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Review"The Pregnant Widow is . . . Amis’s finest novel for a long time. It is close to a masterpiece. . . . Read it: it is hilarious, often wonderfully perceptive, uncompromisingly ambitious and written by a great master of the English language. In a time when many of our novelists are hedging their bets, Amis is gloriously undaunted."— Financial Times"Beautifully achieved, cunningly relaxed, and reveals considerable emotional depth in its last pages."--Ottawa Citizen"This clever novel deserves a Booker prize."--The Guardian"Fine and hilarious.... Amis at his absolute and unique best."--The Economist"Amis is one of the true original voices to come along in the last 40 years. The fizzy, smart linguistic fireworks, with their signature italicisms, riffs on the language and stunningly clever, off-center metaphors are certainly evident in The Pregnant Widow."--The New York Times Book ReviewProduct DescriptionThe year is 1970, and the youth of Europe are in the ecstatic throes of the sexual revolution. Though dedicated to the cause they have yet to realize this disturbing truth: that between the death of one social order and the birth of another, there exists a state of terrifying purgatory--or, as Alexander Herzen put it, a pregnant widow.Twenty years old and on vacation from college, Keith and an assortment of his peers are spending the long, hot summer in a castle in Italy. The tragicomedy of manners that ensues will have an indelible effect on all its participants, and we witness, too, how it shapes Keith's subsequent love life for decades.Bitingly funny, full of wit and pathos, The Pregnant Widow is a trenchant portrait of young lives being carried away on a sea of change.About the AuthorMARTIN AMIS's bestsellers include the novels Money, London Fields and The Information, as well as his memoir, Experience. He lives in London.From the Hardcover edition.Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.Book OneWhere We Lay Our Scene1Franca ViolaIt was the summer of 1970, and time had not yet trampled them flat, these lines:Sexual intercourse beganIn 1963(Which was rather late for me)—Between the end of the Chatterley banAnd the Beatles’ first LP.—Philip Larkin, “Annus Mirabilis” (formerly “History”), Cover magazine, February 1968But now it was the summer of 1970, and sexual intercourse was well advanced. Sexual intercourse had come a long way, and was much on everyone’s mind.Sexual intercourse, I should point out, has two unique characteristics. It is indescribable. And it peoples the world. We shouldn’t find it surprising, then, that it is much on everyone’s mind.Keith would be staying, for the duration of this hot, endless, and erotically decisive summer, in a castle on a mountainside above a village in Campania, in Italy. And now he walked the backstreets of Montale, from car to bar, at dusk, flanked by two twenty-year-old blondes, Lily and Scheherazade . . . Lily: 5' 5", 34-25-34. Scheherazade: 5' 10", 37-23-33. And Keith? Well, he was the same age, and slender (and dark, with a very misleading chin, stubbled, stubborn-looking); and he occupied that much-disputed territory between five foot six and five foot seven.Vital statistics. The phrase originally referred, in studies of society, to births and marriages and deaths; now it meant bust, waist, hips. In the long days and nights of his early adolescence, Keith showed an abnormal interest in vital statistics; and he used to dream them up for his solitary amusement. Although he could never draw (he was all thumbs with a crayon), he could commit figures to paper, women in outline, rendered numerically. And every possible combination, or at least anything remotely humanoid—35-45-55, for instance, or 60-60-60—seemed well worth thinking about. 46-47-31, 31-47-46: well worth thinking about. But you were always tugged back, somehow, to the archetype of the hourglass, and once you’d run up against (for instance) 9
