Martin Amis - The Pregnant Widow

Martin Amis, The Pregnant Widow (Vintage)

One shouldn't review a book one hasn't read to the finish. I might still finish this but it will only be because nothing else turned up to demand my attention in the meantime.

I was very impressed with the Amis contribtion to the Larkin event at Cheltenham last year, all blearily bloodshot and still profoundly alpha male, immaculately well spoken and taking the easy enough part of speaking against the inhibited, unadventurous part of Larkin's character. And, then, when I got back to Cheltenham railway station, there he was in the car park, having a crafty fag with a couple of young women. He looked like the star he is supposed to be.

And his last book got favourable reviews, so why not give it a go.

Okay, he can write a sentence. Once or twice, or even more than that, one can see why he is regarded as a 'stylist' but the literary references are ones that even I have heard of and most people who, like me, have read a handful of books, will have done, too. That wouldn't matter if one could see an end to the theme that mainly seems to involve young men hanging around swimming pools in Italy in the hope that good looking young ladies will soon be sunbathing there with not many clothes on. Whether this is an obsession of his finely-observed characters or only something Amis can't help but pass off as literature becomes a moot point.

By way of contrast, one could pick up and re-read Richard Yates' Young Hearts Crying, which is exactly what I did, and find that Yates is a proper writer who deals with and describes sex in all its glory and its failures, something that on this form, Amis couldn't pretend to be. Perhaps they are very different books but there isn't really any comparison to be made.

Perhaps the book takes off in its second half and makes profound sense of this ongoing, sweaty scenario but I've seen enough so far. If I make it any further and the book becomes the better thing it ought to be then I will be announcing it here but, as it stands, this has been a big disappointment and the English novel needs the forthcoming Alan Hollinghurst more than it ever knew.