Amis' 'Remarkably Tedious' New Novel

Martin Amis’ latest novel, The Pregnant Widow, is “remarkably tedious” tale of baby boomers on vacation during the sexual revolution, and lacquers themes of sex and identity “with pompous, inanely rococo meditations about the nature of art and truth,” Michiko Kakutani writes for The New York Times. Amis’ novel follows a group of young people vacationing in the Italian countryside in the 1970s; the hero, Keith, has one girlfriend and eventually tries to drug her so he can sleep with someone else. In the beginning, Amis explains that Keith paid some huge price for the vacation’s events, but “the deliberately withheld secrets littered throughout this book only serve to underscore the lame storytelling and its reliance on cheap tricks,” Kakutani says. The characters are “shoddily drawn” and “off-the-rack generic,” and though the plot picks up at the end, it’s not enough to sustain interest. Amis has “oddly traded his mastery of language in these pages for a mannered, self-indulgent style,” Kakutani says, rendering this book Amis’ second most annoying, after Yellow Dog.