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The Pregnant Widow Amis Martin 9780224076128 Books

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The Pregnant Widow Amis Martin 9780224076128 Books

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.


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The Pregnant Widow Amis Martin 9780224076128 Books Reviews

This is the first Amis book that I can quibble with, just a little. I understand that the narrative is slow-moving (to say the least), as seduction itself, as a process, often is. But there's just a bit too much explaining in this one, and it feels labored in parts. However, as usual, other parts made me shout out loud with joy and recognition, and if he would just edit out the sections that show parallels between 1960 and now, this book would sing, like the other good ones he's written (Night Train, The Information, etc).
The Pregnant Widow is a literary view of one man's fixation on women's bodies. Who knew that all that playboy stuff was for real? i think one can probably generalize Amis' obsessions to the male of the specis. Might help the reading of this opus if the reader has a classics background. I found it interesting that the only woman who Amis fails to describe in sexual terms is Conchita, his third wife. The reader gets no insight into Conchita's charms or her appeal Interesting, though, that Amis is married to a younger woman from South America.
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 thought I wasn't going to get far in this, with the endless fluff of not quite hilarious jokes. But Amis's jokes got better, or maybe they grew on me. This isn't as funny or as tightly written as some of his other works, like Money or The Information or Success, but the invention never flags. Who but Amis can make a hundred pages of quips about a four foot nine Italian count? And another fifty about a dog that looks like a rat? Or write so humorously about sex without it ever getting grainy and gritty? Where I think the book goes wrong, or if not wrong then somewhat unbalanced, is in not being unrelievedly funny. It tries to get serious. The interludes, where the now fifty-year-old Keith looks back on the twenty-year-old Keith and reports on how his life and those of his young companions turned out, are fine and funny, but don't seem to have much connection with that summer together in the castle twenty years before. Even more unbalancing is the reworking of his earlier novel Success into the plot. Success had two foster brothers and a mad sister. The Widow has essentially the same, Keith and Patrick being adopted brothers and Violet being their mad sister this time out. Violet adds a tragic note to the novel that seems out of place. I appreciate that ending such a book must be hard for an author, but I don't grant total Success here.
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.