also deftly overshadows Martin's first three novels, The Rachel Papers (where in effect he channeled the skills of his father Kingsley), Dead Babies (a pulp work that I panned with more zeal than craft in my 1975 Oxford university magazine Isis review of it), and Success (the less said the better), and leaves Martin with an airbrushed but serviceable legacy for posterity. In fact, the 2010 contribution to the collected works is better than all its predecessors in several ways. It's more sober, more craftsmanlike (except for the sometimes oppressively esoteric vocabulary and references), more reflective (despite the profusion of stylistic tics, such as in-sentence repetition, and pet topics, like breast and stature statistics), and more philosophical. Yes, Martin is aging, and it shows. But so are we all, and there are still plenty of readers ready to read a doorstop like this one to recall the embarrassments of their younger years. One detail for gourmet readers - the Ted Hughes story of Narcissus that reappears regularly in the novel as a leitmotif is brilliant, almost so much so that it overshadows the murky sex games in the castle. That, more than any other visible thread in the tapestry, is what will give the book classic status, if indeed it gets it. For Martin's place in history, it also makes the book a suitably impressive tombstone.

All the brilliance of Amis (use of English, thinks the reader has a brain, set in the real world we all live in) but sadly a lot of the self-conscious interruption of the flow of the narrative with thought associations for Eng Lit grads.Any book on gender relationships since the hippy eighties is so well worth a read too.

I gave up at page 150, amazed I got that far.This isn't a story, it's an exercise by Amis trying to persuade us that he is an amazing writer. It's self-indulgent to the extreme. It might be clever, but it's just boring and anyone who's read his books before will know the story before its finished.