Martin Amis' 12th book shows he is too much of a satirist to mourn his lost youth, writes Andrew Anthony
Next month sees the release of The Pregnant Widow, Martin Amis's 12th novel.
Like heavy snowfall, the publication of a new Amis novel has become a kind of established media ritual in his home country.
Everyone knows the rules of the game: the writer will argue that his work holds a mirror up to the culture, while the culture responds by inviting the writer to take a look in the mirror. But over the years, this exchange has slowly evolved into something less reflexive and perhaps more reflective.
For Amis has increasingly taken to studying the image looking back at him and, in the process, he has become his generation's most astute documentarist of ageing and a symbol of the accelerating passage of time.
Having begun his literary career at the precocious age of 23, Amis enjoyed a prolonged youth stretching deep into his thirties. Not only was he young, he also looked young - short and slim with the full lips and piercing eyes of a Caravaggio model. Rare was the profile that didn't refer to him as an enfant terrible, even in his forties.
These were the years of Success and Money, titles that worked equally as ironic social comments and accurate personal assessments. Money even boasted a character called Martin Amis, a novelist with an enviably cool lifestyle and a daunting intellectual hinterland.
It was meant to toy with media-shaped perceptions of Amis, but the truth was that the real Amis did lead a kind of male fantasy life. He did play tennis each day, snooker with author Julian Barnes and poker with poet Al Alvarez. He had slept with everyone, read everything and he did speak pure prose in a voice seemingly made out of champagne and roll-ups.
Then came middle age, complete with the full-option crisis package - divorce, parental death, mortal dread and dental surgery.
Now the wild child of London letters is 60. And perhaps for the first time in his adult life, he looks his age.
"Keith was now well launched on the bullet train of the fifties," Amis writes in The Pregnant Widow, "where the minutes often dragged but the years tumbled over one another and disappeared. And the mirror was trying to tell him something." Not since Snow White have mirrors been so vocal.
The message they have to tell is that getting old takes its toll. Amis is too much of a satirist to mourn his lost youth - he can leave that to his male critics and female fans - but discovering older age, we gather, is scant recompense for the loss.
Still, if the joke with Yellow Dog, the poorly received 2003 novel, was that Amis had dropped the enfant and was just plain terrible, then The Pregnant Widow is a return not just to form but to more juvenile days.
It tells the story of Keith Nearing, a bookishly bright and carnally propelled young man who spends the summer of 1970 in an Italian castle with a group of tumescent friends, male and female, just at the moment that women began to explore their new sexual liberty.
The title refers to Alexander Herzen's comment that in killing the past order before giving birth to the new, revolutions leave a pregnant widow.
The expectant widow in this novel is feminism, which, according to Amis, "is still in its second trimester ... I think it has several more convulsions to undergo before we'll see the child".
The news that Amis has turned his attention to feminism is not something feminists will necessarily greet with air-punching celebration. In the past, and indeed quite recently, Amis has been accused of misogyny. It was said feminist judges ensured London Fields, which featured a nymphomaniac seeking to be murdered, never made it on to the Booker prize longlist.
And last year, Amis drew criticism when he noted of the public interest in the model and celebrity Katie Price, once known as Jordan, that "all we are really worshipping is two bags of silicone" - though it probably says more about the dislocation of feminism than about Amis that mocking the cult of Jordan is deemed worthy of rebuke.
In one way or another, Amis's subject has always been sex, particularly the male view of sex, and therefore of women. At the same time, his method has remained extravagantly and grotesquely comic.
In novels like Money, he pioneered a baroque-pornographic style to depict the sexualisation of the contemporary world. It was one of the aspects of Amis writing that his father, Sir Kingsley, found unappealing.
"Sex is a fascinating area," Amis senior once explained, "but it's harder than he thinks. Nobody says that fiction should be able to discuss everything; he thinks he can do it, but I wonder if he can."
Though extremely close, father and son were natural antagonists: Martin was an anti-nuke Labour supporter, Kingsley a Thatcher-loving Conservative; Kingsley was a reckless adulterer, Martin the devoted family man.
But the differences have faded or closed with age. Amis did what he said he'd never do and left his first wife, Antonia Phillips, following his affair with Isabel Fonseca, who became his second wife. Then it emerged that he'd fathered a daughter, Delilah, during a youthful liaison. Lately, Martin has even begun to bear a physical resemblance to his father.
And now it seems that the son has his own doubts about writing on sex.
Keith learns in The Pregnant Widow that you can't write about sex because "authorial omnipotence" is too much for the limited sexual potency of the "male creature".
The observation appears to be stamped with the author's approval because Keith is obviously based on him. Versions of other real-life characters, including Amis's friend Christopher Hitchens, the late poet Ian Hamilton, AJ Ayer, are also awarded walk-on parts.
The one most pregnant with meaning is based on Amis's late sister, Sally. Amis, the child of a broken home, almost became a school dropout but, with the help of his stepmother, Elizabeth Jane Howard, went on to gain a first at Oxford, dazzled at the New Statesman political weekly and the Observer newspaper and enjoyed international renown as a novelist.
Sally's tale is altogether less inspiring. She waged a long struggle with alcoholism and depression and died, aged 46, in 2000. She was also, says Amis, "pathologically promiscuous". He recently called her "one of the most spectacular victims of the revolution".
Amis intended to write an autobiographical novel but gave up after several years of work. Instead, he divided the concept into two novels.
Amis is now working on the other section, entitled State of England, and promises to include a lottery-winning criminal called Lionel Asbo.
If it sounds like a parody of an Amis character's name, then perhaps that's the price of originality. So distinctive is his style, its circular rhythms and comic beats, its verbal elegance and brutal slang, and so galvanising was its initial impact that there is a sense in which he is destined to ape himself.
In 2006, Amis returned to England, having spent two-and-a-half years living in Uruguay. It took him a while to regain his social bearings. "Some strange things have happened, it seems to me, in my absence," he noted. "I didn't feel like I was getting more right wing when I was in Uruguay, but when I got back I felt that I had moved quite a distance to the right while staying in the same place."
Following the exposure of a plot by Islamic extremists to blow up transatlantic aeroplanes, he made wildly ill-conceived remarks, suggesting the Muslim community "will have to suffer" - "curtailing of freedom" and "deportation" were mentioned.
He subsequently withdrew the comments, explaining they were said in the heat of the moment, but the damage was done and, for some observers, racism and Islamophobia could be added to the old charge of misogyny.
Such was the line taken by the Marxist academic Terry Eagleton, who accused Amis of having become his father. If the literary theorist had a point, he lost it in a self-righteous diatribe that may have owed its ire to the fact Amis had landed a well-paid position as professor of creative writing at Manchester University, from where Eagleton was about to exit as professor of English literature.
The move into teaching confirmed a profoundly anti-reactionary quality in Amis: his interest in what comes next. He tends to see social collapse around every corner, yet he remains committed to the new.
Amis is strong on describing the world and weak on plotting a story.
This is not because he is a stylist but, rather, because he is a moralist. Instead of narrative drive, he seeks universal significance. Sometimes, he strains literally for it with astronomical descriptions and sometimes he achieves it with effortless aplomb.
There's a sort of reverse bathos operating in Amis in which he slips from the empty epic to the comic sublime. At such moments, and there are plenty in The Pregnant Widow, no one better understands the cosmic joke that is humanity. Nor is anyone as funny telling it.
THE AMIS LOWDOWN
Born: August 25, 1949 in Swansea, Wales, the middle of three children of Kingsley Amis and Hilary Bardwell. Married to his second wife, the writer Isabel Fonseca, with whom he has two young daughters.
Best of times: Amis has never been prize material, but during the period in which he wrote Money (1984) and London Fields (1989), he was probably the coolest figure in English letters since Lord Byron.
Worst of times: The break-up of his first marriage and the public spat with his good friend, author Julian Barnes, after Amis left his agent, Pat Kavanagh (Barnes's wife), and signed to the Andrew Wylie agency. Yellow Dog (2003), his first novel in six years, was critically panned, especially by fellow writer Tibor Fischer, who was widely quoted as calling it "not-knowing-where-to-look bad".
What he says:
"It is the summit of idleness to deplore the present, to deplore actuality. Say whatever else you like about it, the present is unavoidable."
"Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal."
What they say:
"He's a barometer of misanthropy " - Marina Warner.
"Martin Amis is the most original prose stylist of his generation" - David Lodge.
- OBSERVER
