Author of the week: Martin Amis

last updated 8 January 2015

Leave it to Martin Amis to write a novel in which the key attributes of the key character are that she’s 20, gorgeous, and has very large breasts, said Susan Salter Reynolds in the Los Angeles Times. It’s hardly a surprise that an author often accused of primitive sexual attitudes would provoke critics again when creating a story about the sexual revolution of his youth. But The Pregnant Widow is primarily a period novel: a group portrait of several horny young Brits spending the summer of 1970 in an Italian castle. In that setting, the characters’ shared obsession with one young woman’s curves makes sense as both comedy and historical commentary. Amis, now 60, has developed misgivings about the era, and one of his points is that it put too much value on physical attractiveness. Beauty, he says, “is not a democratic power.”

It’s not that Amis thinks the sexual revolution was entirely a mistake, said Stefan Beck in Salon.com. “It was a great and necessary thing,” he says. But the new novel emphasizes the negative—painting Amis’ own alter ego as a sex-obsessed twit, and offering a haunting portrait of another young woman, who is based on the author’s sister, Sally. Sally, Amis says, was a “casualty” of the era: She died, at age 46, after struggling with alcoholism and sex addiction. To Amis, Sally’s faith in “free love” put her at the mercy of men who had different expectations about intimacy than she did. “The world,” he says, “let her down.”