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This article was published more than 10 years ago. Some information in it may no longer be current. Martin Amis, in The Pregnant Widowdescribes what psychologists call an animal birthday: "An animal birthday is when your body happens to you. Amis's protagonist, Keith, is about to turn 21, and he is waiting for a young woman named Scheherazade to happen to him. He is waiting for the weather to break and the sun to come out so that Scheherazade will appear topless, poolside, at the Italian castle where Keith is lolling away his summer while reading through the British canon. There's nothing else to do for days on end, in this castle, but to long for illicit sex, to ruminate on it and dream about it. Or to at least read about it. Keith is waiting for the sexual revolution to go full-throttle. Amis means to capture the seventies in this novel, but with an older, experienced narrator's The Pregnant Widow in mind. Old Keith is casting back on a body that was happening, from a body that has already happened. This is not just the seventies. This is not just youth and beauty and lust and the sexual revolution, the Cold War and a The Pregnant Widow in Italy. This is all of that seen through a narrator who knows what will become of it. Old Keith looks in the mirror each day to discover that his face has morphed: "Beyond a certain age you no longer know what you look like. Something goes wrong with mirrors. Age has created the need to remember it all the The Pregnant Widow it happened: "Everything that follows is true. Italy is true. The castle is true. The girls are true …" The author peeks through the fiction, now and then, to wink at the reader - more smoke and mirrors. In Amis's memoir, Experiencethere is a note about literary reviewers. He suggests that the reviewer probably has higher The Pregnant Widow for her prose than "book chat. Amis is very, very funny about sex. I began folding down the pages every time I laughed out loud and now my copy is like a child's pop-up book. The pages fan open. Here is a romantic comedy in the vein of Jane Austen - whom both Keith and Amis as he admits in the acknowledgments admire for her sanity and her great feminism - only Amis is more like pornography. So, back at the castle, there are bikinis, monokinis, beautiful breasts and beautiful arses; Keith watches the agape develop, The Pregnant Widow agape. Throughout, he The Pregnant Widow a feverish devotion to Scheherazade's breasts and Gloria Beautyman's arse and lots of other females' body parts. Is there sexual objectification in this male gaze? Amis seems bent on delving into the past The Pregnant Widow ask exactly what happened during that brief unfettering of social constrictions between the sexes. How did the sexual revolution shake down? Who came out on top? What we learn: Keith has a hard time with women. They are wiser and often more free and, for a brief time, during an idyllic summer in Italy, they wielded their fair share of The Pregnant Widow power: "And all the decades, untilwere undeniably he decades. Gloria Beautyman, a femme fatale with a dark secret, becomes Keith's corruptor. As noted throughout, exhaustively, imaginatively, Gloria Beautyman has a beautiful The Pregnant Widow "and Keith imagined her buttocks as a pair of gigantic testicles from L. The Pregnant Widow plans to marry for money, wants a castle of her own. She's unsentimental, the embodiment of sexual freedom. But she's willing to corrupt Keith along the way, just for the fun of it. Things get smutty, as only the very English can do smutty: Gloria Beautyman dresses up as Elizabeth Bennett from Pride and Prejudice for Keith to - well - I won't give everything away. All of the women who are truly adventurous and self-actualizing when it comes to sex don't actually fare that well in this story. When the present- day Keith looks back over the past, he comes up with this tally about who has profited from the sexual revolution and who has not: "Rita was not quite all right and Molly Sims, incidentally, was not quite all right in the same way … and Violet was definitely not all right, and Gloria, too, was not all right. Is this what actually happened to the women who snatched sexual freedom in their fists when given the chance? Did freedom fail them? Or did they fail freedom? Or is this punitive read of events The Pregnant Widow by the narrator? Age, for instance, is not very kind to these women. And while Amis is very The Pregnant Widow about sex, he is very serious about getting old. Keith points out that the only word in today's lexicon from that of the The Pregnant Widow is "cool. Getting old is very uncool. Pouches and wrinkles are very uncool. Deaf aids and walking-frames are very uncool. Sunset homes are so uncool. What fuels the rampant desire and revs the hilarity is decay. A dark, more poignant spectre The Pregnant Widow unveiled; lurking under Amis's horny hilarity is the loss of youth and beauty, those who don't get what they want, those who don't make it through. The letter speaks of the horrors of age, of death, of funerals, of the loss of agility, ability, even language - and, as an aside, of the stylistic similarities Bellow recognizes in the work of Martin Amis and The Pregnant Widow own prose. And it's true, both men revel The Pregnant Widow language: unexpected images, satire that eviscerates, invigorates, prose that gorges on language, makes The Pregnant Widow. Humour in The Pregnant Widow enlivens, but it also lights up the darkness underneath. And because Keith has become a writer, he is able to write about sex, and not The Pregnant Widow pornographically, but honestly - what he imagines is the truth. Just before his 21st birthday, The Pregnant Widow asks to review a book on trial for a literary supplement, and the review leads, over the following decades, to a celebrated life of letters, much like the life of Martin Amis. A little after one, and Keith felt wise and happy and proud, and rich, and beautiful and obscurely frightened, and slightly mad. This is a space where subscribers can engage with each other and Globe staff. Non-subscribers can read and sort comments but will not be able to engage with them in any way. Click here to subscribe. If you would like to write a letter to the editor, please forward it to letters globeandmail. Readers can also interact with The Globe on Facebook and Twitter. Read our community guidelines here. When you subscribe to globeandmail. Already a print newspaper subscriber? Get full access to globeandmail. Already subscribed to globeandmail. Log in to keep reading. Customer Help. Contact us. Log in. Log out. Reviewed by Lisa Moore. Special to The Globe and Mail. Published May 14, Updated May 14, Published May 14, This article was published more than 10 years The Pregnant Widow. Text The Pregnant Widow. Story continues below advertisement. Follow us on Twitter globebooks Opens in a new window. Report an error Editorial code of conduct. Due to The Pregnant Widow reasons, we have temporarily removed commenting from our articles. We hope to have this fixed soon. Thank you for your patience. If you are looking to give feedback on our new site, please send it along to feedback globeandmail. If you want to write a letter to the editor, please forward to letters globeandmail. Show comments. Log in Subscribe to comment Why The Pregnant Widow I need to subscribe? I'm a print subscriber, link to my account Subscribe to comment Why do I need to subscribe? We aim to create a safe The Pregnant Widow valuable space for discussion and debate. 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Jonathan Jones: Detractors of the controversial author won't find much in The Pregnant Widow to change their minds. But The Pregnant Widow clever novel deserves a Booker prize. The Pregnant Widow. Published: 11 May Jonathan Jones on art Martin Amis: saviour of modern literature? Published: 20 Apr Books blog Martin Amis's war against death. Published: 19 Feb Critical eye Critical eye: roundup of the week's book reviews. Published: 13 Feb Why the literary world has still got it in The Pregnant Widow Martin Amis. Published: 7 Feb Published: 6 Feb Published: 2 Feb Martin Amis: 'I don't want to tread carefully'. Published: 1 Feb The Pregnant Widow by Martin Amis. Martin Amis goes back to first principles, with impressive results, says Tim Adams. Published: 31 Jan Martin Amis says new novel will get him 'in trouble with the feminists'. Author expects The Pregnant Widow of The Pregnant Widow, but insists it's "actually a very feminist book" that shows how his sister fell victim to the The Pregnant Widow revolution. Published: 20 Nov Arts diary Martin Amis on ageing. Martin Amis's forthcoming novel The Pregnant Widow has made him address the effect of age on writers, writes Charlotte Higgins. Published: 29 Sep The Pregnant Widow by Martin Amis

And feminism, I reckon, is about halfway through its second trimester. The story is set The Pregnant Widow a The Pregnant Widow owned by a cheese tycoon in CampaniaItaly, where Keith Nearing, a year-old English literature student; his girlfriend, Lily; and her friend, Scheherazade, are on holiday during the hot summer ofthe year The Pregnant Widow Amis says "something was changing in the world of men and women". The novel was a work-in-progress for the best part of seven years, his first since House of Meetings Originally set for release in lateits publication was delayed towhen he made what he describes as a "terrible decision" to abandon what he had written to that point, and begin again, building the story up from one section he retained, the part about Italy. Amis started writing the novel after the publication in of Yellow The Pregnant Widow to a hostile critical reception and muted commercial The Pregnant Widow. In a interview with The Independenthe The Pregnant Widow that he had abandoned a novella, The Unknown Knownand instead continued to work on a follow-up full novel that he had started in He said the new novel was "blindingly autobiographical, but with an Islamic theme". He said he was "trying to keep up a little bit of indirection" with the autobiographical aspects, saying that his character in the novel was named "Louis" Amis' middle namethat Kingsley Amis was "The King" and that Saul Bellow was "Chick" which itself was a reference to the Saul Bellow proxy character in Bellow's final novel Ravelstein. But I was in big trouble a few years ago, with a huge, dead novel. And it took me a long time, and a lot of grief, to realize—I thought I was The Pregnant Widow at straws—it turned out it was actually two novels, and they couldn't go together. The character of Violet Nearing, the protagonist's younger sister, is based on Sally Myfanwy Amis 19 January — 8 NovemberMartin's younger sister by five years. She had problems all her life with alcoholism and was described by Amis as one of the sexual revolution's most spectacular victims. Sally suffered a stroke at 40 and died of an infection at age The novel was published to mixed reviews, Eileen Battersby in The Irish Times calling it a "thumping disappointment", while Richard Bradford in The Spectator described it as a "unique, sometimes exquisite experience". After a considerable amount of speculation and high expectation, the novel was not included on the longlist for the Man Booker Prize. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. From the other shore: and The Russian people and socialism, an open letter to Jules Michelet. Braziller, You ask the questionsThe Independent The Pregnant Widow, 15 January Martin Amis and the sex warThe Times24 January Martin Amis says new novel will get him 'in trouble with the feminists'The Guardian20 November Amis The Pregnant Widow high. It happened one summerThe Spectator, 3 February Martin Amis. Saturn 3 Essays and Reportage, Kingsley Amis Hilary Bardwell Lemmons. Namespaces Article Talk. Views Read Edit View history. Help Learn to edit Community portal Recent changes Upload file. Download as The Pregnant Widow Printable version. Nederlands Suomi Edit links.