Michiko Kakutani may have found it boring, but Sam Anderson in New York magazine, calls Martin Amis’s new novel, The Pregnant Widow, his “best book in fifteen years and (at least for 75 percent of it) a nearly perfect comic novel.”

Other quarters are giving it kudos as well; the May 17th issue of People gives it 3.5 of 4 stars.

Ron Charles, in Washington Post, wittly analyzes Amis with this description of his writing style, “he’s a riveting stylist who walks across every sentence as though it were a line stretched taut between wit and erudition.” The book, however, about a group of “horny college kids” at an Italian villa in 1970, doesn’t work,

The setting is exotic, the subject is erotic, but the story is necrotic. For more than 300 pages of ironic dithering about who will have sex with whom, the climax is endlessly delayed like a painful case of literary priapism.

The Pregnant Widow Martin Amis Retail Price: $26.95 Hardcover: 384 pages Publisher: Knopf – (2010-05-11) ISBN / EAN: 1400044529 / 9781400044528

BBC Audio; UNABR; 978-0-7927-7269-9; 12 CD’s; $99.95
WMA Audiobook from OverDrive

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