Disappointment

Have always been a big fan of Kingsley Amis’s ‘Lucky Jim’, for me one of the funniest novels ever about academic life. Had never read anything by his son, Martin Amis, so I decided to try ‘The Pregnant Widow’.  Martin’s is now a much bigger literary reputation than his father’s, so my expectations were high.  I was looking for something smart and funny as a break from Proust.  I joined the 2013 Proust reading group on Goodreads.com.  The plan is to read all of the Recherches during 2013.  No idea how long I’ll stick it out, but I am currently ahead of the reading schedule and enjoying ‘Swann’s Way’ very much.  Nonetheless it’s very dense and sometimes tough going, so something light and witty seemed like the perfect intermission.

Martin and Kingsley Amis in 1965

I couldn’t have been more wrong.  By the middle of the book I was longing to get back to the engaging and confidential (if twisted and neurotic) prose of Proust.  It was a real chore to get to the end of ‘The Pregnant Widow’, and I almost wished I had honored my first instincts and put it down after the first hundred pages.

First of all, Martin Amis is brilliant, well-read, and insightful.  But all in service of what?  I don’t mind negativity at all.  The St. Aubry Patrick Melrose novels are witty and also very bleak, but they engage real feelings, sometimes to a painful degree.  I found the Martin Amis to be slick, snotty, snarky, and utterly devoid of any character that might evoke real feelings in me.  All of the characters are lost in one way or another, most to a degree that they seem to inhabit an artificial world devoid of basic human emotion.  They can’t really feel anything except vague self-hatred  and snotty “Why is everyone happier than I am?” that gets them nowhere.  They’re trapped in a place that frankly I don’t find all that interesting. 

Ok, so yeah I get the basic premise about the difficulties presented to young folks by the sexual revolution.  I’m of exactly that generation.  I was facing some of those same choices in 1970, the year when most of the novel’s plot takes place.  Some of my reactions were constructive, some were self-destructive, but I did manage to feel something and react.  These characters just blunder on and spend page after page wondering in witty, abstract, smart, and ultimately boring ways why they’re not as happy as their overwhelming sense of entitlement tells them they should be.  

Amis manages to bring in references to pretty much the entire history of the British novel, and he does a disservice to every single book he cites.  And I realize he knows he’s doing that.  I just don’t want to read about it unless there’s going to be some kind of genuine heartfelt reaction invoked at some point.  But no.  Nothing.  Zilch.  The writing is full of witticisms, many of which I’m sure I missed.  Some are probably too specifically British for me, some too erudite.  Who cares?  These are people I choose not to spend time with.  Period.

I hope this book is not representative of Martin Amis’s overall output, and I hope the book’s outlook is in no way an accurate reflection of his take on life.  If so, what a terrible waste.