People have been quite mean about Martin Amis over the years. Just because he's a bit clever and got a large book advance once (for a book I haven't read) and had a famous father and he even got a bit of stick because he said he was upset that one of his extended family was murdered by a famous serial killer because some people thought he didn't know her well enough to grieve publicly for this poor woman who had been thought of as a runaway for decades until they found her body in a house of horrors in the 1990s which is a bit of closure but utterly tragic and I think if my second cousin once removed had suffered a similar fate especially if I had been at a young and tender age then I'd be a bit upset too.
Anyway, I've always been quite fond of him.
His books have made me laugh and cry and despite the pyrotechnics (I mean honestly, managing to depict everything going backwards in Time's Arrow without being tiresome was quite a trick) and the fact that he's always making me THINK a bit more than most books I'm reading for fun, I think he's rather sweet and probably a big old softie behind the tough facade.
But I do find myself with a bit of something that can only be described as resentment after finishing The Pregnant Widow
I mean, why didn't I go to university with people who happen to have castles in Italy who invite me to stay so I can spend months and months sitting by the pool reading my way through centuries of English novels?
We're assured repeateld that everything in the castle really happened and it's with the greatest amount of envy I read how much the main character read.
It was A LOT of books.
But they were chosen to make LITERARY POINTS about GENRE
Of course, I'm not sure it's meant TOO literally because with the best will in the world I doubt if anyone could read all of Austen in a week as he appears to do unless the summer is in fact eight months long...
And even though the book itself is hundreds and hundreds of pages about young folk getting it on and talking about getting it on it's such a BOOKISH book that I felt like my MIND was involved.
I mean he lends a woman he doesn't realise he fancies Pride and Prejudice
and
they
TALK about it
with quotes
and new theories about the sexual persuasion of one of the Misses Bennet (not to name names)
I mean, I once lent a boy I liked Under Milkwood and he never read it much less spend hours coming up with a dissertation on life in a Welsh village.
Sigh.
