Martin Amis’s 12th novel is set in Italy in the summer of 1970 and follows an English literature undergraduate who longs to cheat on his girlfriend with a busty maths student named Scheherazade. As Keith tackles a reading list that runs from Clarissa to D. H. Lawrence, allusions to Kafka and Shakespeare lend an erudite sheen — or not — to banter about penis size and the “design flaw” in women (“the tits and arse should be on the same side”). Interspersed with accounts of Scheherazade’s topless sunbathing are passages that show us how Keith fares as a twice-divorced Londoner in the Noughties.
The narration, which comes from the voice of Keith’s conscience, rewords and repeats itself a lot: “He ... felt grateful and surprised, gratefully surprised”; “Dinner was ... strangely quiet — or did he mean quietly strange?”This partly reflects the sensibility of the peacocking protagonist, but you also sense that it’s just Amis being Amis. “The parent star was daubing Lily to its taste”: Keith’s girlfriend is getting a suntan. “He needed that coating to seep down over his eyes; he needed to become reptilian, and receive the ancient juices and flavours of the carnivore”: Keith is mustering the nerve to make a play for Scheherazade.
Amis often attracts criticism for the way that he writes about women, and I’m not sure that there is much here to change anyone’s mind. He means well — Keith is a dweeb — but it’s hard not to feel that the division of attributes among the female characters (one has big breasts, one has a big bottom, one is plain, one is Northern: “I need me Tetley ... I must have me Tetley”) is intended to run some kind of gamut of femininity. And the expression “twenty-year-old girl” is a revealing oxymoron.
Perhaps the novel isn’t meant to be taken too seriously, although the subtitle (Inside History) suggests otherwise, as do the final pages, which somehow manage to link poolside larking around with al-Qaeda while worrying that the sexual revolution was a bad thing because it stopped women having kids when they wanted. My sense is that readers will be happy to let Amis editorialise, while they enjoy a breezy sex comedy that isn’t so different from the sort of thing found in Mitchell and Webb’s sitcom Peep Show.
The Pregnant Widow, by Martin Amis, is published by Vintage, rrp £7.99; 470pp. To buy this book at the Times Books price of £7.59, visit thetimes.co.uk/bookshop or phone 0845 2712134