Martin Amis: no quality control
Mar 23, 2010
Review of The Pregnant Widow by Martin Amis
BEFORE I began reading Martin Amis’s The Pregnant Widow, I hoped it would combine the verve of his earlier books with the heft of the later ones. I am probably rare among Amis fans when I say that House of Meetings was far superior to Money, and that his efforts to transcend comedy will make him a great novelist, rather than just a good one. In the end, it was a return to form, and therefore a disappointment.
The Information, derided because it came in the wake of a tabloid monstering, was, in the end, a far more satisfying book than Money because it had a tragic sense that gave weight to the comedy, and also seemed (to me at least) to provide palpable breathing space that allowed the reader to believe that he was at last being permitted by the author to think for himself, rather than just being swept along inside the claustrophobic accuracy of his all-encompassing descriptions. Money was clever but ultimately facile and unsatisfying.
Night Train and, more pertinently, Time’s Arrow, seemed to many critics like gimmicky experiments by an author desperate to rise above the prodigiously talented but wilfully lightweight qualities of his father, Kingsley, but they also gave him the clout to move towards more ambitious themes. People mocked him for his meditation on Stalin, Koba the Dread, primarily because they were used to mocking him, but while the book was full of strange solecisms, his attempts to gain weight and gravity should have been commended. He could have written the same hollow state-of-the-nation satires for the rest of his life, but he sought to grow.
Someone like Geoffrey Wheatcroft suggested that Martin’s biggest fault was his attempt to become a global intellectual. Wheatcroft said that Martin was at his best when he stuck to what he knew – the grubby malaise of post-baby boomer Britain, but, Wheatcroft said, he then started getting ideas above his station, started aspiring to be considered as great as the suspiciously cosmopolitan Nabokov or Bellow, with all their tales of tragedy and torture and war. That is what they objected to the most, I think: the idea that the privileged son of a famous novelist could himself begin to understand the agonies of history. It was a typical British reflex. Kingsley allowed himself to enjoy Dick Francis and Ian Fleming and was suspicious of all foreign novelists. He thought anything other than the demotic was somehow pretentious and fake. The typical British novelist, on the whole, like to think that things are simpler than we make them out to be. Characters are reduced to urges and temperaments. Their high-faluting efforts to aspire to something greater are reduced to nothing more than foolish fantasy, or worse, subterfuge. We prefer to undercut all efforts at intellectualism.
Anyhow, The Pregnant Widow starts well:
“Sooner or later, each human life is a tragedy, sometimes sooner, always later.”
“Fifty comes and goes, and fifty-one, and fifty-two. And life thickens out again. Because there is now an enormous and unsuspected presence within your being, like an undiscovered continent. This is the past.”
But it soon begins to exasperate. There is the constant inclusion of Latin and Greek derivations, which were distracting (from dis- + trahere to draw) to the reader and unnecessary (prob. from un- + ne- not + cedere to withdraw) to the plot or the elucidation of character and makes Amis seem like a bit of a prat (prob. from argot prat meaning buttocks). The purpose, one would think, was to teach himself these derivations as he goes along, or perhaps (in violation of the genetic fallacy) to make the claim that in every word is a seething pool of linguistic undercurrents, but you’d think at 60-something he was already too old for that sort of thing.
One perseveres and finds the book rather wayward and ill-disciplined and self-important. Even more than Amis's excellent memoir, Experience, it seems overwhelmed by a sad but self-indulgent nostalgia. He’s drunk with the memory of his own youthful conquests and sad (quite naturally) about getting old. In interviews he usually says that in the end he is writing for himself, and I don’t doubt that, but I continue to be enamoured by the idea that novelists should strain as far from their comfort zone as possible. Against the prevailing wisdom, I think novelists should write about what they don’t know.
When Amis is out of his comfort zone, he produces something as taut and grisly and deeply satisfying as The House of Meetings. When he returns to serial shagging and the way it pertains to classic English literature, he becomes flaccid and rambling and produces long unmoored paragraphs that mean very little to anyone but himself – and you start to realise that he has become too powerful for any editor to resist. The Pregnant Widow is beautiful in parts – the poignancy of age looking back at the hubris of youth – but shockingly low in quality control.
