Again, Martin Amis

I'm reading through Norman Mailer's The Prisoner of Sex and Martin Amis' The Pregnant Widow and reading them side-by-side, I begin to see a connection in their views of women. The master and the pupil take from one another, though of course the pupil takes even more than the master.

Amis has a break from Mailer, however. He has a more favorable view of the sexual revolution than Mailer does (though both clearly benefited from it). Mailer looks terrified seeing the Women's Libbers, Amis looks detached, but fondly. He views the revolution with terror. Of course, he was afraid of a left-wing totalitarianism stemming from the more militant and radical feminists. Amis and his crew seem more afraid of the idea that the sexual revolution might end before they've slept with everyone.

Mailer was interested in it for a political reason (misguided and paranoid, in my opinion, but still valid and worth hearing) where Amis was interested only in his personal benefits, until recently.

JPC

Martin Amis

The Pregnant Widow is either being heralded as Mart's return from bad writing to the good stuff we remember him for, or as absolute crap, just a notch above the dreaded Yellow Dog. It all depends on whose reviews you read.

As for me, I'll probably be having a review of up for CS2.com coming out over the summer. It is a good summer read, even though the territory is already well-trod. Michel Houellebecq comes to mind when I read some of the passages about physical peculiarities.

Still, there are some original moments, though I'm not quite sure yet how my review will go down.

JPC

Michiko and Mart

Michiko Kakutani and Martin Amis have always had a kind of love/hate relationship; now that "The Pregnant Widow" has been released in America, Michiko has decided to turn on the hate side of their relationship. She envokes the dreaded "Yellow Dog" (which I have a signed copy of, by the way) and compares it to this novel, with this novel coming out at a marginally better critical standpoint.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/11/books/11book.html?ref=books

I'm still going to buy a copy for myself, though, to understand what's going on.

JPC.