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The Pregnant Widow

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The Pregnant Widow

By: Martin Amis
Narrated by: Steven Pacey
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About this listen

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 wasn’t bloodless – and now, in the twenty-first century, the year 1970 finally catches up with Keith Nearing.

The Pregnant Widow is a comedy of manners and Martin Amis at his fearless best.

©2010 Martin Amis (P)2014 Audible, Inc. Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction

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Thought provoking to read, this is more entertaining when the characters are so well voiced by Stephen Pacey. He brings out the humour and makes it well worth repeat listening.

Brilliantly read.

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Martin Amis' latest book is arguably a throwback to some of his earlier work. It is not the savagely funny satire of 'Money' or 'London Fields', rather it's a comedy of sexual manners set against the changing attitudes and sexual mores starting in the 1970s - the Pregnant Widow of the title is, as it were, between the death of the old age and the birth of the new. The first half of the book is engaging and funny, sometime painfully so, but he rather loses his way in the second half when he seeks to follow what happens to his various characters - his mix of seriousness and humour just doesn't gel that well, and structurally the book becomes unbalanced as he appears to rush through the years.

Still, all that said, it's an interesting and enjoyable book - I dont think Martin Amis could write a dull sentence if his life depended on it. And with Stephen Pacey, who has narrated several of Amis' earlier books, in top-notch form, Pregant Widows makes for a splendid audiobook which holds the attention easily right the way to the end.

Not vintage Amis but still well worth a listen.

enjoyable but not vintage Amis

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Although self-denigrating class ridicule is embedded in the humour, this time Martin Amis does more sex than he does his familiar social satire and political finger-pointing. He pulls off the carnality masterfully despite numerous hair-raising slip-ups. Under the covers the plot is all the classic novels you’ve ever read, and the poetry too, transposed to a period in living memory. We are in the vanguard of the army of the sexual revolution with all its vulnerable naïvité and hurt. We are made privy to the picaresque shenanigans of a house-party’s summer of love and then its winter too. Since our protagonist is a literature student who begins his holiday reading-list with “Clarissa”, we suspect a warning: he and we are in for a long wait before we get to a climax - in so far as there is one. Meanwhile there is Amis’ irreverent romp from Austen to Auster, Fielding to Forster, Eliot to Emmanuelle, and always Shakespeare; and the bonus of Stephen Pacey’s hilarious, perfectly pitched narration.

Dazzling fun, not for the faint-hearted

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