It was summer 1970 - a long, hot summer. In a castle in Italy, half a dozen young lives are afloat on the sea of change, trapped inside the history of the sexual revolution. The girls are acting like boys, and the boys are going on acting like boys, and Keith Nearing - twenty years old, a literature student all clogged up with the English novel - is struggling to twist feminism and the rise of women towards his own ends. The sexual revolution may have been a velvet revolution (in at least two senses), but it wasn't bloodless - and now, in the twenty-first century, the year 1970 finally catches up with Keith Nearing.
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John Crace's Digested Read -- The Guardian
Reviews
The Economist
The Economist
"This is a fine and hilarious book, Martin Amis’s best since Money… The Pregnant Widow is Amis at his absolute and unique best."
04/02/2010
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The Financial Times
Justin Cartwright
"This is Amis’s finest novel for a long time. It is close to a masterpiece, only undermined for me by frequent over-striving, which produces some false images and enervating repetitions; unlike his hero Saul Bellow, Amis is unfamiliar with restraint. But read it: it is hilarious, often wonderfully perceptive, uncompromisingly ambitious and written by a great master of the English language."
08/02/2010
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The Spectator
Richard Bradford
"Amis can reduce even his most sombre, mirthless readers to guilty laughter, but he has not hitherto shown a capacity to provoke tears… This book is a unique, sometimes exquisite experience that begs to be returned to after a first encounter."
03/02/2010
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The Daily Telegraph
Philip Hensher
"I love this novel and it warmed when I read it a second time. It is beautifully achieved, cunningly relaxed, and reveals considerable emotional depth in its last pages… The Man Booker Prize would be no more than its due."
05/02/2010
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The Observer
Tim Adams
"Unusually for Amis, Keith's deferred gratification injects into the novel that often elusive, 18th-century quality, suspense ("Amis novel" and "page-turner" have not always been synonymous). There are other surprises, in comparison with recent Amis, too: fully realised female characters..."
31/01/2010
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The Independent
Boyd Tonkin
"Amis the moral and historical speculator is engagingly open to dispute; Amis the comic artist in prose remains a true master, and a model. As a virtuoso syncopator who lends a hit of rhythmic or lexical pleasure to every snatch of speech or scene-sketching paragraph, he sounds as sweet as ever. Entropy has not yet cramped his style."
12/02/2010
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The Daily Mail
Sam Leith
"Amis writes thrillingly well - better than he writes about sex, if you ask me - about the desolations and indignities of age... problems or not, messy or not, it delivers fantastic enjoyment. Amis spoke in a recent interview of his commitment to what he calls 'the pleasure principle' - and The Pregnant Widow is testament to that. It is funny, clever, and knowing. It also contains what may be the finest last sentence Amis has written."
10/02/2010
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The New Statesman
Leo Robson
"...Amis hits numerous bullseyes. He shows again that, almost alone among novelists, he can practise literature as a stream of highlights, with a tick after every sentence - or after a decent number, anyway. His less enthusing mannerisms are all here - the italics, the near-synonymous repetitions, the stand-up-ish riffs, the ellipses - but so is his ability to hit upon just the right word or couple of words to catch an ironic or idiosyncratic perception."
28/01/2010
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The Guardian
Christopher Tayler
"...there's a growing sense that the reader is being asked to do too many things at once: to chuckle at the consciously puerile gags and over-literary running jokes, to nod along with the bulletins on ageing and baby-boomer sexual attitudes, and to attend solemnly to the busy surface of Amis's later style. Unless you're Christopher Hitchens, it's not easy to sustain the correct mood for doing all three simultaneously... Is it a "return to form"? Not exactly, but there's plainly a regathering of artistic energies."
06/02/2010
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Times Literary Supplement
Bharat Tandon
"…although much of The Pregnant Widow feels – like the period it describes – pitched uncomfortably between two stools and styles, it also shows Amis growing into a new mode, as a chronicler of loss and uncomfortable metamorphosis. If his next novels continue in this vein, then this book’s own awkward transition will have been worthwhile."
03/02/2010
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The Sunday Telegraph
Harry Mount
"…there are flashes of Amis’s old gift for new phrases – the alleyways of the nearby Italian town are 'scooter-torn’… There are also moments of rude, honest observation… The only trouble is, Martin Amis seems a lot nicer these days, and not quite as caustic as he was. He’s not bad at trying to imitate the thoughts of a sex-obsessed young man; he’s not so good at recapturing the wickedly funny thoughts of Martin Amis when he was a young man"
07/02/2010
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The Times
Aravind Adiga
"…you can’t help but feel for Keith, a man so completely lost in his time: promised so much in that summer of 1970, he realises that he has received so little. If only we were offered more of his heartache and less commentary on Mussolini and Pride and Prejudice. A potentially stunning novel ends up containing the familiar ratio of what is good and bad in Amis’s writing, the usual mix of Amis gems and Amis junk."
06/02/2010
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The Literary Review
D.J. Taylor
"While there is the constant impression of a writer trying very hard to engage, and a fair amount of smartish dialogue ... this is an oddly subdued affair, at its best when it reprises old glories (in particular Dead Babies, certain themes of which it recalls), at its worst when it simply sits back on its heels and pontificates. Perhaps it’s that sex, however intently prefigured and energetically recalled, or perhaps merely on account of these prefigurations and recollections, is not a particularly interesting subject."
01/02/2010
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The Sunday Times
Peter Kemp
"...anyone expecting a return to the scabrous zest of his earlier fiction will be disappointed. As in all Amis’s novels since his best book Money (1984), raunchy goings-on are subordinate to lofty soundings-off."
31/01/2010
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The Evening Standard
David Sexton
"Amis condemns life as a formless genre: "Life is made up as it goes along. It can never be rewritten." He wants life to be reformed by fiction and seriously believes that it is the novelist who can redeem the time. That's an irony because The Pregnant Widow is never remotely convincing as a novel in which "the reverberation, the echo of humanity" can be heard. It comes across more as a 470-page interview with Martin Amis. Oddly endearing to read. But as fiction, it's a farce."
06/02/2010
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The Independent on Sunday
Doug Johnstone
"Amis seems to be aiming for a mixture of out-and-out satire and comedy of manners … but his affection for his vapid ensemble means that most of the humour fails to hit home… the vast majority of The Pregnant Widow is a self-obsessed irrelevance, leaving the reader with a monumental feeling of "so what?""
07/02/2010
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